The Entrepreneur, Tochukwu Nkwocha Shares His Journey Into Making Money Online.
My name is Tochukwu Nkwocha. I am the CEO and founder of Spread-It Limited and the owner of spreaditglobal.com: a procurement and shipping company with offices in Lagos and China. Spread-It helps people to buy things from China, UAE, and Turkey. We have been in business since April 2018.
The first time Tony Elumelu Foundation launched its entrepreneurship program, I was one of the recipients of 5,000 dollars grant which I intended to use for an audiobook creation platform. Unfortunately, it did not work.
I started exploring other ways of making money online. I started exploring ebooks, I taught myself how to publish books online and started gathering people’s books and publishing them online.
Later, I went into the distribution of online music and got a few clients who I still manage from 2016 till today. And while I did that, I also got into a relationship that helped me to start writing articles. I started writing articles for websites in the US and at a time I had about 7 people working for me remotely. We were monthly pulling over 1 million Naira from our writing gigs. When I got married, I got married as a writer. So, we earn money using our writing skills.
A few months after we got married, the project stopped and the job stopped flowing. But before then, the person that was helping us with those articles mentioned to me the prospect of importing things from China on a small scale and selling with good margins. At first, I wasn’t interested but later learnt about it. I did one importation with about 50,000 Naira, then came back and sold off the products. And then I spoke to a group of young people in Aba. I also shared the idea of importing things from China without having a huge capital. One could start with N50,000, N100,000, N40,000 or even less. About 40 persons were immediately interested and that was exactly how Spreaditglobal.com was born.
Initially, it was spreadit.ng and we changed it to spreaditglobal.com and improved our platform. Today, 4 years down the line, we have served thousands of people, helping them verify products they buy and bringing them to Nigeria without issues.
And we serve some of the biggest Multi-Level Marketing companies by sourcing, branding, and shipping product for them across Africa and the world from China, and the USA. Some of them are still discussing with us and we are today entering into several partnerships to make logistics from China to Africa a lot more efficient.
You could call me a serial entrepreneur and you would be right. I like to create things. When I see a product that exists I like to see how I can add value – to solve a problem.
We have the ‘Keep Me Safe’ platform: which helps with insecurity. The website is keepmesafe.tech. ‘KeepMeSafe’ app is available on the AppStore and Google Play store. We have about 2000 downloads of the App and we are still pushing. There are partnerships we are trying to enter into to make the App widely available to Nigerians especially to solve insecurity, kidnappings, and all that.
Our website Kainene.com is dedicated to promoting African fashion designs.
I also own a website – effikos.com that is dedicated to helping students and anyone looking to advance his career overseas to do so with the right knowledge. We are overhauling the effiko mobile application and will relaunch it soon. The app helps our undergraduates and postgraduates to easily calculate and manage their GPA and also access scholarship and career-advancing opportunities overseas.
If you are looking to start earning a decent income online, there are so many ways you can do it. You don’t even need to build stuff like I do. That’s a somewhat tedious process. You can start by getting on fiverr and upwork and other gig platforms.
I have a young friend who used to be one of my writers but who now works for clients all over the world via the Fiverr platform. He provides YouTube scripts for his clients and he pulls in over $2,000 monthly. I use fiverr a whole lot and I know so many entrepreneurs that use fiverr for most of their needs. I know that we like to tell people to learn how to make hair and all that. I do not think it’s a good advice for the 21st century. Everyone who is literate should be able to provide a service digitally. It’s a lot easier today than it has ever been.
So, learn a skill – I recommend UI/UX designing, improve your writing, people even earn money by helping people write their statements or purpose for overseas university admission. Then get on Fiverr and Upwork and the likes. No one who is educated can really say they can’t find jobs in today’s world. The internet has democratized wealth.
