Engineer, then personal finance creator, then accidentally a YouTube mentor for businesses. Nine years of making money content for Malaysians across articles, video, podcasts and social.
How I got here. I trained as an engineer and got laid off three times. I started a YouTube channel to build a way out, and it turned into a Malaysian personal finance channel that reached 9,000 subscribers. Alongside it I ran Balkoni Hijau, an SEO blog covering credit cards, credit scoring, insurance and investing, monetised through affiliate and comparison links. Same model as a comparison site, much smaller scale.
Chasing views worked until it didn't. I had sponsorships, so I had a business that stopped earning the moment brands paused. What changed things was noticing that my clients never came from the big videos. They came from the quiet ones where I told a story about my own business. Founders started asking how I did it, and that is how I ended up mentoring businesses on YouTube rather than becoming a creator.
On the written samples. I took Balkoni Hijau offline when I moved to video, but I had syndicated the strongest articles to Medium, so that archive survived with original publish dates intact. Those Medium links are what you will find below.
On attribution. Every piece here is solo work. My own research, writing, filming, editing and distribution. Nothing was ghostwritten, agency produced or team assisted.
Long form written work
Six pieces chosen for overlap with a cards, loans and insurance business.
A first card buyer's guide. How to filter out gimmick cards, why I argue cashback beats brand partner rewards, how issuers actually make money, and how to use a card without ever paying interest. Closes on a comparison of Malaysian cashback cards.
Objective
Rank for high intent card research queries and convert readers into applications through affiliate links.
Why it works
It leads with my own card and my own statements. Screenshots of real cashback credited, real points balances, a real redemption. Product comparison content earns trust when the writer is visibly a user rather than a reviewer.
A plain language explainer on what a credit report is and why it matters, then a walkthrough of pulling your own from both Bank Negara's eCCRIS and CTOS, including a comparison of the two and what a healthy report looks like.
Objective
Own a genuinely searched, low competition query and use it as an entry point into card and loan content.
Why it works
Regulated finance topics fail when they are written in regulator language. I took bank terminology like "credit worthy" and translated it into what a borrower actually cares about, which is whether they get the loan and at what rate. Every step is screenshotted from my own application.
Every ringgit my wife and I spent from first scan through to labour and delivery, itemised and published. Consultations, scans, tests, hospital admission, the lot, with what insurance covered and what we paid ourselves.
Objective
Answer the question expecting couples actually search for, which is not "what is maternity coverage" but "how much is this going to cost me".
Why it works
Pregnancy is the moment people stop ignoring insurance and start pricing it. Publishing real numbers from my own family, rather than a range from a brochure, is what makes the piece credible at exactly the point a reader is ready to act. This is the single strongest overlap between what I already write and what a cards and insurance business needs published.
Editorial6 min readMar 2022Article, video and thread
What
Three short stories about trying to buy insurance in Malaysia. An agent who explained the policy to my mother and then explained it again to me like I was a child. A policy website so dense with jargon that I had to phone in to find out what I was already covered for. And an agent who, the moment she heard the word pregnant, ignored everything I had asked for and quoted me investment linked products I had explicitly ruled out. It ends constructively by naming the insurers whose sites are readable and can be bought online.
Objective
Build trust by saying the thing the category will not say about itself, then route readers to the products that solve it.
Outcome
Made in three formats. The article, the video below, and an X thread that substantially outperformed the article.
A line by line build of what comfortable actually costs a Malaysian couple, landing on a number most readers find uncomfortably high.
Objective
A shareable, debate starting piece to pull a broad audience in from social rather than search.
Why it works
It puts a specific, arguable number in the headline. People share it to agree, and share it harder to disagree. Most fintech content is written to be useful but not to be forwarded, and that gap is the easiest lever to pull on a brand's social ceiling.
A universal, repeatedly experienced loss that nobody ever sees itemised. My best performing video, and the clearest proof that a cards and currency topic can carry mass reach when the hook is the money you are already losing rather than the product that fixes it.
Aimed at business owners who know they need to publish and are burned out by it. The job of the video was relief, not instruction. It told them the work could be smaller than they feared. Tapping an audience's exhaustion usually beats tapping their ambition.
I put a referral link to my own insurance agent in the description and sold the leads through. It produced more volume than he could service, which I then made a case study about afterwards.
Why it is here
780 views, and it beat everything else on this page commercially. Included deliberately, because reach and result are different metrics and content should be briefed against whichever one the piece is actually for.
One viewer recognised his own path in mine, went looking for my YouTube channel, booked a call and became a client.
Why it works
No hook formula, no editing tricks, one story told plainly. Short form usually gets briefed for reach. This is the argument that it also works as a qualification filter, because the people who choose themselves into a specific story tend to be the ones worth talking to.
A deliberate format experiment while long form conversation was trending. Different production discipline to scripted video. Booking and briefing guests, running the interview, and cutting for narrative rather than retention beats.
The point
Formats rise and fall much faster than editorial strategy does. I would rather test a trending format early and cheaply than commit budget to it once it is already obvious to everyone.
My actual process on camera, start to finish. Ideation, outline, the presentation deck that replaces most of the B roll, filming and cutting. Nothing staged and nothing skipped.
Why it is here
Anyone can claim they work fast. This is the version you can audit. If you want to know whether a process would survive being handed to a team, watching it run is more useful than reading a description of it.
Every article on this blog began as a YouTube video and was rebuilt into an SEO post through a custom Claude AI skill I wrote. It is not a transcript dump. The skill enforces structure, keyword targeting and my own sentence rhythm.
Process
The skill returns ten hook options. I pick one and rewrite it until it sounds spoken. It drafts against my script and my mannerisms. I then rewrite line by line, reading aloud, and set the call to action to whatever that piece is meant to drive. Nothing publishes in the state AI produced it. Unedited output reads like AI and readers can tell.
Why it matters
This is a one person operation running long form video, a podcast, a blog, an email list and several social channels. The leverage sits in the systems, not the hours. What interests me is doing that at team scale. Fewer people producing more, with editorial judgment kept firmly human.
Documented publicly
Note
I publish these workflows rather than keep them quiet. A full YouTube video produced in two hours. A website designed, written and shipped in thirty minutes. And how AI answer engines came to recommend me to a client. All on @helmi_hasan.
A contrarian take on where discovery is heading. Included as a sample of point of view writing rather than service content. This is the register I would use for brand level social.
Deliberately built as a prompt rather than a statement. Money questions with no single right answer are the cheapest reliable engagement mechanic in this category.
All work solo. Researched, written, filmed, edited and distributed by me. Happy to walk through the thinking behind any piece, or to write something new against a live brief.