Writing

Notes from inside the work.

Essays on growth, retention, expansion, and the things operators learn the hard way. Updated when something is worth saying.

JUNE 2026

Three markets, one playbook. That was the problem.

Running Gojek's regional expansion across Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam taught me that distribution isn't a channel plan — it's a theory of why someone adopts your product in a specific context.

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JUNE 2026

Anthropic raised $65B. Doesn't fix your D30 retention.

AI makes the right growth motion faster. It also makes the wrong motion faster. The $65B is a bet on the shovel — most teams still haven't figured out where to dig.

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JUNE 2026

Most AI growth teams are stuck in 1994.

Benedict Evans called AI a 1997 internet moment. He's right. But adding AI to your existing workflow isn't the shift — rethinking which parts of your acquisition logic break when AI is everywhere is.

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MAY 2026

Most growth teams optimize for the wrong ceiling.

Activation feels like the lever because it moves. Retention is the ceiling that defines unit economics — and almost nobody names the behavior driving it.

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APRIL 2026

Vouchers aren't a discount strategy. They're a product feature.

What changed when we stopped treating vouchers as margin leakage and started designing them as the activation loop itself.

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APRIL 2026

I stopped trusting attribution. Here's what I do instead.

The cleanest attribution dashboard I ever built told me the wrong story for nine months. The lessons cost real money.

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MARCH 2026

Southeast Asian expansion is not Europe with worse infrastructure.

Most playbooks I see for SEA market entry are European playbooks with the names changed. Why the unit economics break and what to do instead.

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MARCH 2026

The 32% spend cut that grew acquisition 27%.

How I cut a $10M+ marketing budget by a third at GOJEK while growing new user acquisition YoY.

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Stay in the Loop

New essays go out on LinkedIn first.

I post twice a week. Tuesday is tactical, Thursday is reflective. Follow there if you want them as they land.

Got a growth problem worth a real conversation?

I respond within two business days. No discovery-call gauntlet.

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