Tag: writing

Are Your Potential Customers Ghosting You? 8 Warning Signs Every Business Owner Should Know

It usually begins with excitement.

The first meeting goes extremely well. Everyone has ideas. The customer talks about a pilot project, future deployment, possible collaboration and even a long-term partnership. People use words such as “promising,” “interesting,” and “we should definitely explore this further.”

You leave the meeting thinking, “This one looks serious.”

Then you send the proposal.

Silence.

You follow up a week later.

Still silence.

At some point, even the crickets give up.

Welcome to one of the most frustrating experiences in business: being ghosted by a potential customer or partner.

8 Signs Your Business Opportunity May Be Fading Away

1. Their Replies Become Shorter and Slower

At the beginning, their messages were detailed and enthusiastic. They asked questions, suggested ideas and wanted more information. Replies arrived quickly because there was genuine momentum.

Then something changes.

Long messages become “Noted,” “Will check,” “Let me discuss internally,” or the legendary phrase:

“We will get back to you.”

The problem is not the phrase itself. The problem begins when nobody knows when “get back to you” is supposed to happen.

2. “Next Week” Never Arrives

“We should be able to confirm next week.”

You wait.

One week becomes two. Two weeks become a month. Three months later, you begin wondering whether their calendar operates in a different time zone from the rest of humanity.

In business, dates matter because dates indicate commitment. If every next step has no specific date attached to it, the opportunity may already be sliding down their priority list.

3. You Are the Only Person Following Up

There is a simple way to test the health of an opportunity.

Stop messaging for a while.

If the entire conversation immediately goes into hibernation, you may already have your answer.

A genuine business opportunity normally has movement from both sides. You provide information, they respond. They ask questions, you answer. You submit something, they review it. Someone proposes the next meeting.

If you are constantly the person restarting the conversation, you may not be managing an opportunity anymore. You may be performing CPR on one.

4. Meetings Keep Getting Postponed

One postponement is normal. People are busy and unexpected things happen.

The warning sign appears when meetings are repeatedly postponed without a replacement date.

Then comes another famous phrase:

“Let’s reschedule soon.”

Of course.

“Soon” must be one of the most popular dates in business. It sounds positive while committing to absolutely nothing.

5. They Love the Idea Until the Quotation Arrives

This is where excitement meets reality.

During the presentation, everyone loves the technology. During the demonstration, people are impressed. When discussing possibilities, the future sounds wonderful.

Then you send the quotation.

Suddenly, their Wi-Fi appears to stop working.

This is when we learn an important distinction: interest is not buying intent.

Someone can genuinely like your idea without having the budget, authority, urgency or internal support required to purchase it.

6. They Keep Asking for Documents, but Never Make a Decision

Proposal? Sent.

Quotation? Sent.

Presentation? Sent.

Technical architecture? Sent.

Company profile? Sent.

Revised quotation version two, three and four? Also sent.

The decision?

Apparently still travelling somewhere between departments.

One lesson I have learned is that more document requests do not necessarily mean you are getting closer to winning the project. Sometimes they simply mean you are doing more unpaid work.

7. Nobody Else Joins the Conversation

This is one signal I pay much more attention to today.

When an opportunity becomes serious, the circle usually expands. The technical team wants to understand the solution. Management starts asking business questions. Procurement appears. Finance discusses budget. Legal may eventually review the agreement.

These are signs that the opportunity is moving through the organisation.

But if months have passed and you are still speaking to one very friendly contact who keeps discussing how wonderful the partnership could become, be careful.

You may not have a business opportunity yet.

You may simply have a very friendly person who likes your idea.

8. They Are Active Everywhere Except in Your Inbox

This one can be both funny and painful.

They have time to post on LinkedIn.

They upload photos from events.

They congratulate someone on a promotion. They comment on AI. They like conference announcements.

Meanwhile, your message remains peacefully unread or unanswered, apparently enjoying a long meditation retreat.

At some point, the message itself becomes the message.

Silence Does Not Always Mean Rejection

We should not assume too quickly that someone is deliberately ignoring us. Business situations can change unexpectedly.

Budgets get frozen. Management changes. A project loses its internal sponsor. Procurement gets delayed. Another project becomes more urgent. Sometimes the person we are dealing with genuinely does not have an answer yet.

That is why I do not believe in immediately becoming angry or burning the relationship.

At the same time, we must respect our own time and resources.

If an opportunity has no next step, no date, no owner and no action, we need to consider the possibility that it is simply no longer a priority.

Give Them One Final Opportunity to Be Clear

Instead of sending endless messages asking, “Any update?”, I prefer a final message that makes the choices clear:

“We had a good discussion about this opportunity, but I understand that priorities may have changed. Would you prefer to proceed, pause the discussion until a specific date, or close it for now? A direct answer is perfectly fine as it helps us plan our resources.”

