An AI-powered campaign playbook
Built an AI-powered campaign playbook for a key client. It lowered acquisition costs, improved returns and unlocked new budget.
Building businesses, one market at a time.
From opening new markets as an early hire to running a large eCommerce book at Meta, my work has been about finding where growth is blocked and building the system that unblocks it.
Where I’m strongest
Business building
Opening new markets and building the first version of a business, then making it repeatable.
Growth strategy
Finding where growth is blocked, in measurement, structure or the metrics themselves, and fixing it.
Commercialization
Turning advertising and platform products into business results for large eCommerce clients.
Cross-market
Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe and Greater China, in several languages and business cultures.
The journey
Meta
Client Solutions Manager, eCommerce
A shift from doing everything myself to doing one thing so well it becomes repeatable for everyone. I started with a single client pod and turned it into a methodology across three very different business models: marketplace, multi-site and direct-to-consumer.
Responsible for an annual book of business of ~US$500M+.
Shopee
Senior Associate, Marketing
Not 0-to-1 anymore, but 1-to-100. I owned social media and performance marketing for new markets across Latin America and Europe, and built a social-listening system that fed real-time consumer insight back to the merchandising team. It was when I realized the best marketing isn’t just creative; it’s infrastructure.
Grew channels to millions of followers and improved reach while lowering ad costs, on annual paid budgets of ~US$500K+.
7.5 Degree
Marketing Manager
At a consultancy helping Chinese tech companies expand into Southeast Asia, I led a content team building a WeChat and Douyin presence from scratch, and ran workshops to onboard expansion clients. I learned that great content isn’t about volume. It’s about knowing exactly who you’re talking to.
Organic following grew by more than an order of magnitude in a month, with millions of video views.
University of Washington
MA, Communication in Digital Media
I went back to school to study digital media, brand storytelling and content strategy, and did freelance creative work along the way. This is where the creative portfolio on Behance comes from.
Grew a business-school program’s social presence several-fold in a year.
Creative portfolio on BehanceAkulaku
Project Manager, New Market Expansion
As an early hire at a fintech and eCommerce startup, I helped launch a buy-now-pay-later shopping app across Southeast Asia. My job was whatever needed doing in a country where we knew nobody: setting up the business in Manila, Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City, finding payment and logistics partners, recruiting local teams, and translating between headquarters and operators who spoke Tagalog, Bahasa or Vietnamese.
Opened the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam from scratch as the company grew to millions of monthly users.
Selected case studies
Fixing the signal
Fixed long-standing measurement-signal issues nobody had asked me to touch, which lifted revenue on key accounts.
Changing what success means
Persuaded a client’s leadership to rethink how they define success, then rebuilt the campaign architecture and budgets to match.
Listening at scale
Built a social-listening system that fed real-time consumer insight back to the merchandising team, and ran influencer-led campaigns that reached tens of millions of views and inspired users to share their own content.
Opening markets from zero
Set up the business in three Southeast Asian markets: finding payment and logistics partners, recruiting local teams and bridging headquarters with local operators.
See what I build.
Small projects I make on the side, from travel guides to AI experiments.
Projects