I was not supposed to end up here.
Not because I was not smart enough. Not because I did not work hard enough. But because where I came from, the idea of building websites, earning online, and running a digital platform was not even in the conversation. It was not something people around me talked about. It was not something anyone showed me was possible.
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| 2017. After three years of building on a smartphone with prepaid data — that approval notification changed everything. |
I grew up in Venda, Limpopo. And growing up there, I always felt different from my mates. Not in a way I could easily explain then — I just knew I was not like everyone else around me. I did not want the same things. I was looking at the world differently and that made me stand out in ways that were not always comfortable. I got bullied a lot. I did not fit in. For a long time I carried that quietly, just trying to figure out who I was and where I was going.
What I knew clearly — even when everything else was unclear — was that I wanted out of poverty. Not just for myself. I just knew that the life I was looking at around me was not the life I wanted to build. And I was willing to do whatever it took to find a different path.
I just did not know yet that the path would be digital.
When I eventually left Venda and started hustling in Gauteng — Kempton Park first, then Tembisa, then Soweto — I was figuring things out as I went. Working. Surviving. Looking for something that felt like it was going somewhere. The Mechanical Engineering diploma and Trade Test gave me a foundation. Real, practical skills. But something in me kept looking further. I could feel there was another world I had not accessed yet.
Then I met Manuel McCain.
Manuel was the one who showed me how online things work. Not in a formal way — not a course, not a classroom. Just a person who knew things and was willing to share them. He pointed me at what was possible. Showed me that you could build something on the internet. That the internet was not just a place you consumed from — it was a place you could create in.
I fell in love with it immediately.
The problem was I had almost nothing to work with. No computer. Could barely afford data. Most people would have seen those as reasons to stop before starting. I saw them as the conditions I was working inside. So I did what I had to do — I built my first websites on a smartphone. Sitting with a phone, figuring out Blogger, learning by doing, making mistakes nobody was there to correct. Just me and the screen and the determination to understand how it all worked.
That was 2014.
For three years I built and broke and rebuilt. Learning SEO without knowing it was called SEO. Learning content without knowing anything about content strategy. Just trying things, reading whatever I could find, watching what worked and what did not. Twelve years later I am still doing exactly that — the approach has not changed, only the scale of what I know.
Then in 2017, one of my websites got approved by Google AdSense for the first time.
I cannot fully describe what that felt like. After years of building in the dark — with no money, no mentor, no formal training, no guarantee that any of it was going anywhere — seeing that approval come through felt like the world finally confirming something I had believed about myself quietly for a long time. That I was on the right path. That it was worth it. I was genuinely overwhelmed. Happy in a way that is hard to put into words.
But the journey did not smooth out from there. That is not how this story goes.
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| Three websites gone. It hurt. But losing them taught me more about this space than anything else could have. |
While I was living in Tembisa, three of my websites got disabled by Google AdSense for policy violations. Three. Gone. Everything I had built on those platforms — the traffic, the income, the time — wiped out because I had not understood the rules well enough. That hurt deeply. I will not pretend it did not. It was one of the lowest points of the whole journey. You put years into something and then watch it disappear, and you have to decide whether to keep going or accept that maybe this was a sign to stop.
I kept going.
Not because I was fearless. Because I was not willing to let that be the end of the story. And because losing those sites taught me more about how this space works than anything else could have. You learn the rules properly when breaking them costs you something real. I came back knowing more, making better decisions, approaching things with more patience and more care.
That is where AnaniTech Global comes from. Not from a business plan or a strategy session. From a long, messy, real journey through failure and recovery and growth. From a kid in Venda who did not fit in, who built websites on a phone because he could not afford a computer, who lost everything and started again.
I am writing this in 2026 from Savanna City. Twelve years after that first Blogger post. And the reason I keep doing this — the reason this platform exists — is not to show off what I have built. It is because I know there are people right now in Venda, in Tembisa, in townships and rural areas all across South Africa, who are exactly where I was in 2014. Smart. Hungry. Looking for a different path. With a smartphone and not much else.
I want them to know the path exists.
You do not need a degree to build something online. You do not need a computer or expensive data or a mentor in the right industry. You need consistency and the ability to keep going when things break — and things will break. My AdSense accounts broke. My websites broke. My confidence broke more than once. None of it killed the direction I was moving in.
If you are reading this and you are at the beginning — the confused, uncertain, resource-limited beginning — I want you to know that where you start does not determine where you end up. I am proof of that. Manuel showed me a door. I walked through it on a smartphone with expensive prepaid data. You have more tools available to you right now than I had in 2014. The free AI tools alone would have changed everything for me back then. The free Google certificates did not exist. The access you have today is genuinely different.
Use it. Make mistakes. Learn from them faster than I did. Come back when you fall.
It is never too late. And you do not have to already be someone to start becoming who you want to be.
That is the whole lesson. Twelve years in — that is still the whole lesson.
— Anani Ragwala, AnaniTech Global
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