There was a moment, somewhere in the middle of the pandemic, where I sat across from a mentor and came close to tears.
I had spent years building businesses. I had worked harder than most people around me. And yet, nothing seemed to materialise the way I had imagined it would. The debt was real. The anxiety was real. The health problems that came from carrying all the stress and sleepless nights were real too. In that conversation, I found myself questioning things I had never questioned before, including whether any of it was worth it at all.
She listened. She did not offer easy answers. But what she said gave me something I had not expected to walk away with: Clarity. Faith. And a newfound Purpose.
The Noteway Started With Us Customising Notebooks
In 2014, I was a student at NTU, enrolled in an entrepreneurship minor programme that pushed students to start something real. My group and I decided to sell customisable paper notebooks. We called the business, The Noteway. The idea was simple: let people express themselves through the things they used every day.
It was a modest start. The notebooks were difficult to personalise, each one at a time, and the business wasn’t scalable. So we pivoted to t-shirt printing, built our own printing facilities, and I took charge of growing the business. Within a few years, the printing business was generating close to half a million dollars in annual revenue, driven almost entirely by Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Building & Pivoting The Noteway
Beneath the revenue numbers, the printing business was struggling. Over-hiring, financial mismanagement, costs that had outgrown our margins. From the outside it looked like growth. Inside, we were making a loss.
Alongside the printing business, we had started The Noteway Art Studio. A space where customers could paint on t-shirts, tote bags, and sneakers. When we eventually decided to shut down the printing side, the art studio was rebranded. It became Streaks n Strokes.
The Noteway’s brand name did not disappear. I held on to the domain and ran it quietly as a gift blog on the side, which is where our Best Gifts blog category today comes from.
The Best Month of My Life, Then the Slump
With the printing business behind us, I focused everything on Streaks n Strokes art studio. I applied the same SEO thinking, but sharper. Instead of chasing high-volume keywords with low intent, I targeted searches like “Team Building Activities Singapore” and “Kids Birthday Party Ideas Singapore”, terms with real purchasing power behind them.
It worked. Corporate teams booked our art studio on weekdays. Birthday parties filled the weekends. In December 2019, we recorded our best month ever: $60,000 in revenue.
Then the first COVID-19 cases appeared in Singapore. Revenue slumped sharply. Capacity restrictions, circuit breakers, a complete halt in corporate events. It all hit our business built on people being together in a room. One by one, seven team members and co-founders left. By the end, I was running the entire operation alone.
I pivoted to e-commerce. Art jamming kits for couples and families. Virtual corporate sessions over Zoom. It was enough to keep things moving. But when the pandemic finally eased in 2023, I sat with an honest question: did I actually want to reopen the studio?
The answer, when I let myself hear it, was no.
Art was never my passion. It had been a business. SEO was the thing that had always excited me. SEO had been the quiet engine behind every business I had ever grown.
I sold Streaks n Strokes art studio. And I started over.
Starting Over With SEO With Senthil
The first version of SEO With Senthil was a $40 course for founders. Two people bought it. Neither took action.
It was discouraging. But instead of walking away, I took it as a signal to get closer to business owners, to understand what they actually needed rather than what I assumed they did. I spoke to more people. I refined how I thought about SEO. I moved from selling a course to offering a hands-on programme with unlimited guidance.
My early clients started ranking. Even one in the ultra-competitive Singapore real estate market hit Google Page 1 within four months. But as I worked with more businesses, a pattern emerged: most of them did not have time or expertise to execute the work effectively themselves. And SEO was changing rapidly. They needed someone to do it with them, not just advise them.
So I pivoted again, from consultant to agency. From teaching SEO to doing it for my clients.
The Full Circle
I did not start out wanting to build an SEO agency in Singapore. Honestly, I did not start out with a clear purpose at all. I just wanted to make money. From notebooks, from t-shirts, from an art studio. Whatever could work.
But somewhere along the way, through the debt, the health struggles, and that quiet conversation with a mentor that changed everything, I realised something. It was never really about the money. The businesses that drained me were the ones I built chasing profit. The work that lit me up was always the same thing: helping other people grow.
SEO was the vehicle. But the real shift was deeper than that. It was moving from doing whatever could bring the most profit, to doing what I was actually built for. From chasing success, to creating real impact with the strengths and talents I had been given.
In late 2024, I found the right technical SEO partner in Rohith Sai. Where I owned strategy, content, and client growth, he owned the operations and technical side, including site rebuilds, schema markups, and SEO audits. In early 2026, SEO With Senthil became Seedscale Pte Ltd. A full scale SEO agency to help purpose driven businesses grow their revenue using SEO.
The Noteway: Where We Go From Here
The Noteway has had more pivots than I can count. A notebook company. A t-shirt printer. A quiet gift blog I kept running on the side while I was busy doing everything else.
But what I really want The Noteway to be is a space for founder stories. Real ones. The kind that do not make it onto highlight reels or press releases.
The struggle of starting with nothing. The pivot that felt like failure but turned out to be the best thing that ever happened. The moment a founder almost gave up and did not.
Singapore has no shortage of remarkable people building remarkable things. Most of them just do not have a platform to tell their story properly. That is what The Noteway is for.
If my story resonated with you even a little, I think you will find something here worth coming back to. Bookmark this page. Follow along. And if you are a founder with a story worth telling, reach out. I would love to feature you.
The next great Singapore business story is already being written. We just want to help tell it.
