“When I was about 10, I used to help my father sell pisang goreng and cakoi for a living. That’s how I first learned about business.
My family was always into ‘berniaga’ (selling). My family’s environment was all about business, business, business. Kerja is still kerja but mindset is all about the business. And I had to learn all of that when I was young.
And where first year university students would usually be ‘lepaking’, I challenged myself to do new things. If people don’t do it, I want to try and do it myself. So, I started designing t-shirts and made it as a preorder business on Facebook groups. After that, I went on to developing websites for clients, then app development and after that game development.
And the fact is, I didn’t even want to do computer science when I was in university. It was my 5th choice. My first choice was Architecture.
If you understand ‘hikmah’, this best describes where I am today.
At that time, I didn’t even have my own computer. So when I got my fifth choice in my university, I felt down.
It was only after starting the course that I learned about programming, like C++ and other softwares, and that’s when I fell in love with computer science.
So you see – sometimes when you don’t get what you want but you get something else in return, something that’s for you – that is ‘hikmah’.
And now computer science has become my ‘rezeki’. It lead me to what is considered my first tech startup, RunCloud, where we are a middle man to help web developers simplify their task in the configuration and management of websites. A control panel to automate the configuration process.
Within three months of launching our software in 2017, we were featured as the top most viewed community project in Digital Ocean.
A year later, we joined the MaGIC Global Accelerator Program. They have helped us tremendously in digital marketing and connecting us to mentors, and this has helped in our business growth.
And we now manage over 35,000 domains with 6000 connected servers across 80 countries with an 80 percent of our clients from Europe and Americas with our staffs covering different time zones.
As you can see, I believe that everyone can start their own business. To start, is easy. There’s plenty of ideas. But to maintain it? Partners fighting, businesses not making enough money – if your business can survive for 3 years, that is a great marking point.
Not bad for someone who wanted to be an architect, interested in ‘lukisan kejuruteraan’, and whose university degree choice for computer science ws only his fifth choice!”
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Humans of Kuala Lumpur is partnering with Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC) in featuring inspiring and impact-driven entrepreneurs, problem solvers and startups in their mission to solve Malaysia’s problems! #HumansofMaGIC
Photostory by Christine Cheah
Edited by Amalina Davis Mushamir Mustafa
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(This post was first published on July 21st 2018)
