Alright, so you want to know more about me than just the official bio. Got that.

Maybe this is the first time you’ve heard about me. Maybe you already know me from somewhere. Maybe you’re considering one of my Programs and would like to know who you’re dealing with. Or maybe you’re just curious… 🙂

Whatever it is, you’re already here on this page, and I have a message to share. This is my story, and why I do what I do.

The only photo of me from 2004. I was a very different person then… and what a depressing year it was!  

Right after High School, I landed on my first (and last) full-time job as an office boy. A lot of crazy things happened the year before, including:

• My parents had divorced
• My younger sister and I left school for a few months
• My mother sold the house away, we moved to London, UK temporarily and practically lived on our suitcases (most INSANE experience)
• We moved back to Malaysia only to settle in Johor Bahru, where my sister and I would continue our studies

It wasn’t much better at my workplace. I was at the mercy of a perpetually angry, verbally abusive boss. I had very toxic and negative colleagues for company… oh, and I got paid a measly RM6 per hour. That’s roughly USD1.50 by today’s currency conversion.

So I went to work Monday to Friday, and studied CFP (Certified Financial Planning) on weekends because it was the cheapest tertiary course I could afford.

My mother was unable to find a job, and my sister was still studying. That means I was the sole breadwinner of the family. We couldn’t expect much help from our relatives because they weren’t doing well themselves.

So you can imagine how much I really hated my life back then.

While I had read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” in my teens and loved the idea of being in business and making money for myself, reality was quick to remind me how it was easier said than done.

I wasn’t born or taught to be an entrepreneur, and there is no successful business owner among my immediate family members. So I had no one to turn to for advice.

That means I had to figure out on my own how to get out of the rat race.

My first ever attempt at financial freedom was through Multi-Level Marketing or MLM in short. I spent RM515 to get started as a Distributor under a neighborhood friend that recruited me, and then a bit more. Note that this amount was nearly my monthly income at the time.

To cut the long story short: I FAILED here.

I lost some money, and worse, through being pressured by my Uplines to call up all my Contacts in my phone about “the next big opportunity” I inadvertently turned off and even burned bridges with the already few friends I had.

(I wonder if anyone knows or remembers “Omega Trend”? It collapsed in 2006, it’s long history by now though there’s not a lot that can be found about it on Google)

Next I tried trading Magic: The Gathering cards.

I made a cool profit of RM70 but problem is, I was no longer 11 years old. I needed to make an adult’s income because like it or not, I was shouldering the responsibility of man of the house!

For a brief moment, I also taught breakdancing to Uni students on weekends. Still, it was far from enough.

If I wanted out of the rat race and change my life, I knew I needed to do something DIFFERENT, something DRASTIC.

This was the suggestion of a good friend. At this point, we had brainstormed and traded a lot of ideas. Initially I dismissed it as just one of the many ideas we came up with, and maybe it won’t work. Or maybe it would?

Crazy to think how I nearly passed this up, that was a pivotal decision in my life that shapes who I am and what I do today.

Remember this was year 2004. This was a time when the idea of starting an Online Business or make money online had yet to capture public imagination. So it’s little surprise a lot of people at the time were skeptical and thought it might be a scam.

However I had to weigh my options against the little income I managed to save up to that point.

A conventional business would gobble up hundreds of thousands of Ringgits to just get started. Investing in properties? Out of the question. Buy shares or stocks? Not ready to lose my hard earned money.

That leaves starting an Online Business. I felt it was within my means to afford it and start one.

It’s 2005.

After working a full year at a job I hated, I finally quit and gave my now ex-boss the middle finger (literally) for all his verbal abuse and crappy leadership.

I saved around RM4,000 or USD1,000 to start my own online enterprise, reselling a USD97 e-book I bought the resale rights to.

I retreated to our humble, rented home in Johor to start the new business. Broadband was already a thing in Malaysia, but it didn’t cover my area as I was living in the suburbs. So I had to apply for a landline and 56K modem. That means paying 10 times the price for 1/10th the speed. Just brilliant.

Can you hear the 56k modem sound?  

Now I wish I can tell you I made a lot of money right off the bat and made it the last word in financial freedom – after all, like most people I bought into illusion of making heaps amount of money just pushing some buttons…

… But that was not what happened.

Two months in, and I was still making ZIP.

The hard earned money I saved from the year before was burning too fast, and I didn’t have anything else to rely on for backup. Bills were piling up and we got eviction notices.

