Reeve Yew · Techpreneur
I wasn’t building businesses. I was building freedom — through systems that run without me.
Co-founder & CEO of Funnel Duo Media. One half of Gen AI — the brother who’d rather build systems than be in front of the camera. Leads AI Agency™ and Millionaire Marketer. Author of 有钱有閒.
Age 15, Malaysia.
I bought watches from Alibaba and resold them on Lelong — the local Malaysian marketplace. I wasn’t thinking about profit margins. I was thinking about connecting products with people who needed them.
2010 humbled me fast. My entire Angry Birds merchandise shipment got seized by customs. The Goophy Enterprise platform withheld all my payments. I lost money in a violin import scam with fake customs fees.
Each failure chipped away my naiveté — but it built my foundation. I started to understand: success isn’t about talent. It’s about systems, vision, and relentless execution.
London. Code. Apple.
I studied at King’s College London. Faced financial challenges. Picked up programming. Won hackathon competitions. Won an Apple Developer Competition — flew to California for WWDC.
Back in Malaysia, I co-founded LAVA X Technologies in 2016. We secured international projects. But I noticed something: our clients’ software projects kept failing — not because of the code, but because they didn’t know how to market what we built.
I left LAVA X in 2017 to focus on marketing. Studied SEO and affiliate marketing. Experimented with black-hat techniques. It worked short-term. I knew it wasn’t sustainable.
Funnel Duo. SaaS. Scale.
In 2019, Jackson and I co-founded Funnel Duo Media. Early days: couldn’t explain “funnel” to the Malaysian market. Invested RM100,000+ in courses and seminars trying to figure it out. Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery unlocked it: focus on who to sell to, not how to sell.
By 2022, we’d reached international success. We pivoted — stopped taking new agency clients, partnered with a local B2B SaaS company. Grew revenue 10x in one year. Scaled to 120 team. Positioned for IPO and globalization. Exited shares in 2023 because the company’s rigidity and our need for freedom were incompatible.
In 2023 we relaunched. The Brand Funnels as our international agency. AutomaticSales AI — proprietary features on top of HighLevel — hit 2,000+ subscribers in its first year. Won the GHL SaaSPreneur Diamond — highest tier, >1,000 SaaS users.
Two lessons I paid to learn.
Lesson one
Dinner in the Sky.
Before Funnel Duo, I was the young marketer for a German-owned fine-dining company in Malaysia. They ran cranelift “dinner in the sky” events. At peak they were a top-3 Malaysian Facebook advertiser — Facebook Singapore HQ sent an account manager to personally handle the relationship.
I had a front-row seat to massive ad spend. I ate on aircraft and sky platforms. I got paid in meals, not upside. The whole time I watched the gap between my labor and the owner’s take grow. MCO killed the business in 2020.
I was helping print money for someone else and calling it dinner.
Lesson two
Fatt Kee Roast Fish.
I charged RM 40,000 once for a single video for a 4-table roast fish hawker stall — a friend of Cody’s. That one video drove the transformation. The shop grew into a 50+ table restaurant doing millions in monthly revenue, with customers spending RM 200+ each.
I eat there regularly now. Every meal is comped by the owner, out of genuine gratitude. But I captured RM 40K total from the engagement. If I’d negotiated 10% profit-share at deal time, I’d own an annuity. I didn’t — because I didn’t know to ask.
Free food forever is nice. Owning a sliver of the machine you built is better.
Both stories point the same direction: effort-for-fee caps at your hours. Equity or profit-share compounds. Most marketers never learn this until it’s already cost them. I teach both lessons now — in Millionaire Marketer.
AI changed everything.
In 2024, I saw what was happening with ChatGPT adoption and realized it was the biggest opportunity of our generation — especially for Malaysians. We could earn in USD from anywhere.
I launched what became AI Agency™ — teaching Malaysians to do AI-powered freelance work for international clients. Students started earning 4–5 figures USD/month. It became our flagship program.
February 2025: ASEAN Records officially recognized us as the region’s AI Freelance Training Platform with the highest number of freelancers trained online in a single year.
December 2025: We set the Guinness World Record for the Largest Artificial Intelligence Marketing Lesson in the world. SinChew covered it.
April 2026: Jackson and I rebranded our ecosystem into Gen AI — the umbrella over everything we run.
What I believe.
I wasn’t just building businesses. I was learning to build freedom — through systems that run without me.
- · Success isn’t talent. It’s systems, vision, and relentless execution.
- · Focus on who to sell to before how to sell.
- · The market doesn’t reward the smartest — it rewards the most consistent.
- · Mentorship scales. So does giving back.
- · Build businesses that generate value independently — so you can build the next one.
Next up
The book drops April 2026.
有钱有閒 — the playbook behind everything above. Pre-sold. Get on the launch list.