Sean Teoh did not like studying. But he enrolled in KDU College, Penang, to pursue a diploma in electrical and electronic engineering in 1996. His father had saved up RM70,000 for him to do as he wished, be it to further his studies or start his own business. So, he used some of the money to start his first business: selling computers to college students.

He approached a friend, who was a computer distributor, to learn how to set up a computer. “I did not know how to install anything on it. I just wanted to make money,” Teoh grins.

Two years later, just one semester shy of completing his diploma, he decided to drop out of college. This was the first time his father slapped him, he tells Enterprise. But despite his rage, the old man was supportive. “That was when my dad told me I could pursue whatever I wanted and gave me what was left over from the RM70,000 he had saved.”

Teoh was not slow to avail himself of the permission to do as he pleased. He registered for a booth at a three-day computer fair. “The price of one booth was RM38,000,” he recalls.

Teoh worked with his friends and a leading computer parts distributor to fill his booth. He signed a contract with the distributor that allowed him to return any remaining stock he had after the fair. On the first day of the fair, the pressure was on as he needed to prove himself to his parents. But by the end of the day, he had not sold a single unit.

Frustrated, Teoh explored the fair to see what was being offered by the other booths and realised it was impossible to compete on price alone. But just to prove to his father that he was not a failure, he decided to lower his prices to the point where the mark-up was only RM1. It was crazy, but he wanted to show his father that he could make some money, even if it was not a lot.

“Our booth was full and crazy on the second and third days. We had a lot of cash in hand. But by the end of the day, we had only made RM83 [having sold exactly 83 products],” says Teoh.

At this point, he knew that this was not the business for him. But he also realised that technology was his passion.

From selling hardware, Teoh moved on to installing software for companies as well as designing websites and working with motion graphics. During his four-year stint, he met some people who worked at Philips Lumileds Lighting Company, which had just developed LED lighting.

At the time, LED lighting was new to the region and Teoh saw a business opportunity. He set up Enerleds Solutions Sdn Bhd, a Penang-based company that did R&D on high-grade LED lighting, and partnered Philips Lumileds to develop LED light bulbs. The business took off and in 2003, the company secured contracts worth about RM2 million to install an LED system for the traffic lights at the Butterworth Outer Ring Road and in Pulau Singa Besar.

“Tech has always been in my blood and I knew I wanted to build something. Nobody wanted to work with LED at the time, so I thought there was no harm trying. Who knew that LED would end up changing the world?” says Teoh.

Business was good. While running Enerleds, he set up and managed his first club in Penang. Over the years, the company has grown and added more restaurants and bars. Today, there are more than 20 food and beverage (F&B) outlets managed under the Billion Frontier Group of Companies, some of which are still owned by Teoh.

He sold Enerleds in 2006 to focus on his F&B business. In 2011, when Facebook was just becoming popular worldwide, he developed a marketing strategy for his businesses using the platform. He set up a page called Penang Lang (Hokkien for the people of Penang) and started posting content on his restaurants there. He realised that the more content he created, the more people visited his page.

“I started to realise that the Facebook page had a lot of potential to become the voice of Penang. I had no intention to make money, I just wanted to create a site with high traffic,” says Teoh.

Two years later, he sold Penang Lang. “Over the years, I realised the potential of monetisation and I wanted to start a media company in Kuala Lumpur that I could really monetise. So, I started Tantan News,” he says.

“Tantan”, meaning “to discuss the news” in Mandarin, had a simple concept: take a photo of all the Chinese-language newspaper headlines in the morning and afternoon, and post these on Facebook to stir up a discussion. In 2013, the page evolved into a news site, tantannews.com.

People were drawn to the website and by 2015, it was getting more than 20 million page views per month. “At the time, we wondered whether we were big enough to monetise. But when we finally activated our monetisation plan, we were hacked. Our site traffic went back to zero in a month,” says Teoh.

Back then, tantannews.com was hosted on WordPress. The platform was not secure enough for Teoh, so he set out to find a better solution. But everything on offer was too expensive. Some even offered to design a platform for him, but the fee demanded ran into at least five figures. 

“So, we went back and looked at our company’s direction. Did we want to be a publisher or a tech company? Tech had always been my passion, so we decided to take that route,” says Teoh. 

That was when he decided to create his own platform.

In 2016, under his publishing company Monster Alliance Bhd, Teoh worked for over a year to develop MOPress, a content management system (CMS) designed for publishers. Its function was similar to that of website-hosting platforms such as WordPress and Wix, but with enhanced tools and features essential to a publisher.

