Joel Seetoh
I'm a product marketer who builds things. I started in design, moved into marketing, and eventually learned to code. Mostly because I wanted to build what I could see in my head and test it fast, rather than waiting on dependencies for something a quick experiment could answer.
The thread across everything I've done is the same: take something complicated and make it simple enough that people understand and actually use it. I've done that for fintech, payments, BNPL, and Web3. Now I'm doing it with AI, building products with tools like Gemini and Claude to understand the technology from the inside, not just the marketing deck.
I believe the best marketing comes from genuinely believing in the product. When you do, you can empathise with how users actually feel and promote something you'd use yourself. I also care about how products are marketed, not just whether they grow. The companies I've enjoyed working with most have shared that instinct.
Experience
Bitget Wallet
Product marketing for a Web3 fintech ecosystem. The kind of product where you have to explain what a decentralised payment is before you can explain why someone should care. Positioned PayFi across e-commerce, OTC, and card products. Adoption went up 133%. The hard part was making crypto make sense to normal people, not just the ones already deep in it.
Grab
Four years across multiple verticals. Moved wherever the hardest problems were. One quarter I'm positioning fintech products for people who've never had a bank account. The next I'm figuring out how to get hawker stall owners to trust a delivery platform with their livelihood. Then it's convincing drivers that the platform is fair, or helping enterprise clients see the value in corporate meal programmes. Every vertical had a different audience, a different fear, and a different reason to say no. The job was always the same: dig into the data to understand what's actually holding people back, then fix the message.
On the merchant side, I worked closely with product and engineering to build and position AI tools that helped thousands of sellers grow based on where they actually were. Using store data and lifecycle signals, a new hawker stall got different recommendations than someone running five outlets. The goal was to make each merchant feel like they had their own advisor. On the consumer side, I ran regional campaigns for GrabPay, BNPL, and investments reaching millions of users across Southeast Asia. Across campaigns, we drove 150M+ impressions and lifted adoption 4.6x. The balance I cared about most: hitting business targets while making sure users genuinely benefited, not just converted.
hoolah
First business hire at what became Southeast Asia's first Buy Now, Pay Later company. When I joined, the category literally didn't exist here. I spent the first months just explaining to merchants what BNPL was and why their customers would want it. The playbook I built here, educating both sides of a two-sided market on something completely new, became the foundation for the BNPL work I later scaled at Grab.
At a startup that early, there's no "that's not my job." I built the website, designed the user flows, sat in on product decisions, talked to merchants and shoppers to understand what was confusing or broken, tracked what was working and what wasn't, then turned all of that into the marketing. Scaled to 2,000+ merchants across Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. The positioning I'm most proud of: "responsible spending." We could have leaned into impulse buying. We chose to help people spend wisely instead. ShopBack acquired the company in 2021.
Smartly
Head of marketing at one of Singapore's first robo-advisors. The mission was to make investing feel less intimidating. Help everyday people grow their wealth through financial literacy, not jargon. We were early. Syfe, Endowus, and StashAway weren't around yet. The category took off, just not for us. But the work of translating complex financial concepts into plain language shaped how I think about marketing to this day.
The Common Folks
Co-founded a collaborative design and print studio. Built the website, set up partnerships across multiple locations, ran the business. There's no better education than building something from nothing with your own hands and your own money.
Projects
I build things to learn. Right now that means AI. I want to understand what it's actually good at, not what the hype says it's good at.
sgpropertyads
Built this for friends in real estate who kept asking me what their competitors were doing on social. It scrapes Meta Ad Library, enriches with public transaction data, and shows who's advertising what. The idea was simple: help agents learn what's working so they don't have to guess.
twomore
Small e-commerce brands can't afford professional photoshoots for every product. I wanted to see if AI could close that gap. Upload a flat lay, get styled photoshoots with different poses, locations, and lighting.
I stepped away from this one after talking to customers and looking at the numbers. Brands with models preferred real shoots for fit and feel. Brands without models were happy using supplier images or generating directly through Gemini at zero cost. And once Google launched their own tool, there wasn't much of a moat. The middle ground I was building for was thinner than I thought. Knowing when to pivot is part of building.
content-creator
I spent years doing influencer marketing the manual way: finding creators, vetting them, reaching out, negotiating. It's slow and most of it is grunt work. This is my attempt to fix that. The vision is something like Claude Code but for influencer marketing. An agent that finds the right creators for your brand, contacts them, and manages the partnership. Right now it discovers and profiles nano-influencers in Singapore's food scene. The rest is coming.