This was the toughest and most frustrating period of my life to this day.

I even gave up and tried to look for another job. I paid a small fee to a Jobs Agency to help me find a job (and boy, letting go even RM20 was hard…)

Alas, even after attending a few job interviews – which seemed promising at first – I didn’t hear back from anyone and I needed the money like last month.

Miraculously, none of the utilities were cut off despite being long overdue, so I decided to just continue where I last left off.

So I was back in action, sitting in front of the computer, not knowing zilch, but I knew I had to do whatever it takes to make this Online Business thingy work!

I shot randomly into the dark, hoping something sticks… and then lo and behold…

3 months in, I was checking my email late at night when I saw something unusual. Something I had not seen before.

It took a while to register in, and decide it was legit – I made my first sale!

They say the first sale is the sweetest. I believe so!  

I raced up the stairs to wake my mom up. I guided her to the computer and showed the sale.

“Are you sure this is real?”she asked.“I think it is. The Customer details are in there.”

“But son, you said the Customers are going to be Americans, right? So why is this is from Africa?”

At the time, I believed that most of the Customers would come from the US because they are the biggest online shoppers. Regardless, despair turned into hope for the first time.

I didn’t know what I did, but something I did up to that point worked. I just needed to find out what I did and do more of that.

A few days later, the second USD97 sale came in.

Another few more days later, the third and then a fourth sale.

Eventually, I made just enough and waited at the nearest ATM with my mother. I was using 2CheckOut payment processor at the time and one needs to make more than USD300 to withdraw the payments.

We were used to seeing 2 digit and 3 digit balances, so imagine our relief when we saw a surplus of RM1,100+!

First thing we did? Paid off some bills to keep the bill collectors at bay. Then stock up the fridge (we were living on literally bread and Maggi Mee for months)

I was far from being out of the woods, of course. I continued to struggle for the next several months in learning how Internet Marketing works and developing the maturity to be an entrepreneur.

I was making a bit of sales here and there, but it wasn’t consistent. I was averaging a few hundred dollars per month, and still in debt.

… Came in the form of a Russian Canadian. This guy found me on the Warrior Forum and offered to buy over the rights to some of my written e-books for a cool sum of USD550. That comes up to slightly more than RM2,000 and that was a lot of money to me at the time.

I agreed to it, received the payment almost immediately, and was happy of course. Two weeks later, I saw the same person resold the e-books he bought from me and made six figures from it!

Sure I felt like a sucker, but I would’ve still agreed to the amount anyway because I needed the money at the time. But that didn’t stop me from asking him what he did exactly. Fortunately, he was generous enough to share roughly what he did with the e-books.

I didn’t know it was called a “product launch” at the time – where you’d come up with an offer, get a bunch of affiliates to promote it and pay them a cut like 50%. This was long before the era of Upsells and Funnels as you might know it today.

So I wrote 7 more new e-books – I was writing a book a day with 40-70 pages each (I was in a pretty fired up “do or die” state).

Then I wrote the sales copy modeling after some experts I saw on Warrior Forum.

Then I created my own Graphics for the book covers with Photoshop.

And slapped a $167 price tag on the package, and called it “Private Label Rights”. Again, this was a very different time when you can sell a bunch of e-books at prices like this (not anymore today)

I emailed several Internet Marketers that I thought was a guru or expert, inviting them to promote my new offer on PayDotCom and I’d pay them 50% commissions.

Some agreed, and I got my start there. Again, I didn’t know I was doing a product launch; I just did what I saw other experts were doing at the time and rephrased my offer so it wasn’t a direct copycat.

What my first product launch’s sales copy looked like. Dug this out from Wayback Machine.

For the first time, I saw the sales come in fast and furious… I would make my first USD8,000 in sales!

After paying off affiliates, that leaves USD4,000 or close to RM15,000 at the time of exchange rate.

At the time, I had not seen 5 figures before in my life! I suppose that when you’re broke, ten thousand dollars will feel like a million dollars.

However because there was no PayPal in Malaysia, I trusted a ‘stranger’ from Singapore to collect the sales on my behalf with his PayPal account and I would meet him in Tampines, SG later on to collect the money in cash with my mother.

Yes, it was a scary and anxious experience – maybe I could have been ripped off and he could make off with the money – fortunately he is trustworthy and proved to be a friend long term.

With the sudden ‘windfall’, I paid off all my outstanding rent and debts by Christmas 2005, with more money to spare.

It was the best Christmas I’ve ever had.

