OpenMinds was not my idea. It was the brainchild of one of my co-founders, and the original plan was not even marketing. Fresh out of college in 2009, we wanted to build something the country needed in the job search industry. That product never materialised. What survived was the name, the partnership, and the stubbornness. We carried OpenMinds forward and pivoted into social media marketing, back when convincing a Malaysian business to take Facebook seriously was itself a sales pitch.
A chocolate factory and RM1,500 a month
Our first client was CocoaBoutique, a local chocolate company. The job was social media marketing on Facebook, for what I remember being a paltry RM1,500 a month. For that money, the founders did everything. Copywriting, content planning, visual creation, photography, even covering their live events with our own hands and cameras.
I would not trade that period for anything. When you have personally done every job in the agency, nobody can bluff you about how long the work takes or what it should cost. Seventeen years later, that is still how I scope projects.
Two tables in a shared office
Year one was a tiny room in a shared office in SS15. Two tables pushed together, and that was the whole company. Within about eighteen months we had accrued close to RM1 million in revenue, and the two tables were clearly not going to hold. Registering as a Sdn Bhd was the first deliberate act of scaling, the moment it stopped being a project and became a proper Malaysian company.
The parts that tested us
The years since have not been smooth, and I would not trust any founder who claims otherwise. The original team stayed for about five years, and then a large change happened almost at once. We rebuilt. Our technical side grew from a single programmer into a proper unit with its own CTO. We eventually outgrew SS15 and moved, and then the COVID lockdowns arrived to test every assumption we had about how an agency runs.
None of it broke us. Each one forced a version of the company that was slightly harder to break than the last.
What the job became
Today OpenMinds is a group of around thirty people: OpenCreative for content production, OpenMinds Intelligence for practical AI, OpenAcademy for training built by practitioners rather than theorists. My own role has changed shape too. As COO I no longer need to be in every room. I guide a small number of leaders closely, and I hold the same line I held when it was two tables in SS15: the quality of the work comes first. The move from doing the work to leading the people who do it became its own lesson in leading and mentoring.
If I had to compress seventeen years into one piece of advice for someone starting out, it would be this. Take the RM1,500 client and do the work as if it were worth twenty times that. Everything we built came from behaving that way before anyone was watching.
If you are building something and want to talk through where you are stuck, start a conversation.
