Since I was 18, I’ve been tinkering with random ventures. Coming from a maths & science school, none of this made sense, but I kept drifting towards business. I’m glad I followed that instinct, because it was the first time work felt like play.
It started with writing and blogging, then social media and content, then online coaching, and eventually a marketing agency.
Then came 2023. I spent a year in New York working at a startup, and it opened my eyes to a whole new world of business. I fell in love with creating a product from nothing. I told myself I’d start my own startup when I got back to Singapore, and that’s exactly what I did.
When I graduated and my friends took high-paying jobs, I spent almost two years building without pay. It was scary, but deep down I knew it was the fastest way to learn everything at once, and it was worth more to me than any grad job. I’ll never regret it.
When my cofounder left, I became a solo founder and had to take on the technical side too. It was a blessing in disguise. I found out how much I love building, and that I can learn almost anything, however complex, and learn it fast.
So this is a little taste of things I’ve made and done.
Welcome in.
Snowball
A consumer social app that reached 1,800+ users with no paid acquisition.
users, with no paid acquisition
1,800+
App Store rating
4.9★
merged pull requests
339
Snowball IRL members
1,190
I took over engineering as a solo founder after the CTO left, and was shipping production features within a month. In 8 months I wrote 862 commits, over half the codebase’s activity, and built 10+ major features end to end with AI tools like Claude Code.
I also owned the product design, set the roadmap, ran releases, and hired 9 interns from 320+ applicants.
Snowball IRL, the community side, grew through 7 free in-person events, and every one was oversubscribed. After 9 iteration attempts, I made the call to wind Snowball down.
Live on the App Store and Play Store · snowball.day
A Snowball IRL event
My Gym Coach
A workout app I built to get my first pull-up at home.
It shows a 3D demo of each exercise, tracks sets and runs a rest timer.
An AI walking coach I made for my 54-year-old mum.
An iPhone app built to help parents start one small walking habit. It was the first time I designed for someone other than myself. I ended it before launch when my mum told me her problem wasn’t reminders. It was not having the time.
Expo, Next.js, Supabase, Claude API
JEN
An AI time management assistant, backed by a $10,000 grant.
I co-founded it, designed the full app and did the prompt engineering behind its recommendations. We won a $10,000 VIP grant and got into The Hangar, NUS’s startup incubator.
After beta tests with 30+ people, we decided to pivot because we had no defensible moat.
A promo video from when JEN was still called NOVAPitching JEN
SIXR Marketing
My marketing agency, which grew out of social media coaching.
social media project
$100,000
other client projects
8+
followers on my own TikTok
12,000+
of coached owners went viral
90%
I started out coaching business owners on Instagram and TikTok. About a year in, I legally incorporated SIXR to offer social media management too, and kept coaching alongside it.
The biggest win was the Singapore Computer Society’s 12-month social media project, worth $100,000. I led a team of 4 to present a 60-slide proposal. We closed 8+ other projects worth more than $20,000 in total, and partnered with another agency to make TikTok content for HBO Asia, SquirrelSave and more.
On the coaching side, close to 10 business owners went through the 3-month program I built, and 90% of them made videos with over 100k views. I also coached Beauty Insider’s marketing team of 6, who hit 1,000 TikTok followers in a month.
Growing my own TikTok got me invited to a live interview on CNA938 to talk about social media management.
Coaching calls, 2021
Firework
My year in New York, doing B2B marketing ops.
I worked onsite in the New York office. It was my first and only time in B2B SaaS, and where I learnt marketing ops properly, running the company’s HubSpot, GA4 and other tools.
I also wrote and sent 2 newsletters a week to 100,000+ subscribers.
New York, 2023
Fairing
LinkedIn posts and growth ideas for a New York startup.
When I got back to Singapore, my supervisor from Firework, who had moved to Fairing, invited me to work with him as an independent contractor. It was a short stint, alongside the rest of my semester.
Planning the #SubwaySpotlight posts“We are kinda like dry shampoo”
Portfolio Tracker
A dashboard for my investments.
Brokerage apps never made it easy to see the whole picture, so I built my own. It shows what everything is worth against what I’ve put in, what I own and how each year went, so I can check in and plan my next move in a minute.
Then came 2023. I spent a year in New York working at a startup, and it opened my eyes to a whole new world of business. I fell in love with creating a product from nothing. I told myself I’d start my own startup when I got back to Singapore, and that’s exactly what I did.
When I graduated and my friends took high-paying jobs, I spent almost two years building without pay. It was scary, but deep down I knew it was the fastest way to learn everything at once, and it was worth more to me than any grad job. I’ll never regret it.
