Tanveer Nandla: SEO is the mother of digital marketing

Why Muzamil went back to the drawing board on this one

Muzamil opens the episode by explaining why this particular guest exists. An earlier conversation on learning and development drew heavy criticism from his audience — that he brings guests without vetting them. So he did the research. His starting position is a set of numbers he wants viewers to hold in their head: roughly four million Pakistani children turn 18 every year, only about half meaningfully graduate high school, and only six hundred thousand university seats exist to absorb them.

His frame is that in an AI-driven world where higher-order thinking is the ticket to any high-value job, Pakistan cannot expect its youth to compete unless it builds a parallel, private learning infrastructure. Universities cost too much. Something else has to fill the gap. The problem is that the people who did move in — what the market now calls “manjan sellers,” snake-oil trainers — moved so aggressively that the entire category got a bad name. That has produced a lazy consensus in urban Pakistan: education is a scam, everything is free on YouTube, avoid all courses.

Muzamil rejects that framing directly. “Majority log self-learning ki qabaliyat nahi rakhte,” he says, “aur unko ek structured, accountable system chahiye hota hai.” That is the frame in which he introduces Tanveer — someone whose work he says he has personally verified, and who has stayed narrowly focused on one niche for a decade rather than promising to teach everything.

From a Multan village to $86 in Google AdSense

Asked how any of this started, Tanveer takes it back to 2003, matric year, in a village on the outskirts of Multan. Post-matric in his area meant going to a local teacher to “learn computers.” The teacher showed him how to install a typing tutor. A screensaver popped up. Then he discovered the HTML marquee tag. That was the trigger.

He did his intermediate — 52% in FSc, because he “hated chemistry” — and in 2006 got into Bahauddin Zakariya University for information technology. He says he only filled one admission form, because the conviction was already fixed. “Aap research keh dein, aap chhathi hiss keh lein,” he tells Muzamil, but he knew the future was IT.

The internet in Multan then was V Wireless dial-up. He describes setting a reminder at 9 minutes 55 seconds so he could disconnect before the next two-rupee slab kicked in. Orkut communities pointed him to Yahoo Messenger click-exchange groups; he made his first $86 that way, was excited to hit $100, and then his AdSense account was disabled. “Jab account disable hua to I dug deep,” he says. That was when he learned click-exchange was illegal — but that AdSense and Blogspot were real Google products, and therefore a real path.

His first .com domain was gifted by a junior, Wasif Lak. On it he built a rough competitor to Hamara Web. In 2008 his first real AdSense payment — around $114 — arrived. “2008 was the first payment year,” he says, “ke mujhe dollars ki shakl dekhna naseeb hui.” From there, no way back.

Why he refused to leave Multan — and what it cost him

One of the sharper threads in the conversation is geography. Muzamil pushes hard on it: Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad carry access and exposure whether their residents want it or not. Multan in 2005 did not.

Tanveer credits three things: a father who home-schooled him and deliberately trained his curiosity, a temperament that pushes him to research things deeper than anyone around him, and stubborn self-confidence. “Mujhe kabhi ye complex nahi raha ke Lahore ka banda mujhse behtar hai, Islamabad ka banda mujhse behtar hai,” he tells Muzamil. “Muzamil Hasan kyunki ek burger bachcha hai to he is more intelligent than me. He thinks better than me. Mujhe kabhi bhi ye nahi raha.”

But he concedes the cost. In 2011 a childhood friend, Sajid, asked him whether he too should try building something from Multan. Tanveer told him to go to Lahore. “Chhote shehron mein rehte hain wo bade aadmi nahi ban sakte.” Sajid went to Lahore, then Karachi, then Dubai, and is now the Africa regional head of a Dubai-based organisation. Tanveer says the same friends still ask him why he gave that advice but stayed himself. His honest answer: “Mujhe lagta hai ke mujhe is cheez ka bahut zyada nuqsaan bhi hua hai.” A US-based friend recently refused to work with him on a project unless he moved to Lahore.

The reason he keeps going anyway is that the small-town experiment worked. When he started teaching at BZU in 2015, he picked interns from his own classroom, and says roughly 90% of that first batch are today “multi-crorepati.” When he launched the first proper iSkills batch of 54 students, he claims over 60% are now multi-crore earners, and names Raja Waheed and Shahna Warri as students his audience will recognise.

