Life is An Adventure | KC Lau

Stanley Lim (0:00)

In this episode, I'm speaking with KC Lau from kclau.com. And if you have never heard of KC, he's basically one of the most famous and one of the first financial bloggers and influencer in the Malaysian market, even before the word influencer come into play. So KC is someone that has an amazing history, turning from a musician to a financial blogger. And so I sat down with him to understand his life journey, and what are some of his thoughts looking back.

Enjoy. Thank you very much for joining me today. Long time no see.

KC Lau (0:36)

It's my honor to be in your house.

Stanley Lim (0:39)

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's really been a very long time since we see each other.

How's life so far?

KC Lau (0:48)

Life has been very good to me.

I'm enjoying the beauty right now. Not too old and not too poor. You see, I guess that's the comfort zone here, right? Absolutely.

Stanley Lim (1:00)

Today, I actually wanted to spend some time to understand a bit more of your journey, especially in terms of your family life and also career. Because to me, you are like my mentor, because you are one of the first person I seek out when I first started to do online. And even though you don't know me, and I just randomly messaged you, you are so kind to meet up with me and show me the ropes, how to actually go about doing the whole thing, set up. So I'm extremely grateful to you, and I have always looked up to you to learn. You are my role model. Thank you so much.

So honored.

KC Lau (1:38)

Definitely to be connected to you.

Stanley Lim (1:40)

And I wanted to understand, how does this journey started for you? Because you started kclau.com at a quite early stage, before the internet boom and before we have such thing, like an influencer kind of industry. So can you talk me through now? How does the idea come about?

KC Lau (2:00)

That's quite a long story. 2026, this year, right? So I started my blog, kclau.com. The first blog post was dated December 2006 So it's exactly 20 years, right? Almost 20 years. So what happened at that time was, I know that, you know, internet was booming, right? And I just want to do something on the internet. So of course, I brainstormed some ideas, and then we actually did some other business as well. So I was like, I think the first one we have done is to have a platform that can let people to send out postcards, like birthday card, like automated birthday card, things like that. So of course, we do some research, and there are some already available in the United States, right? Other countries, not Malaysia. So we tried to do that, and actually printed the cards, you know, got a friend who designed all the 3D cards, but of course, the business fault. We didn't manage to do that one. Then, so some of our friends brainstormed ideas together, and one of the website designer of our group, he said, why not you try blog? He said, no, blog is the new thing. At that time, okay. So, okay, so I started a blog, actually about piano, about music, and then since at that time, I'm also a full-time financial planner, so I sell insurance, sales unit trust, and I'll do financial planning. So I was like trying to, okay, maybe I have something that I can share with my clients, but you don't have to write a full email to do that, so you can also do it in a blog post style, right? I'll just explain the thing in a blog post, and then next time, I just share the link, it's much easier. So it started from there.

And as you know, my English really sucks.

And it's hard to do Chinese website, I guess, at that time. So because of the software, WordPress started in English.

So that's how it started. So eventually, how it became a main business is that the blog post itself, although the grammar is not correct, some of the time, but there are strangers who are actually reading my blogs, and they ask questions. Okay, now it starts to get some traction. So can this thing make money? I don't know, I just put up AdSense, last time Google AdSense. And when I got the first click that I got paid, I thought, okay, now actually we can do something online.

So I think it started from there.

Stanley Lim (4:39)

I see. But when you first started the blog, it was more of an experiment to you or?