Twenty years.
Four rock bottoms.
One operator.
Started with a question from my mom in 2005. Still answering it in 2026. This is the unedited arc.
Most personal brand pages are a highlight reel. This isn't. The wins are in here. So are the bottoms, the bad partners, the wrong reasons. They're all lessons.
The Awakening.
I was a Singaporean kid finishing high school in Perth. Came back for national service. Got addicted to MMORPGs while waiting for enlistment. Even in uniform, every weekend I was locked into virtual worlds chasing virtual wins.
· Mom, 2005
That question broke me open. I quit the games. Bought my first online marketing course · Corey Rudl, Internet Marketing Center. The OGs of the OGs. Applied to Nottingham China so I could be closer to mom. The mission started.
First Wave.
Bought more courses than I can count. Failed more times than I can remember. Then finally · bought a course on eBay selling. Did $10K/month within weeks. Dropped out of university full-time.
Then PayPal banned me. First lesson in not putting all your eggs in one basket.
Moved to Yahoo Taiwan auctions. $30K/month. Got JV'd with a “partner” I'd never met. He scammed every dollar of inventory. Second lesson in not trusting people on faith.
Built my own WordPress site. Setup my own Magento eCommerce stack. No Shopify yet. Learned SEO and HTML the hard way. Stumbled into Facebook ads in late 2008. First $100K month. Then grew to over $500K months.
I was 24 and ashamed. None of my friends understood what I did. The money was real but the validation wasn't. Started chasing it the wrong way · drinking, partying, car clubs, trying to be seen.
First Crash
+ The Factory.
Twangou: launched as one of the first Groupon clones in China. Ten thousand competitors. VC-funded sharks. Closed mid-2011.
Amei: niche cosmetics groupon. $10K/month profit. Closed 2012.
Then mom got sick. Sarcoidosis. Autoimmune. Incurable. No AI then, no good information. Flew her to Cleveland Clinic. She took the steroid path. It cost her.
Stopped everything to help her run the factory in Ningbo, China. 150 people. Procurement, manufacturing, ops, QA, HR. The whole floor. Built the SOPs, brought in ISO, strung the departments together.
That season taught me ops in a way no course ever could.
Hardware Wars.
Launched Kreyos. $100K in 24 hours on Indiegogo. $1.5M total. Promised a smart watch. Delivered something that didn't work.
The product partner I trusted didn't fulfill his role. He extracted the money. We shipped a shitty product to backers who'd believed in us. I take accountability for that to this day.
Almost died in Typhoon Haiyan flying to the Philippines to check on the outsourced agency that turned out to be a sham. Built my own dev team afterward.
Launched Wuvo in 2015 · hardware again, with all the lessons. Marketing didn't pop. Closed in a year. Lost everything I'd built across a decade.
Also dropped $300K into a friend's forex fund. He lost it in three months. Said he'd pay me back. Never did. No paper. Just trust.
Rock Bottom.
Back in Singapore. Broken. Depressed. Girlfriend gone. Friends drifted. $0 to my name.
Borrowed $30K from mom to try forex. Lost it. Sat in a one-room rental at the corner of Singapore for weeks. The clearest definition of failure I'd ever met.
· A friend, 2016
That sentence cracked the box open. I packed a bag and flew to China the next morning.
The Compound.
Brother Evan graduated. Could've taken McKinsey. I told him to skip the corporate path and build with me instead. He took the leap.
We started with Amazon FBA. Found dropshipping in some FB group. Within 3 months we crossed our first $1M month. Then $2M.
The reason we scaled fast was relationships. Mr Wei · the small logistics guy I'd worked with in 2008 · was now a 1,000-person operation. I told him the story. He extended a $1M credit line. My old Facebook account manager was now head of APAC. He gave me six figures of ad credit. Never forget who helped you when you were small.
The ecom gurus deleted our posts because our numbers were bigger than theirs. So we launched our own FB group: eCommerce Elites Mastermind. What we built:
- 0 to first $1M month · 3 months.
- 0 to 100K FB group members · zero paid acquisition.
- Phuket mastermind · 35 operators · $12K each.
- eCommerce World Summit · 1,000 people · no ads.
- $360K revenue day · haters called it fake, then live-refreshed and got respect.
Along the way I met my best friend Rio. The 99% of the closest people in my life today all came through him. Forever grateful.
Crypto +
Big Cringe.
Hit some 100x Crypto ICOs. Made stupid money fast. Got distracted. Music Festivals. Parties. Two Lambos. One Porsche.
· ST · 2021
Wrong friends came. Gold diggers came. The wrong kind of attention came.
Built Intercart · a Shopify checkout app · that processed over $1B in GMV before Shopify shut it down. No hard feelings. It's business.
Meanwhile the ecom side kept compounding in the background. New single store peak: Over $4M in one of our stores.
Launched Leap Vista, an education company. Scaled hard during COVID. The ads were cringe. The content wasn't me. Closed it because I don't feel aligned.
Capital Club.
May 2022 · Luke Belmar pitched me on Capital Club. We started building.
Built infrastructure that generated over 3 billion views for his personal brand. Unfortunately, pride, greed and ego came as a package of the fame.
October 2023 we launched. $5M in the first launch at $369/year.
By June 2024, I knew the partnership was over. I brought up parting ways. The exit didn't go the way I expected.
The Drama.
October 2024. Bali mastermind. Luke told everyone he'd bought me out at an offer I couldn't refuse · $10M. After transitioning control in good faith, we got kicked out of all admin overnight.
The next year was the hardest of my life. Lawyers. Demand letters. Silence. Coping. Long holidays trying not to think about it. The kind of pain that runs underneath everything.
September 2025: we filed the lawsuit. Wyoming. Public record.
October 2025: I posted the story on X. 1 million views in days. The old eCommerce community came back to support me. People I hadn't spoken to in years. I'd spent the previous year feeling cast out, forgotten, written off. What hit me hardest wasn't the support itself · it was being remembered after thinking I wasn't.
I'm healing. The chapter isn't closed but it's no longer in control of me.
All in AI.
This is where the page becomes present tense. Below isn't what I'm planning. It's what's running right now, on May 26, 2026.
The bigger move: twenty years of operator work, finally organized into something you can use without me in the room. Frameworks, playbooks, the vault, the newsletter. AVO · the food transparency app · ships in the background. Free where it should be free. Paid where it has to be paid. Honest about both.
The work didn't go away after the last bottom. It just got clearer. If you're reading this, you're early.
If you're still here,
you've read the whole arc. Wins, losses, lessons, the bottoms and the climbs back. Most of it I figured out the hard way.
I spent twenty years building businesses the hard way. Then I found AI · and it gave me the one thing I was always looking for. Leverage. The edge. The multiplier. The unfair advantage.
What I'm building now: operator-grade systems for people who actually ship. The vault is the toolkit. The newsletter is the signal. I show other builders the same door. You walk through it yourself.
If you've read this far, you're not a casual. Three doors below. Pick the one that fits.
If you've made it
this far, we should talk.
The Newsletter
One operator update per week. Written by hand. Five minutes of signal, no noise.
The Resource
Twenty years of operator work, indexed. Frameworks, playbooks, 26,073 prompts. Free.
Work With Me
AI strategy, agents, content clone, transformation. Tell me about the business. If there's a fit, we would love to help.