Kid
The golden grandson
Single child, born in Singapore. That's my favourite aunty, who took care of me a lot when I was younger.
My story
My first job was selling Christmas cards at about $5 each. I walked out of the office with a box and sold absolutely nothing. It got better after that, mostly.
18
My first business
A forex course business with some trainers: my first digital product and my first sales pitch. I wanted a better product, they wanted more courses, so I left with nothing. It went on to make maybe $250-300k in course fees.
I got 0.
F&B
The beancurd stall
I raised $50-100k and lost most of it to rent and bills. Thin margins, a lot of manual labour, one of the worst experiences of my life. I won't go near F&B again.
Poker
Paid the bills for 3-4 years
I reached Supernova status on PokerStars and was still ranked the lowest among my friends. It taught me to think methodically and take calculated risks under pressure. That royal flush happened maybe 2-3 times in my life.
2014
Bangkok
I bought about US$500k in ads and did about US$800k in revenue, before employee costs. Then we built our own bra brand, Stickeebra, which did US$2.66M in sales across 56,209 orders. When the China factory shut for Chinese New Year we bought stock at Pratunam market. My mentor said ads should be no more than 10% of revenue. Ours reached 50-60%. Competitors copied our ads and the profit dried up.
2018
Content over ads
First YouTube and Facebook, TikTok from 2020. I co-founded the digital marketing firm Ally Media, got featured in The Sunday Times and was invited onto Alvin Poh's podcast. One client, 74-year-old Mr Yeo, reached 240k fans and Zaobao wrote about him. Later, about S$8.9k of TikTok ads brought in S$250k in sales. That only worked because people already knew us from 2 years of posting.
Now
Low costs, a small VA team, and AI for the boring parts, so evenings and weekends stay off and I get more time with my parents. I write about what I built, what it cost and what broke. This is a live blog.
A few questions
- Why content over ads?
- Ads stop the moment the budget stops. Content stays up and people can still search for it, and some of my older posts are still getting traffic. The catch is time: you usually only get your money back around 1.5-2 years in.
- What are you actually good at?
- Sales and presenting, online and offline, but only for things I truly believe in. I know how the different functions in a business work together. I also speak and write Chinese, which opens doors to China-related companies.
- What do you care about?
- Seeing my parents as much as possible. Evenings and weekends are for family and rest. I want slightly more than enough money for my parents and me to enjoy life.
- What are you working on now?
- Running my business with AI and a small VA team, testing local models on cheap machines, and writing it up as I go.
Some photos