The exam papers that broke him

The trigger for iSkills itself comes out of a moment Tanveer describes vividly. He was teaching ASP.NET at two universities. When mid-term and final papers came in front of him, he says, “hardly 5% bachhon ne attempt kiya tha.” The rest wrote pleas. One student wrote that he was an orphan and would be ruined if not passed. A girl from Rajanpur wrote that she had fought her family to be allowed to come to university and that failing her would mean forced marriage.

That, he says, is what broke him. Four years of degrees, lakhs of rupees in fees, hostel life — ending in a student writing “Allah ke naam par mujhe number de do” on an exam paper. “That triggered ke why not kuch aisa silsila start kiya jaye ke unko digital skills mil jayein.” His specific insight, which Muzamil later builds on, is about girls from small South Punjab towns — Muzaffargarh, Kot Addu, Taunsa — whose ultimate ambition after a full degree is to return home and teach at a primary or middle school. He gives a concrete example of a NUST biotechnology graduate, admitted on scholarship, working a college job in Taunsa for ₹15,000 a month. She joined iSkills, and along with her brother is now making roughly $3,000 a month running an SEO-driven blog.

The privileged-user problem — and why “AI killed the job” is wrong

Muzamil turns the conversation to the AI question. Fiverr’s stock is down from over $300 to under $10. Upwork peaked around $60 and now trades near $10. Is the ladder still there for a new entrant?

Tanveer’s response is one of the more useful sections of the episode. He argues that the people declaring skills dead are almost always power users projecting their own experience onto the mass market. “Har insaan cheezon ko us perspective mein dekhta hai jis position mein wo currently maujood hai,” he says. If Muzamil finds it trivial to deploy an AI agent through Claude, he assumes everyone does. That vacuum, Tanveer argues, is exactly what the “manjan sellers” walk into — because the capable people refuse to fill it.

He gives specific evidence. He says he has personally asked his graphic-design students, including those earning $1,000 to $5,000 a month on Fiverr, whether AI has reduced their work. “Mujhe abhi tak 100% students ne kaha hai ke sir AI ki wajah se kaam humara kam nahi hua. 100%.” His theory: people who could design their own logos in ChatGPT still hire designers because they are buying time, not capability. He uses his own example — he could physically install his podcast camera himself, but he paid someone five thousand rupees to do it because his time is worth more elsewhere.

He also concedes the harder version of Muzamil’s point. He tried to build a product called Worker by hiring an agency for $10,000. They failed. He then sat down himself in Baku and, in his words, built the structure in “five to seven days” and handed it to an in-house developer, Faheem, to standardise. His conclusion: for a power user with domain knowledge, AI genuinely collapses timelines. For everyone else, the market for skilled human intermediaries is expanding.

Why he still bets on SEO

The SEO section is where Tanveer plants his flag. He cites the search-share numbers: Google still holds between 77% and 91% of global digital search, ChatGPT roughly 18% of the broader digital query market. “Main 90% wale ko is base pe chhod nahi sakta ke yaar pata nahi 10 saal baad ye khatam ho jaye.” SEO is a roughly $150 billion industry, he says, and refusing to touch it because a rupee-earner is worried about a five-year horizon is absurd.

But his real argument is subtler. SEO, he insists, is the foundation skill that makes every other digital skill better. A developer who knows SEO builds better landing pages because he understands user experience, page speed, Core Web Vitals, DOM size, schema. A Google Ads operator who knows SEO gets better ad quality scores at lower cost. An Etsy or eBay seller who knows SEO writes better listings. Even AEO — answer engine optimisation — requires SEO underneath it. “Agar aap SEO seekhte hain to aap har digital field mein behtar perform kar sakte hain. And that is my challenge.”

Muzamil validates this with his own recent experience. He built his personal website, realised ChatGPT knew almost nothing about his 500-episode catalogue, and asked Claude how to fix it. Claude told him he needed AEO. When he asked how, Claude told him he needed SEO first — transcribe, index, backlinks, the full stack. “Main to ek bilkul hi dumb aadmi hoon,” Muzamil says, “to main bhi jo padh raha tha wo yehi padh raha tha ke SEO is dead, AEO is the future. Pata laga ji AEO karne ke liye SEO chahiye.”

