About

I’m Brendan. Singaporean, currently in Taiwan.

I don’t really know what I’m building yet. That’s the honest version, and it’s the whole reason this site exists.

Right now, three things fill my days. I work in my family’s business. I’m starting a trading card shop called Baw Vault, buying, selling, and grading cards, with a YouTube channel to go with it. And at night I build small projects with AI and try to make them earn something.

How I got here

I spent about a decade doing marketing for other people’s startups.

Then I turned this site into an SEO and affiliate blog. I wrote articles built to rank for the keywords people search right before they buy something, then filled them with affiliate links. It made a bit of money.

But it felt gimmicky. I was pulling topics out of Ahrefs, not out of anything I actually cared about. The blog slowly became every other blog chasing the same searches. I wasn’t building a brand. I was building a traffic machine.

After that came Nimbflow, an AI outbound agency. I loved the building part. Wiring up automations, getting AI to do the boring work. I did not love running an agency and selling that as a service. So I shut it down. The archive is here if you’re curious.

Look at the pattern and it’s obvious. I kept building things that were never really mine.

What I’m actually chasing

Own my work. Buy back my time.

I want small internet businesses that make money without me babysitting them, so I can live without a 9-to-5. That’s it. Not a mission statement. Just the thing I actually want.

People will tell you to pick a niche. Maybe they’re right. But I haven’t shipped enough to know what my niche even is, so for now the niche is this: me, building in the open, writing about whatever I’m working on. Today that’s the card shop and AI side projects. In a year it might be something else. I’ll show you the parts that work and the parts that flop.

Where I honestly am

I haven’t made it. Let me be clear about that.

I’ve built a few WordPress sites and launched a couple of digital products that sold almost nothing. I’m not a real developer. Most of what I know came from years of YouTube and being too stubborn to quit.

But I’d rather write from inside the mess than wait until I have a clean success story to sell you. There are already too many people doing that.

(For context, not because it’s the point: my work has been in Buffer, Semrush, Entrepreneur, and Hackernoon. I studied accounting and finance at UNSW, then data science at Le Wagon.)

If you’re here

You’ll probably get this if you’re trying to build something of your own and figuring it out as you go.

Read the writing. See what I’m building. If you want to follow along, subscribe. I only send something when I actually have something to say.