TechTamu #6: Stories of Builders, Thinkers, and Risk-Takers
Introduction: What is TechTamu?
If you’ve been wandering around the Malaysian tech scene long enough, you’ve probably stumbled upon the name TechTamu, usually mentioned online as a group of curious folks with laptops, nasi lemak, and big ideas. I myself found TechTamu on X by chance, from the people that I follow.
To sum it up, TechTamu is a community meetup for people who build: coders, founders, data scientists, marketers, and being mostly enterpreneurs, by defination dreamers - who share stories from the trenches. The word “Tamu” itself, borrowed from Malay and Indonesian, means “guest”, and fittingly, each session invites speakers who come not to lecture but to share their lived experiences, often unfiltered and always real.
Once a month on a Saturday TechTamu will sharing sessions where invited speakers come up and talk about their work and experiences.
This month’s edition of TechTamu featured four speakers, each bringing a unique flavor to the mix:
- Faiz Azizan: An SEO expert with a very Malaysian sense of humor and sobering truths about Google rankings.
- Amin Fauzi & Rosli Amir: The founding duo of ToyyibPay, Malaysia’s homegrown payment gateway.
- Erhanfadli Azrai: From Kotak Sakti, unpacking how complexity kills organizations (and your weekend).
- Nazmi “Abami” Najib: The charismatic CTO of Pomen, with lessons from pitching and surviving the startup grind.
So, grab a cup of coffee (or teh ais, if you’re feeling patriotic), and let’s go through each talk, because if there’s one thing TechTamu proved again, it’s that Malaysian tech stories are anything but boring.
1. Faez Azizan: Five Harsh Lessons in SEO
Faez Azizan began by introducing himself as an SEO enthusiast from Kampung Bangau, Temerloh Pahang, clarifying humorously that his hometown was not Bangsar.
He described himself as both an academic and a practitioner and a home-based professional who has handled more than fifty websites, built analytics dashboards for clients, and written in both media and journals.
His talk, “Five Harsh Lessons in SEO,” focused on what he called average but honest truths from ten years of practice.
Lesson 1: Obsess Over Ranking Does Not Sell
Faez explained that search engines like Google, Facebook, and TikTok are just transport for a message, not the goal itself.
Businesses should focus on margins, product optimisation, and on-page improvement rather than chasing keyword rank alone.
He compared business margin to oxygen: Without it, the business cannot breathe.
Lesson 2: Not Every Effort Gets Rewarded
SEO is a probability game.
Even perfect on-page optimisation may not lead to higher ranking if competition is too strong. He noted that he had seen companies spend RM100,000s on ads yet fail to appear in search, proving that ranking needs patience and consistency.
Lesson 3: Hidden Forces Behind Ranking
He listed the quiet mechanics that shape visibility:
- Authority bias: Old, trusted websites with backlinks and brand trust dominate.
- Indexation bias: Google’s crawl budget is finite; badly managed 404 pages waste it.
- Intent drift: Search behavior changes constantly, so keyword stuffing no longer works.
Lesson 4: Explain Simply
He mocked the habit of some consultants who answer client questions by giving “HTML tuition classes.”
Clients only want their dashboard fixed; clarity beats jargon.
Lesson 5: SEO Takes Patience
Faez closed by reminding that SEO results arrive slowly. Ranking takes months of steady work; quick wins do not last.
“If you can’t survive six months without ranking,” he said, “you’re gambling, not doing business.”
2. ToyyibPay: Building with Sincerity and Timing
The ToyyibPay session featured Rosli Amir and Amin Fauzi.
Rosli opened by explaining that ToyyibPay was created to solve real payment frustrations faced by small merchants and community groups, not to compete with anyone.
The early version borrowed existing models but focused on making transactions simple and trustworthy.
They started small with a lean team and a single developer, serving users who needed an easy FPX gateway.
From the beginning they aligned pricing to what local merchants could afford and maintained a clear record of transparent charges.
Rosli spoke frankly about trust as their main barrier. Early users were skeptical of online payments, so the team focused on earning credibility “satu transaksi demi satu.”
When regulations shifted and the license process tightened, they continued serving existing users rather than waiting for perfect conditions.
Rosli repeated their core principle: Help others first. If mosques or small businesses could not afford fees, ToyyibPay waived them. He called it not charity but responsibility: “kita tolong kerana itu fungsi kita.” Over time, that trust-first philosophy grew the platform organically.