Tanveer adds a data point he says most people miss: OpenAI, Anthropic and Google themselves are hiring SEO specialists. “Agar Claude SEO kar sakta tha to usko banda kyun chahiye?”

The 33 million small businesses argument

Muzamil brings his own thesis into the conversation here, and Tanveer takes it further. Over the past twenty years, digital operators sold small businesses three successive things: digitisation, then automation, and now — starting this decade — intelligence. There are roughly 33 million small businesses in the US alone, each doing between $10,000 and $50,000 in monthly revenue. None of them have the time or skill to install their own intelligence layer.

Tanveer’s version: this is 2001 for the internet, or the post-World War II moment for industrialisation. The race is starting from zero again. “Ab kisi ke paas wo unfair advantage nahi hai. Wo unfair advantage aapke paas hai.” He points to Cursor being acquired within two years of launch as evidence of how fast the ceiling is moving. He gives a small-town example that lands harder: on holiday in Madeira, then in the remote Azores, he found every local business running ads through one dominant local agency, and estimated that even a small operator there was likely clearing a lakh a month. If that market exists in the Azores, he argues, the Pakistani operator refusing to enter digital work is refusing to see what’s in front of him.

Even his own small Multan swimming pool, he says, gets its phone choked with queries in summer once he set up a Google Business Profile for it.

What iSkills actually does differently

Late in the conversation, Muzamil asks the real question: is iSkills a generic curriculum blasted at everyone, or is it personalised? Tanveer makes what he acknowledges is a big claim. “iSkills is the most advanced, most technical, most up-to-date digital skills training in the world.”

Muzamil pushes back — that “in the world” is a stretch when Coursera and Khan Academy exist. Tanveer’s defence rests on three things. First, they teach only what they themselves currently do; when he stopped his own team from working on Amazon affiliate marketing a year ago, he pulled it from the curriculum a year before anyone else. Second, everything is live, not recorded — no batch matches the previous batch. Third, and the one he stresses most, is empathy: an in-house AI system they call iBrain ingests each student’s attendance, support tickets, LMS progress and interaction data, then hands a personalised summary to a Student Success Manager who calls the student to find out why they’ve stalled. He tells a story about a student at a “sensitive institution” who told him: “Yaar main tumhare success manager ki call se tang aa kar padhne lag gaya tha, aur aaj main online kamane lag gaya hoon.”

He also notes that one of his senior trainers charges iSkills nothing — no salary, no per-hour rate — because in the trainer’s own framing, iSkills changed his life and this is how he pays it back.

Where a new entrant should actually start

Muzamil narrows the question at the end: for someone listening right now who isn’t already earning in dollars, what’s the entry point? Tanveer’s answer is less about platforms and more about mindset. He tells listeners to enter the digital field by any door — YouTube, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, even a mouse-hover explainer tool — because Pakistan’s macro trajectory, in his reading, is not recovering soon. “Mujhe to personally nazar nahi aa rahi ke hum in crisis se nikal payein. Mujhe nahi door door tak nazar aa rahi.”

Specific tactical bets he lists: Etsy, which he says has quietly become a major income source for his students since iSkills added a short module on it about eighteen months ago; TikTok Shop in the UK, parts of Europe and the US; Amazon in specific niches; and digital marketing services sold directly to foreign small businesses. He mentions a student who cleared $100,000 on Upwork in eighteen months, and another running Meta ads to sell just logo design services and clearing $500–$1,000 a month in net profit. His counter to the “platforms are saturated” argument is that his students are increasingly bypassing platforms entirely — cold LinkedIn outreach, subcontracting from small UK-town agencies at half the price, WhatsApp closes that survive even during bans.

The closing exchange is unusually direct. Muzamil argues that when five hundred people in a small town start earning a thousand dollars a month, the second-order economy — restaurants, schools, services — changes shape entirely. “Sirf un khandanon ko paisa nahi jaa raha hota. Un khandanon ko jo serve kar raha hai uske haalat behtar hona shuru ho jaate hain.” He ends by pushing the criticism back at his own audience: if every trainer in Pakistan is a fraud, why aren’t the qualified people teaching? The demand exists. The learners exist. The money is being spent. The absence of good teachers, he suggests, is a choice the capable have made.