Jackson Yew.

Mechanical engineering, then Zion.

I graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering — the path I'd been told to follow. The same year, I joined a work-and-travel program at Zion National Park.

Four months in the U.S. was the first time I'd been somewhere where remote work was visible everywhere — people doing real jobs from cafes, on trails, in cars. I came back to KL wondering whether the path I'd been handed was the only one.

Flipping websites with Reeve.

Back in KL, my brother Reeve and I started buying sites off Flippa, building them up, and selling them. It worked — about USD $12k a year in profit on the side.

Our parents weren't comfortable with what looked, to them, like a hobby that could vanish overnight. We dropped it.

The job I tried to want.

I took a sales role at a palm oil machinery company. Two years driving to mills in Sabah and Sarawak. The job was steady, the work made sense to most people I knew.

I couldn't stop thinking about Flippa, and about what would have happened if we'd kept building.

The ship business.

I left the day job for a ship salvaging partnership. The deals were big. The first year looked promising. The second year unraveled — operational issues, missed deliveries, a partner who wasn't there when it mattered.

I lost most of what I'd saved. That Chinese New Year, I couldn't afford red packets for my parents. It's the only stretch of my career I don't want to retell often — but it's the one that taught me to read partnerships harder than I read offers.

Building skills out of necessity.

I rebuilt by taking whatever work would pay. App development. Email marketing. SEO. Some affiliate work. None of it was a real business.

All of it taught me how the internet actually works underneath the marketing pitches — which became the foundation for everything I do now.

Funnel Duo Media.

Reeve and I started Funnel Duo Media. He chased growth experiments and acquisition. I chased referrals and made the work ship.

We took on every Malaysian small business we could find — and lost money on most of them. Local budgets and local imagination both had ceilings we couldn't break through. We knew the work was good. We were selling it to the wrong people.

Thinking too small. Then launching for the world.

We were thinking too small.

We invested in Tony Robbins' Business Mastery. The line that stuck wasn't about positioning or pricing — it was the recognition that the avatar we were selling to was the constraint, not our skill.

Same year, we launched LandingPageDesignrr — a brand name built specifically to target international clients, with the audience finally matched to the craft. (It would rebrand to xBrand, and then again to The Brand Funnels in 2023.)

Mike Dillard.

I posted a teardown of a competitor's landing page in a marketing Facebook group. It opened the door to international work — and inside that door was Mike Dillard.

Mike wasn't technically the first international client. He was the first whale — directly through his own projects, and indirectly through every door he opened for me afterward. The trajectory bent there.

Funnelboss.

I launched Funnelboss — the first time I'd built something focused on teaching other operators rather than serving clients directly.

The muscle of packaging knowledge, running a community, and writing in public would shape everything that came afterward. It wasn't the biggest business I ever ran. It was one of the most formative.

The B2B software bet.

In search of a product of our own, Reeve and I stopped taking new agency clients and went all-in on a partnership with a local B2B software company. We 10×'d the revenue in a year and set the company up for IPO and globalisation.

On paper it was the most successful thing we'd ever done.

The pivot.

The rigidity of a 120-person company conflicted with the kind of work we wanted to do. We decided to exit. The actual share exit closed in 2023, but the decision was made in 2022.

Bigger isn't always better. What works on a balance sheet doesn't always work on a calendar.

The Brand Funnels and AutomaticSales AI.

Running an international agency was still the work I loved most. We relaunched it as The Brand Funnels — the home for everything I'd been calling Conversion Design.

Same year, Reeve and I partnered with HighLevel (GHL) and launched AutomaticSales AI. Within a year: 2,000+ active subscribers and the GHL SaaSPreneur Diamond — the highest tier.

LinkedIn, in public.

By end of 2024, I'd built 30,000 LinkedIn followers in a single year — almost entirely by posting daily about conversion, AI, and the operator decisions behind the work.

Favikon named me a Top Creator: #1 in Growth & Lead Generation in Malaysia, #8 on LinkedIn Malaysia overall. The list above me included Tony Fernandes at #1 and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim at #3 — names I never expected to share a leaderboard with.

Guinness, and going offline.

December 2025: Reeve and I set the Guinness World Record for the Largest AI Marketing Lesson in the World — a single certified event, with the team that had been building Gen AI Club for two years.

The same year, we launched several offline brands. Online businesses taught us systems thinking. Offline businesses force you to confront constraints — location, staffing, inventory, real-world timing — that the internet hides from you.

AtheonX goes B2B. Three lanes, one belief.

AtheonX enters 2026 with a sharper focus: B2B AI services for CEOs and B2B operators who need AI implemented across their business — not generic chatbots or tooling demos.

The Brand Funnels keeps doing what it does best. Gen AI Club continues the corporate training work. Three lanes, one belief underneath: the work should run without me in the middle of it.

If you're reading this and any of those lanes fit, the door's open.