Who is Tino?
BScEng. Electronic Engineering Graduate
If you don't feel like reading you can just watch this video below which says the same thing as the text.
Early Life
It's always so hard to describe yourself. Is it the fear of sounding narcissistic or is it that we just struggle to look at ourselves objectively? Nonetheless, I would like to consider myself someone who doesn't just work harder but also works smart. If there is a more efficient way of doing something I'll spend hours trying to learn how to do it that way. However, if there is only the hard way, so be it, I have to slog it out.
In my short life time so far I have tried quite a large number of things. These things range from trying to make some extra cash to just things that fascinate me. I still remember back in primary school when I made a complete soccer stadium out of wires. It’s a true shame I didn’t take a picture. You only think about these things when looking back. That was one of my many ideas.
High School
When I was in high school I made some extra cash typing out something someone had handwritten. My main motivator was a fairly new Samsung tablet I wanted to buy myself. It cost R5000, and my parents couldn’t think of buying me such an expensive thing. It was probably my annual school fees for Clarence primary school. After saving up for a year or so and finally buying it, I was quite disappointed by the tablet’s low processing speed. It struggled to play the games I wanted at a decent speed. On top of just the extra cash typing taught me about being timely and saving your word document every 10 seconds. To this day that day when word just closed and I hadn't saved still haunts me.
When I was in grade 8,9 I was really into skating. Every week I would look forward to going skating on Friday. There was a skate-park close to my high school, which is by the beach front. The skate park had some magnificent views. I would carry my skateboard and after school finished early since it's Friday I would walk to the skate-park. Now thinking about it brings back some great memories. Besides being fun, skating taught me a lot of useful lessons. It taught me to be resilient, because to learn any trick means you will fall many times. No matter how many times I failed a trick I would keep trying until I eventually got it. I still remember it taking approximately 3 to 4 months to land my first kick-flip. Now thinking about it I made my first website using an application which is now called google G Suite. I planned to teach others how to skate. I would show it to you but I think I'll just leave this one to your imagination. It's a shame when I got to grade 11 and 12 I no longer had time for it. It was just school school school. I knew to get into an engineering programme I needed many As and my school wasn’t producing too many students with those kind of results.
University
When I got to university my ideas went up exponentially. I started trying more things. The first real idea which I had was maths tutoring. I didn't really think I would get customers, given I wasn’t a teacher by profession. But then since there was no harm in trying, I posted a few ads on Gumtree. To my pleasant surprise the new problem I was facing was trying to balance my time between Calculus, Finite maths and tutoring. There just wasn't enough time in a day. I would tutor on the weekends and try to keep all my school work during the weekday. This was quite a challenge since the engineering workload is really nothing to play with. Although I was running myself to the ground, I was really enjoying earning some of my own money. Being a tutor taught me a lot of things, the most important being time management. Managing school work and tutoring. From tutoring, I managed to save some money for an idea which I thought was absolutely brilliant.
I had the idea of drop-shipping products from China to the USA. I would list products from AliExpress on my website and when someone purchased something I would go to AliExpress and order it to that person's address. I would list the product at a slightly higher price so I could make a profit. At first I used Instagram influencers to sell the products but the traffic the influencers brought was just not converting. I ended up learning how to use Google ads and Facebook ads. There were not many clicks on Google ads and Facebook ads were just too expensive for me to test enough variation to find a wining formulae. That's how I abandoned an idea which I still think is brilliant. My tutoring money wasn’t enough to sustain the ads and the hosting plan for Shopify.
Matric Maths Course
After that I tried multiple other ideas like an eBook I published on Amazon. Click here to see it. These ideas just didn't pan out. They were yielding results which didn't justify the time I was spending on them. Central to my challenge was the lack of time, due to university demands and resource constrains, as I couldn’t find time to tutor more students.
It was a wicked problem till in my third year I came up with another really good idea. I filmed a matric maths course. A course which covers the whole matric maths syllabus.
It was a great idea because I had learnt my marketing chops from drop shipping and tutoring from my experience tutoring matric maths over the past couple of years. After finishing filming the course, I considered putting it on Udemy, an online learning platform. After doing some decent market analysis of my potential market, I realized Udemy would exclude a lot of matric students who didn't have uncapped data at home.
The all-consuming question became, how do I get this course into the hands of students without much internet access? I decided to have it on cell phone memory cards, USB drives and DVDs. I also made it available online for those who had the data.
This solved the problem which I experienced when I first started tutoring, not enough time. Now I could give 100 students the course in one day without a problem. It took a very long time to record the videos and then edit them and structure them in a way which made them easily consumable for the student. I managed to cut it down to 9.5 hours of videos. I branded my course and got my friends to wear branded T-shirts for promotional purposes.
I used Google ads and Facebook ads to get the students and parents to my website. From there they would choose whether they want the videos on a memory card, USB or DVDs. They would pay on the website or EFT to my account. I would then use a courier company to ship the branded videos packaged nicely to the students. From some of the students who bought the course they said it was really helpful. If you want to check out the course on Udemy just click here or search Tino Nyamunda on www.Udemy.com
Conclusion
I have tried a lot of things and the central lesson I have leant is that you learn much more from your failures than successes. Using those lessons, you can carry them to exploit great opportunities which present themselves. It has been a great journey so far, and I will continue to try new things and learn as much as possible from deliberate efforts and what life presents to me.
Other Things
I used this video as a branding video for my Matric Maths course.