Reflections on the Journey So Far (July–November 2025)
The journey started with just a hunch. Guided by feelings of frustrations in various tools while building LLM related backends. Things felt a bit fragile and going outside the box was a bit of a pain in the ass. I wanted an easier process to build AI agents and workflows, a faster iteration process, and something easier to productionize.
For people hearing about Rekait for the first time:
Rekait is an agentic tool that builds production-ready backends for LLM workflows and AI agents (think Cursor/Replit + n8n, but for Python AI backends). Users chat with Rekait to design pipelines where both code and data are represented as nodes, and everything can be exported as a Docker container to run locally or deployed through our managed service.
July and August: Early Ideation Phase
I spent a lot of time talking to people during this period of time. It was a struggle for me to put my own thoughts into words and people reacted differently to different words. Sometimes I will spend a lot of time chatting with someone and even if they were patient with me, it still felt like I failed to convey the idea properly. Other times, there are people who immediately get excited within the first two sentences of what I say. It was kind of weird, because I think at that point, the idea was still a little vague even to myself.
“It turns out when you are vague, you are almost always right.” – Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI
Hearing that statement was a good reminder to myself that I shouldn’t get too caught up with the positive responses until the idea is more concrete.
For context, here are the events I went to during July and August.
July events:
- Jul 3rd: GenAI Open Innovation by GenAI Fund, Vietnam
- Jul 9th: TGB x AWS GenAI Demo Day, Singapore
- Jul 17th: Antlr: Turning Research to Revenue, Malaysia
- Jul 24th: Cursor Meetup, Singapore
- Jul 25th: Build Club Co-working, Malaysia
August events:
- Aug 12-13th: ASEAN AI Summit, Malaysia
- Aug 14th: ASEAN TVET Conference, Malaysia
- Aug 19th: Singapore AI Showcase by Menlo Research, Singapore
- Aug 20th: The Future Of AI by Launch JDI, Vietnam
That was a lot of events and a lot of talking to people from a wide variety of different backgrounds. I’m not sure if it was a bad idea to go to all those different events, but it was certainly useful to observe how people reacted to different choice of words and at the very least I felt the messaging improve bit by bit after each conversation.
So around this time was when the idea started to crystalize more. I started writing the first lines of code probably some time around mid-August and the very first commit of the alpha version of Rekait was on 2025-08-22.
On Aug 28th, I did my very first live demo of Rekait at the 500 Global SEA office in Kuala Lumpur. It was an epic fail. I was fixing things up until when it was time to present the demo, then I ended having to debug live which meant I quickly ran out of time. But still, I am thankful for 500 Global for providing a space for builders to give a demo to peers in the community.
September, October, November: Building and Iterating
One of the reasons I went to a lot of events in July and August was to try to get more leads for contract work from people looking for help with building their AI backends. In my head, I thought it would be how I would generate more early revenue for Rekait.
Having contract work was useful in the beginning to understand what the process and requirements tend to be, but eventually I decided to stop pursuing B2B contracts because the administrative work was just eating into too much of my development time. More importantly, I started to feel more strongly that at this stage, focusing on development and revenue from the main users of the product was a better use of my time.
One issue with B2B leads that I often ran into was that after a few conversations, it starts to feel more like people were looking for a co-founder or a fractional CTO because of my background, rather than just mainly having interest in Rekait.
So I continued developing Rekait and connecting with other builders, getting feedback through live demos on Sep 25, Sep 27, Oct 23, and Oct 25 as I alternated between presenting to communities at 500 Global KL and Build Club Malaysia.
September events:
- Sep 27th: Build Club Co-working, Malaysia
- Sep 29th: GenAI Open Innovation, Malaysia
October events:
- Oct 9th: Build Club Co-working, Indonesia
- Oct 17th: Cursor Hackathon, Singapore
- Oct 20th: GenAI Open Innovation, Indonesia
- Oct 25th: Build Club Co-working, Malaysia
November events:
- Nov 3-5th: Startup ASEAN Summit 2025, Malaysia
- Nov 26-29th: AI.SEA week, Malaysia
Reflections from taking the dive
A friend recently asked me what it was like working on a startup and what my hours were. I paused at that question, because not that long ago when I was at a corporate job, I would naturally think about stuff like work hours, but that hasn’t happened in a while now. My answer might sound unhealthy and probably not sustainable, but frankly I just told him that I start work from when I open my eyes until I close my eyes.
And it’s not like someone is pointing a gun to my head, although I do feel ashamed whenever people check in on me asking about the status and they want to try it but I don’t have something quite ready yet to at least tell if what I’m building is actually useful or not.
I knew doing a startup was going to be hard, but really you don’t realize how much it consumes you until you dive in and I’m not even in the deep end of the pool yet. There have been a lot of gut punches during this period that I did not mention above. In fact, they happened so often that I’ve started to become a bit numb to all the let downs. Even then, taking this leap is something I do not regret at all. The one thing I do ask myself the most is why I did not start this journey sooner.
Quite a lot has happened these past few months, but there is still a ton more work to do and I still don’t have my first paying customer yet. So that is the goal for now and it’s why the Rekait Ramen Blog exists, so that people can follow along the journey!