One of my JVZoo accounts hitting the million dollar mark (in USD). I have a few accounts among others. Not showing this to brag, just proud of my achievement and I know how important proof is to some people.

UPDATE: Here’s another one, so people don’t think I just got lucky. Feel free to verify with the JVZoo network on the screen shots. Plus if you are on my email list and/or in my FB group, you’ll be able to see more and more examples and proof.  

Thanks to running a profitable Business that I can take and do from anywhere in the world provided I am connected online, I’ve been able to do the things I enjoy or feel like doing such as…

Traveling The World

I’m not a holiday kind of person, but at least I have the option to call time out whenever I need or want to…

Being a devout Catholic, going to the Holy Land had always been on mom’s bucket list. In 2018, I accompanied her to Israel, Palestine & Jordan. If you can, I always recommend take your old folks out while they’re still fit and relatively young.  

Featured Article In The Star Newspaper (2008)

I was also featured in an article in The Star. Link here:
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/education/2008/01/06/pitching-it-online/

Wrote My Own Book “Secrets of Millionaire Students” (2008) and “Crushing It!” (2015)

Bought My House

First for mom and Ashley my sister. Then for myself…

I organized what I called the ‘last housewarming party’ because I thought I wouldn’t move again after buying a house for myself. Little did I know, 5 years later and I moved out and went back to renting! This time I want to prioritize on investing instead, and improve my credit rating with the bank.  

Bought My Own Car (A Few Times)

For the first part of my life I went around in public transport. When I bought my first ride it was a humble Perodua Myvi, but I felt proud as it was earned on my own – no help from parents! Much later on, I would gradually upgrade my ride…

But understand that cars are liabilities, it’s better to invest first and spending heavily on big boys toys should be an afterthought. Speaking of big boys toys…

I Get To Do Thrilling Extreme Sports

Indonesia’s first competitive Airsoft tournament in Bali, 2015. I teamed up with players from Netherlands to play against other 3-men teams from all around Indonesia. We survived up to semi-finals on the last day.  

I’ve been playing Airsoft since 2009. Through the sport I get to go to other countries to play. It’s not exactly a cheap hobby, and there’s a lot of gear and preparation that goes into every war game.

Again, I couldn’t have done any of these if not for the freedom and income afforded by running an Online Business.

I Started My Own Full-Time Team In 2014

After spending the first 8 years being a solopreneur, I decided to go ‘offline’ and ‘conventional’ i.e. start an office and recruited my own in-house team of content creators and online marketers.

At first it seemed like an ironic decision, as my original motivation for going online was because I loathed the 9-to-5 job.

However I reached a stage where it’s all about scaling and there’s only so much one person can do despite the vast freedom and low overheads of being a one man operator.

So Musemancer was born.

Connecting And Meeting Other Respected Public Figures, Mentors And Business Owners Around The World

Sure making money is cool, and doing business behind the computer screen is a God send for introverts like me. But even I acknowledge that some things cannot be replaced totally, like good ole fashion meetup in person!

Thanks to the business, I got to meet other amazing individuals in the same field and out… sure didn’t expect all these when I was starting out and all I wanted to do at the time was just make some money to put food on the table!

Conducting Live Events, Seminars And Workshops

… and training others to do the same! I did not start my Online Business with the intention of teaching others, however it just came to me naturally over the years to coach and mentor others.

Doing Parkour, Hiking, Gym & Obstacle Courses

I admit in the first few years, I spent a lot of time in front of the computer and staying up late nights that my health was neglected. Eventually, I turned my attention to taking care of myself.

Few people take care of their health as they age or when they get too engrossed in work. I believe health is wealth!

As you can see, I didn’t start with a lot of capital. I didn’t have all the answers. Heck, I didn’t have the making of an entrepreneur!

Fortunately even if you’re not born with such acumen, I discovered it is a learnable skill.

Though I was self learned in my early years, I propelled faster when under the wing of mentors.

There was a time I didn’t thinking becoming a millionaire was possible, and I thought maybe if I made my first million Ringgit by 30 it would have been a great achievement already (I made it by 23)

Well that’s my ‘origin’ story.

Maybe you can relate to some parts of it. Maybe you wonder if you too can succeed.

Regardless of your current circumstances or disadvantages you feel is holding you back from getting to where you want today, just know there are far more people out there that have had it worse but it didn’t stop them from realizing their full potential.

And if you’d like me to be your coach and partner in success, then we should talk.

Here’s To Writing Your Own Success Story!