Now

One rule this month: ship before build

End of July was my biggest work week on record — forty-four hours. Almost none of it reached a real person. I built a lead engine and didn't publish it. Made progress on three other things and submitted none of them.

The review wrote itself: I keep building, and I don't deliver. Building is the comfortable part. It always feels like progress, and it lets me avoid the bit where someone might not care.

So August has one rule, and it governs everything else here: nothing new gets built until something already built gets shipped. No new projects. No new tools. Finish, publish, then move.

Writing in public, properly this time

The newsletter form on this site was decorative. It had a placeholder where the form action should be, so for months it accepted email addresses and quietly threw every one of them away. I found it last week and fixed it. Right now is the first time this thing has actually worked.

That's a fair sample of how I operate: build the nice-looking version, never check whether the wire is connected. Writing it down so I check next time.

The one format that's working is short weekly video — a "Sabah This Week" run-down for SabahGuide. It earns followers and it feeds the newsletter, which is more than anything I've built this year can say.

Counting things properly

This week I sat down with seven years of invoices and worked out how many clients I've actually served, instead of repeating a number I'd been estimating for years. It came to 200+ businesses served since 2012, with 60+ on ongoing retainers today.

Two pages of this website had been contradicting each other on that for months, in public, where anyone could read both. Worth the afternoon.

Client work, honestly tracked

Clients stay unnamed while work is in flight — some of these aren't awarded or announced yet. The status column is the part I care about, because "building" is where things go to quietly sit forever.

The last one closed this year — the client wound the business down and chose not to renew. Four years of build, then the shutter comes down. That happens, and it's worth writing down next to the wins.

My own builds

Happy Florist got a full rebuild this year, and Kota Kinabalu Florist now runs alongside it as a second storefront. HelloReply went live in July — an AI receptionist that answers WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram messages for small businesses so nobody loses a customer to a slow reply. It has a dashboard, a trial and pricing. What it doesn't have yet is a first paying customer, which is the only number that counts.

Get Found by AI is the newest service on the agency side: checking whether a brand actually gets cited when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a buying question, then fixing it when the answer is no.

Tools I've built to make this possible

Four industries as one person only works because the repetitive parts stopped being done by hand:

• BingoOps — the agency operations dashboard. Tasks, checklists, close-out tracker, work log, client hub.
• ZeroRank — tracks how a brand is described and cited across seven AI engines over time.
• A public pricing calculator — real project estimates in about a minute, so first calls aren't spent on budget.
• SabahGuide's event pipeline — scrapes local news and listings, LLM-extracts real events into one approved queue, and that queue feeds both the site and the newsletter. Turned a weekly writing job into a weekly reviewing job.
• Bagasi's page pipeline — generates and cross-links 1,800+ hub, guide and destination pages from structured data.
• An outreach system — self-submission link building and sequenced follow-up. Unglamorous, necessary.

A fair criticism of that list: it's a lot of machinery for a person whose main problem this year has been not shipping. Building tools is the most sophisticated form of procrastination I know. But the ones above genuinely bought back hours, and the newsletter you're being asked to subscribe to is largely about which ones did and which ones didn't.

The long plays: SabahGuide and Bagasi

SabahGuide is past 1,000 pages now. Bagasi is past 1,800. Both grew a lot this year.

And that is exactly the trap. Pages built is not readers earned. Bagasi's backlink push has sat untouched for four weeks while the page count kept climbing, because adding pages is easy and asking someone for a link is not. It gets sent this week or it gets formally parked. No third option.

What I'm fixing

Zero exercise, three weeks running. Somewhere around twenty-seven hours a week is going to naps and scrolling — hours I could just have back. The root cause isn't mysterious: I read novels on my phone past midnight, then sleep badly, then nap through the morning I was supposed to work in.

Phone out of the bedroom by nine. Lights off by ten. Walk in the morning instead of napping. Unglamorous, and I've written versions of this before — which is rather the point of putting it somewhere public.

Family

The kids walk to the padang on their own now, no parents hovering. They've made local friends and are speaking real Bahasa Malaysia with them — not the classroom kind. Watching that happen has been the best part of this year.

Mornings belong to them and to the gym, not to WhatsApp. That rule has held better than most.