Photo credit; Ronaldo Ferreira on Flickr

Former teacher David Cameron started his online tutorial service, LearnCoach, off small, offering math and physics tutoring to New Zealand students. But when he shifted his focus to teaching English in China via online videos, that’s when his business really took off.

“In the six weeks it was active we had more than 3,000 students and teachers signed up for our learning resources and were delivering over 40,000 learning tutorials per day,” said Cameron, who was teaching secondary school in Dunedin when he launched the business in 2012.

Cameron secured funding through AMP’s Regional Scholarship programme and was then accepted into a three-month business accelerator programme called The Lightning Lab where he received $18,000 in seed funding, an office space, and mentoring that prompted him to refocus the business on China.

“They really encouraged us to move faster. We thought ‘how can we create a more scalable business that can help more people in a way that’s more profitable,” he said.

“It just got to a stage where we thought China was the bigger market.”

Lightening Lab culminated in a “demo day” at Te Papa in May where Cameron pitched the new idea to 150 investors and ended up attracting $750,000 in capital.

Cameron, 25, has since relaunched the business as LearnKo, offering English language lessons to people living in China.

The business’ new home is in Wellington where he has six full-time staff and another 30 part-time staff situated around New Zealand.

The next step for the business is to launch its own video service where students can meet one-on-one with their tutors.

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