Twenty years.Four rock bottoms.One operator.

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.

The right question, asked once, changes a life.

Bought more courses than I can count. Failed more times than I can remember. Then finally bought a course on eBay selling. Did $10K a month within weeks. Dropped out of university full-time. Then PayPal banned me. First lesson in not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Money without identity is louder, not better.

Twangou launched as one of the first Groupon clones in China. Ten thousand competitors, VC-funded sharks. Closed mid-2011. Amei, a niche cosmetics groupon, made $10K a month. Closed 2012.

Then mom got sick. Sarcoidosis. Autoimmune. Incurable. I stopped everything to help her run the factory in Ningbo, China. 150 people. Procurement, manufacturing, ops, QA, HR. Built the SOPs, brought in ISO, strung the departments together. That season taught me ops in a way no course ever could.

The detour was the lesson.

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 fulfil his role. We shipped a bad 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 an outsourced agency that turned out to be a sham. 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.

Trust, but get it on paper. Every time.

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.

“Why are you trying to be good at something you may never be good at? Just go back and do ecommerce.”A friend, 2016

Sometimes the way out is the way back.

Evan graduated and could have taken McKinsey. I told him to skip the corporate path and build with me instead. He took the leap. We found dropshipping in a Facebook group, and within three months crossed our first $1M month. Then $2M.

We scaled fast because of relationships. Mr Wei, the small logistics guy I’d worked with in 2008, now ran a 1,000-person operation and extended a $1M credit line. My old Facebook account manager was now head of APAC. Never forget who helped you when you were small.

• 0 to the first $1M month in three months
• 0 to 100K Facebook group members with zero paid acquisition
• Phuket mastermind, 35 operators
• eCommerce World Summit, 1,000 people, no ads
• A $360K revenue day

Build the community the gatekeepers refuse to let you join.

Hit some 100x crypto ICOs. Made stupid money fast. Got distracted. Music festivals. Parties. Cars.

Significance bought is significance owned. Build for what you respect.

In May 2022 Luke Belmar pitched me on Capital Club. We built the infrastructure that generated over 3 billion views for his personal brand. We launched in October 2023 and did $5M in the first launch.

Pride, greed and ego came as a package with the fame. By June 2024 I knew the partnership was over. The exit didn’t go the way I expected.

The wins were real. The lessons came after.

After transitioning control in good faith, we were removed from all admin overnight. The next year was the hardest of my life. Lawyers. Demand letters. Silence. In September 2025 we filed the lawsuit. In October I posted the story on X and it reached a million people in days.

Some chapters you don’t get to write alone.

This is where the page becomes present tense. Twenty years of operator work, finally organised into something you can use without me in the room: the resources, the weekly email, and the events.

Twenty years to figure out what to do. The rest of my life to do it in the open.