Teoh then saw another gap in the local publishing industry. On the one hand, most publications wanted great content. But on the other, writers were being laid off from their jobs. From there, he developed MOPress further to include a content marketplace, which allows writers to sell their articles and for publishers to purchase content for their respective sites. Publishers may also put up assignments on the platform, which can be taken by the network of writers registered on the platform.

“When we created MOPress as a system, we wanted to solve the problem for publishers, while the content marketplace helped to connect content creators with publishers. As I learnt more about the industry, I realised that a lot of tools were needed but these were only available to big companies like Media Prima. To subscribe to publishing tools such as search engine optimisation (SEO) and others, which are meant to empower writers, would cost about RM20,000 a month,” says Teoh.

“It was almost impossible for small and medium publishers to use these tools. If publishers such as BuzzFeed and Vox were to come here, all the local publishers would perish. So, we believe this technology can help them to survive.”

Like Grab, but for publishers

The first website onboarded to MOPress was tantannews.com in 2018. The focus of the website was to monetise its content and create quality content using MOPress to keep traffic flowing to the site, says Teoh.

From there, he created a cheat sheet for writers in the content marketplace, which tells them the kind of keywords, content and call to action needed for an article requested by publishers. 

On MOPress, there is a gamification model for writers. There are four levels — newbie, silver, gold and professional. For writers to level up, they need to create good content and get publishers to buy it. The more views they manage to generate for a publisher’s website, the more publishers will purchase their work, and the easier it will be for the writers to level up.

“After the gold level, it is harder to level up. We want to create a pool of premium writers for more popular publishers that are willing to pay for quality content,” says Teoh, adding that most writers are vetted using their résumé and LinkedIn profile prior to gaining access to the platform.

Why gamification? It is to make sure that writers submit quality content, that good writers are paid well and to determine the percentage MOPress cuts from writer’s fee. Teoh explains that at the newbie level, MOPress takes 30% of what is paid to the writer. As a writer levels up, the percentage is cut down to as low as 10%.

Writers may also be paid a “royalty” based on page views, he says. For example, if a publisher is agreeable, a writer can set a page-view price, where they are paid RM1 for every 1,000 article views. “The amount and clause can be set by either party, depending on what kind of payment method they agree on.”

Right now, the platform only accommodates Chinese and Malay content and publishers. The company is looking to activate English content by the end of this year. Ultimately, Teoh wants the company to be run like the Forbes website.

“Forbes produces 650 articles per day and has 150 editors who monitor and publish relevant content daily. The company only employs a team of editors to see if a particular piece of content is good,” he points out.

There are currently three companies actively buying content from the MOPress content marketplace — tantannews.com, tantaninvest.com and kitareporters.com. In total, there are 20 publishers signed up, including sites under Media Prima, as the company acquired a 25% stake in Monster Scape Sdn Bhd (tantannews.com) in 2019, which is the subsidiary of Monster Alliance Bhd. 

“Tantannews is part of Media Prima’s Chinese network now. Next, we will focus on implementing our technology in Media Prima, where we will rebuild the whole site. We are also rebuilding the CMS for them as a publisher, so they can also gain access to the content marketplace and purchase content.”

Future plans

Some of the countries that the company is looking to expand to are Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines, depending on the growth of MOPress this year. In each market, Teoh will be looking for local partners to work with.

“If we are going to grow in the English language market, the first location I need to go to is the Philippines. Content creation is cheaper there and growth will be faster, not just in the local community but abroad as well,” he says.

The company is looking to offer Chinese language content in Singapore and Bahasa Indonesia content with its own pool of writers in Indonesia.

On the platform itself, the company is looking to incorporate artificial intelligence to assist writers in doing research for their articles. For example, if a writer is curating a travel piece on food in the Klang Valley, the site will curate keywords that may be useful for the content. This feature can also be used by editors to create headlines, says Teoh. “Basically, it is like SEO, where we tell the writers what keywords to use so that their articles get picked up more and are higher up on the list.”

The company’s immediate focus is to get as many users on the platform and grow the number of writers and publishers concurrently. The aim is to have 10,000 writers on the platform. There are currently more than 3,000, including 15 lawyers and 40 professional writers and journalists. 

The company’s biggest challenge is to convince publishers to use MOPress. While most company owners see the benefit and want to use the platform , it is usually the head of the editorial team who is difficult to convince, says Teoh.

“The quality of the writing is a concern, followed by the fact-checking and the position of the company’s full-time writers. They think they will need to fire all of their writers because by using the platform, a new content base price is created. These are some of the things we are trying to address in the immediate future.”