So I actually fell into the hotel industry right after finishing high school. At university I studied a Bachelor of Business with a major in events management. During uni, I did shift work in hotels which involved either a morning, afternoon or overnight shift. I essentially picked up every casual shift I could do around my uni schedule to fund my travels, which I had an obsession for especially in my 20s.

I had this kind of lifestyle up until I was 29. When I quit my hotel career, I had basically done everything under the sun from food and beverage, to front desk, to operations to the point where I moved up into executive management. I quit at 29 because I was quite tired of the corporate bureaucracy, then took a one year gap year travelling the world. I was able to get 12 months of travel in, right before COVID-19 hit. Then, I found myself with my then-girlfriend, now-wife in our Airbnb in Bangkok, deciding if we were going to continue our travels to Norway and potentially get stuck there, or come back home. We decided to come back home, which is where I found myself in self-imposed quarantine in April 2020. I sat there in quarantine, thinking that I had two choices - to either go back to the hotel industry that was completely falling apart, or pivot into something else that could possibly work.

It sounds like a structured way of thinking about it, but honestly at the time I just needed to make an income immediately to support myself again. So, I went down the second path and started out pitching for clients. It started out on Upwork (freelancing platform) where I would pitch hundreds of different jobs, from which I was fortunate enough to pick up a couple of clients. At that time in 2020, every business suddenly realised that they had to go digital because of lockdowns.

One of my clients was Davie Mach, my good friend from high school, and his accounting firm, Box Advisory Services. I was doing his marketing and that involved SEO, branding, positioning and copywriting. I met Noel Myaing, my now-business partner through Davie, who was doing all of Davie’s filming for his videos. We ended up getting a huge amount of success with Davie’s marketing. People started inquiring with Davie about who did his marketing for him. And through that, I ended up deciding to create the marketing agency with Noel. That was 4 years ago now, and in that time frame we've gone from 2 co-founders to 10 staff in Australia and 25 in the Philippines, and we work with about 60 to 70 clients. We work from anyone as large as Coca Cola and Mercer Super down to your local tradie in terms of marketing. We grow iteratively, so we change our marketing strategy based on changes in the marketing landscape, which is very fluid.

So I don't come from a marketing background, but fundamentally marketing revolves around human behaviour. There’s an anthropology aspect to marketing where you've got to understand how humans actually interact with each other. The thing is, human behaviour has always been the same, it’s just that the platforms we use change. Before it was MySpace, then Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Tiktok… who knows what the next thing is, right? The fundamental way that humans behave, interact and make buying decisions, doesn't change. The trick is understanding how people use certain platforms. Personally, I've always been someone who just watches how people behave. I don't know if it's nature versus nurture, but in the hotel industry, I did the reps everyday when interacting with people, and have this very clear understanding about how people actually behave on a mass level.

When I moved into marketing, I found it very intuitive because I actually fundamentally understood how I behaved as a consumer. When I became a prosumer (someone who consumes and produces), I would reverse engineer how things worked, and apply it in a marketing context. You can only do that through doing - you have to market yourself, be in the trenches, create content, see how people respond, understand what works, and what doesn't work. The great thing about marketing is, the more marketing you do, the better you get - which is great when you’re setting up and running an agency.

I discussed this in Episode 48 where we reflected on one year of Level: Asian - one of my favourite moments was the first event we ran at the Carter. That was a very surreal moment for me. When you create content, you can tell that you’re building a community through followers and DMs etc, but having 350 people packed in an event space, crystallised the reality of the community, and how we were all there to celebrate the Asian Australian community.

But fundamentally, what I enjoy most out of Level: Asian is the connections that I get to build - from your Vinh Giangs, to Matt Purcell, to Dai Le and Sally Sitou for example who all have very limited time. So I feel very blessed and privileged that they're willing to not only give time for the podcast, but stay and help, build a connection and ask how else they can help. It’s important to build these relationships because you don't know where they’ll lead to. And ultimately, my goal is to be able to use those connections, to then help others as well.

I think it’s that no one is doing it to the scale and the production quality that we are, which immediately sticks out and gets noticed. Secondly, creating content and marketing it out is essentially what we do with Social Wave. This is our bread and butter that we do for a living and for our clients. We know what works and doesn't. We know how to amplify the content on social media and reach new people.The third factor would be the quality of the guests we've brought on the podcast - we bring on an assembly of the best of the best Asian Australians. I think the fourth factor would be the quality of the conversations we have. From the chemistry on camera, to the way we manage the discussion with podcast guests as well, and being able to unearth the best of the best conversation from people.

The first thing that comes to my mind is how we'd like to think that everyone is keen on being a part of this community we’re building. But the truth is, not everyone is, even if they’re Asian. In fact most people don’t care. A lot of people are just struggling in their own lives, and couldn’t care less about being part of a broader community because they’re just trying to keep a roof over their head and food on their table. And because of this, we’re very aware of the fact that we're here to serve and give back to the community that genuinely benefits them.

Another thing would be that our hypothesis of what people would be most interested in, when it comes to the podcast, was wrong. We thought that people would be most interested in the guests. As it turns out, listeners are also very keen to learn more about us, the hosts. I wasn’t expecting to put forward a personal brand and it’s a little uncomfortable because I'm quite a private person. But I realised over time that telling my own story, the things that I do and my perspectives actually does benefit people.

We’re pulling back from the podcast, from weekly to fortnightly releases. This is based on a capacity standpoint. My marketing agency Social Wave essentially funds Level: Asian, but we’ve got finite resources. Our focus right now is on monetisation -  we need funding and support to build an exclusive team for Level: Asian. This can either be through brand deals, sponsorships such as partnering up with other Asian Australians or businesses in creating things that result in revenue. I’m focussed on this issue right now because I've seen too many podcasts and initiatives like this fall off after two years.

In terms of actual projects that we’re doing, one of the major projects that we're looking into is moving into YouTube. We really believe that YouTube, besides podcasts, is the next best way to build a community. Even though Instagram and Tiktok are fantastic platforms, they don’t come close in forming deep parasocial relationships in the way that YouTube allows. We’re leaning into our strengths. We create long form content for our clients and are going to do the same for ourselves. Food content is a big one. That's the current area of focus because it's such an accessible form of content for people to consume. We’re also moving our tagline away from ‘unconventional Asian Australian stories’ to something more creator based e.g. showcasing cool stuff that Asians do. We’re moving away from that corporate flavour and more towards a community, which is what we’ve always wanted to do. This means that we're not pigeoned to a podcast format, or a certain type of style.

We’re also thinking about creating merch, which is such an easy way to represent the community. And if I put one more future plan, it’s that we're going to continue to do more events. There's something about events that galvanises a community. Again, we’re limited by the resources that we have to be able to do this, but we want to hold two or three events a year.