ToyyibPay became a recognized gateway through word of mouth, community support, and steady service, not through advertising.
3. Kotak Sakti: When Complexity Becomes the Enemy
Erhanfadli Azrai from Kotak Sakti opened by introducing his company as a data specialist working in data engineering, data science, and data analysis. They build SQL pipelines, Spark jobs, and Power BI dashboards for clients.
Recently they handled two projects that exposed a pattern in Malaysian organizations:
- An IT audit of a 400-person organization running 50 different software applications, all on mixed stacks (AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Azure)
- An AI landscape study for a government-linked investment corporation to map AI companies and data-center capacity in Malaysia.
From these projects he observed how complexity slows everything down. More systems mean more people, more approvals, and less clarity. Many organizations lack architecture thinking, so documentation breaks when staff leave.
He called this the coordination cost — the hidden expense of too many committees. A decision that should take minutes becomes weeks because each department must sign off. “Kadang-kadang meeting untuk benda kecil pun ramai gila dalam bilik,” he said.
Erhan gave a typical example: a tender planned in 2021 was approved only in 2023 with requirements already outdated. Technology moved forward while paperwork stood still. The result: projects delivered late, expensive, and irrelevant.
He summed it up with a sharp comparison: Humanity can build rockets, but some teams still struggle to build a working website. The problem isn’t technical skill; it’s the layered decision chains that slow everyone down.
His recommendation was simple and practical:
- Keep teams small and close to decisions.
- Define clear boundaries and ownership.
- Avoid the “consensus tax.”
Complexity, he warned, grows exponentially with each extra person or system. The only cure is conscious simplicity.
4. POMEN: Nazmi “Abami” Najib on the Art of Pitching
Nazmi Najib, known as Abami, began his session by admitting he was not going to talk about code or AI at all. Instead, he would talk about pitching: The skill that had kept him and many other founders alive.
He introduced himself as the CTO and co-founder of POMEN Autodata Sdn. Bhd., a startup he helped build from scratch after years as a programmer, analyst, and manager.
He has been pitching since 2006 and has secured funding from Petronas FutureTech, Cradle, and SUPERB, including during PKP lockdowns.
Pitching Is the Real Skill
For Abami, founders must learn to communicate as well as they code.
A pitch is successful only when an investor approaches you after the presentation: “turun pentas terus dapat kad nama” was his benchmark.
Start with the Script, Not the Deck
He urged founders to write a complete three-minute script first before opening PowerPoint.
- The deck should follow the story, not lead it.
- Slides are support; the founder is the hero.
He even recommended using ChatGPT to generate drafts in English, Malay, or Chinese and then refining them by hand.
The Timing Game
Typical demo day pitches run three to five minutes.
- If only two to three minutes are allowed, skip roadmaps and market strategy; keep the story tight and use the appendix for questions.
- The deck exists only to support the spoken story: “you are the hero, not your deck.”.
Win the First Eight Seconds
He cited the “goldfish attention span” analogy: humans now have eight seconds to capture attention.
Start immediately with a hook: Not a formal introduction that wastes those precious seconds.
Four Presentation Energies
Abami classified presenters into four types:
- Energetic
- Commanding
- Passionate, and
- Connection.
He encouraged each founder to recognize their natural style and build from it instead of copying others.
Storytelling That Works
He shared examples straight from his training files: One pitch by a mother that moved an entire hall to tears, and case studies of AirBnb and YouTube, both built on simple human problems clearly explained.
Clarity and emotion, he said, beat complex slides every time.
Final Reminders
Abami ended with repeatable rules:
- Write the story first, grab attention in eight seconds, show emotion, structure the narrative, and practice until it flows.
- Pitching is a skill, not a talent: Refine it like debugging code.
Conclusion: Takeaways from TechTamu
By the end of the event, it was clear that TechTamu isn’t just about technology. It’s about the people who dare to build, whether through faith (ToyyibPay), storytelling (Pomen), systems thinking (Kotak Sakti), or relentless curiosity (Faiz).
There’s something distinctly Malaysian about the mix: humble, self-deprecating, but quietly world-class. You get stories about billion-ringgit payment systems built by one developer, and SEO lectures that start with jokes about kampung names, and somehow, both are equally inspiring.
If you’ve never been to a TechTamu session, you should. Not just to “network,” but to remember why we do what we do: To build, to learn, and maybe, if we’re lucky, to help others along the way.
Because as Rosli from ToyyibPay said best:
“Even if it’s only RM1 — do it sincerely.”
