The story
The story behind THIRTEENK
From KwaDabeka to Cape Town. From a Google search about cartoons to building products people put on their desks every day.
Ikhaya — Where it started
I grew up in KwaDabeka, a township in KwaZulu-Natal. Long before I knew what a business was, before I had a laptop, before I had a name people recognised — I was already making things.
Not because anyone taught me to. Just because I had to. That is what creativity feels like when it lives in you from the beginning: not a choice, a compulsion.
My family always saw it. A kid who couldn't leave things as they were — who had to understand how they worked, take them apart, and put them back together differently.
Ukufuna ukwazi — the need to know.
2019 — The laptop
I got into the University of Cape Town to study Computer Science. That year I owned a laptop for the first time. I sat with it and asked the most honest question a curious person can ask: how do they make cartoons?
That question cracked a door open. Blender led to 3D. 3D led to Adobe and design. Design led to content creation — all of it alongside the degree, mostly alone, mostly online, mostly at night.
By the time I left UCT in 2021 I was already a working software engineer. I dropped out. No drama attached to that sentence. I left and kept building.
Ukuzama — The years of trying
What followed were years of trying. Real trying — not the romanticised kind. I started business after business, and each one lasted a few months and folded: Libertad Design, Nkululeko Designs, Nkululekodot Prints, and Thirteenk Art.
Every time one closed, I did not quit making things. I went and learned the skill I was missing. The businesses failed fast. The skills stayed forever. The companies failed; the builder got sharper.
Kwakuyisikole — it was school. I just didn't know it yet.
2023 — R13K and a drone
I bought a drone for R13,000. I was wet from rain, waiting for an Uber, eating amagwinya with water on the way. I filmed all of it — the journey, the unboxing — in isiZulu, the language I think in, the language I dream in.
The video trended. Not the production quality, not a formula — it was real: a kid from KwaDabeka, now in Cape Town, genuinely excited. People felt that. 13K became a number, a name. The following grew — 50K on TikTok, 20K on Instagram — explaining technology in people's mother tongue. 13K was no longer just a number. It was an identity.
THIRTEENK — The intersection
I am a Senior Software Engineer. I have built AI products with real users, shipped systems handling 200,000+ people, and co-founded Tredicik Group, a multi-tenant SaaS platform. The engineering side of my life is serious and ongoing — but it was never the whole picture.
THIRTEENK is the intersection I have been building toward my entire life — where the maker from KwaDabeka, the developer in Cape Town, the content creator and the designer all meet and make something physical.
Binary is 3D printed in matte black PLA+ — cable organisers, phone stands, enclosures, printed to order and tuned, not churned. Laser is engraved in-house — nameplates, coasters, display pieces. And the curated products — cables, hubs, chargers, stands — are tested on our own desks and stocked only if they earn it. If we wouldn't use it ourselves, it is not here.
Sikhangela phambili — Looking forward
This is not the finished version of THIRTEENK. 3D printing and laser engraving now. Metal printing later. Eventually, stores — physical spaces where the product speaks before anyone has to explain it.
Every skill I stacked in the years people thought I was scattered — 3D, design, code, content, hardware — they were never separate things. They were components. THIRTEENK is where they assemble.
Siyaqhubeka. We keep going.