Buy the commodity, build the differentiator
Hosting and fonts are commodities, so the platform handles them. The module system is not, so I wrote it myself. The same test applies to every tool decision. If it makes you different, it should be yours.
About
Build it, then run it
That has been the thread for fifteen years, across three continents. The titles changed. The habit never did.
The story
I started in Kuala Lumpur, freelancing across PR, communications, sponsorship and events for international media houses. Then I stopped freelancing and started owning. For nearly four years I ran Maretia Asia as CEO: 32 people across three divisions, events, festivals and artist management, with the full company P&L and every hiring decision on my desk. Nineteen months into that, I founded Jivana Asia alongside it, a lifestyle brand with 22 full-time staff and a second P&L. Two agencies at once teaches you what a budget line actually costs.
Before all that, Australia. A degree from the University of South Australia and a talent and creative director role at XYZ Networks, where I built the talent acquisition engine: candidate lead generation, recruiting metrics, forecasting. Marketing a job is still marketing. A useful reminder that the craft works whether you are selling software or laksa.
Europe came next, deliberately from the bottom of the funnel. After relocating continents I took a business development seat at Altium to learn the European B2B market from inside it: prospecting, qualification, quotas. When the pandemic closed the job market, I founded Ameera’s Kitchen and ran the full marketing stack on my own Malaysian meals. Then LicenseQ, where I was the entire marketing function for a B2B software company, remote, across the whole demand generation mix.
Today I lead group marketing: four brands plus a partner programme, a distributed team across the Netherlands and Bulgaria, and the post-merger job of making one MarTech stack out of several. I built the infrastructure myself. 21 custom HubSpot modules and 30 templates run the group’s email and web, the ISE Barcelona lead capture system fed our biggest show straight into HubSpot, and I build AI agent systems standards-first, so the quality bar lives in writing rather than in anyone’s head.
The thread through all of it: I build the thing, then I run the thing. Most marketing leaders hand the building to someone else. I never developed the habit.
Principles
Three rules I keep in writing
Standards in writing, not in heads
Quality that lives in one person’s taste does not scale and does not survive that person being busy. I write the standards down. Written rules can be versioned, checked and improved, and they are what AI agent systems get built on.
Show the receipt
Every claim carries a number, a named system or a shipped thing. If the receipt does not exist, the claim does not ship. It keeps the work honest and the writing short.
Career in brief
The roles, compressed
- Head of Marketing, ScreenCom Group
- Marketing Manager, ScreenCom Group
- Lecturer in Digital Marketing, Tio Business School Hengelo
- Marketing Manager, LicenseQ
- Founder, Ameera’s Kitchen
- Business Development Representative, Altium B.V.
- Founder, Jivana Asia
- Chief Executive Officer, Maretia Asia Sdn Bhd
- Talent & Creative Director, XYZ Networks
- Freelance Consultant, Kuala Lumpur