This gives the other party three simple choices:

  1. Proceed because there is still genuine interest.
  2. Pause until a specific and realistic date.
  3. Close the opportunity and revisit it someday if circumstances change.

A “no” may hurt for a few minutes. Months of uncertainty can waste far more time.

If They Still Do Not Reply, Move On

There comes a point when another follow-up will not change anything.

Move the opportunity out of your active pipeline. Stop spending emotional energy on it. Keep the relationship professional and leave the door open, but focus your attention on customers and partners who are willing to move.

Do not keep watering a plastic plant.

One of the harder lessons in business is learning that enthusiasm during a meeting is not the same as commitment after the meeting.

People can smile, praise your presentation, talk about huge possibilities and sound genuinely excited. None of those things require much commitment.

What happens after the meeting tells you far more.

Do they introduce you to the decision-maker? Do they arrange the next meeting? Do they discuss the budget? Do they involve procurement? Do they agree on a pilot date? Do they actually do what they said they would do?

That is where genuine interest becomes visible.

People can be incredibly excited during a meeting. Real interest shows after the meeting, when they are willing to take the next step.

In business, learn to appreciate enthusiasm.

But learn to recognise commitment.

The Difference Between Being Busy and Moving Forward

There are days when my calendar is full from morning until evening. Meetings follow one another. Messages keep arriving. Proposals need to be reviewed, events require attendance, and new introductions demand follow-ups. By the end of the day, I feel exhausted. Yet a difficult question remains: Did all that activity move the business forward?

For a founder, being busy can feel like proof that the company is active and opportunities are growing. The truth is less comfortable. A packed schedule can create movement without progress. We may be running all day, but still running in the same place.

When Activity Looks Like Progress

Meetings are necessary. Proposals open doors. Networking events help us build relationships. Messages keep conversations alive. None of these activities is useless. The problem begins when we mistake them for outcomes.

A meeting is not progress unless it leads to a decision, commitment or clear next step. A proposal is not progress simply because it has been submitted. An event is not valuable merely because we took photographs, exchanged business cards and posted about it on social media. A long WhatsApp conversation is not a business opportunity until someone is prepared to act.

I have experienced many situations where a prospect appeared highly interested. They requested presentations, demonstrations, technical discussions and several versions of a proposal. Each interaction created hope. Weeks became months, but no decision came. We had been busy serving the opportunity, yet the opportunity had not moved any closer to becoming a real project.

The Hidden Cost of Looking Busy

The greatest cost is not always money. It is attention. Every hour spent on an unclear opportunity is an hour taken away from a committed customer, a stronger product, a capable partner or a sales activity with better potential.

Busyness can also protect us from uncomfortable work. It feels easier to attend another meeting than to ask whether the prospect has an approved budget. It feels productive to improve a proposal again, rather than asking who has the authority to approve it. It feels good to attend an event, but harder to follow up with ten people and ask directly whether they want to explore a project.

Real progress often requires difficult conversations. We need to ask questions that may reveal that the opportunity is not ready, the customer is not committed, or our offer is not strong enough. The answers can be disappointing, but they save time and give us clarity.

How I Now Measure Forward Movement

I have learned to distinguish activity from progress by looking for evidence. Before investing more time, I try to identify whether something has genuinely changed.

Signs of forward movement include:

  1. A decision-maker has joined the discussion.
  2. The customer has confirmed the problem and its operational impact.
  3. A budget, procurement route or realistic timeline has been identified.
  4. Responsibilities and next actions have been assigned.
  5. A proposal has advanced to negotiation, purchase order, pilot or contract.
  6. A partnership has produced a joint opportunity, not just an announcement.
  7. An event has resulted in a qualified conversation or scheduled follow-up.

These indicators are not perfect, but they are more meaningful than counting meetings, proposals, messages or contacts.

Choosing Progress Over Motion

This does not mean rejecting every early conversation or avoiding events that do not promise immediate revenue. Relationships take time, especially in enterprise technology. Some opportunities require patience before they mature. The lesson is to know why we are investing our time and what milestone should come next.

At Favoriot, moving forward could mean converting a prototype into a real-site deployment, helping a system integrator prepare a customer solution, securing a committed pilot, or turning an existing deployment into a recurring contract. Each step must bring us closer to customer value and sustainable revenue.

A founder will always be busy. There will never be a shortage of meetings, messages, invitations and ideas competing for attention. The real discipline is deciding which activities deserve that attention.

At the end of each week, I should not ask only, “How much did I do?” I should also ask, “What changed because I did it?”

Being busy fills the calendar. Moving forward changes the future.

Why I Want More Malaysian Students to Brag About Their Projects

Malaysian students build impressive projects but rarely share them publicly. Here is why that needs to change, and what students, lecturers, and institutions can do about it.

Have you ever built something and then kept it to yourself?

I have seen this happen too many times, and it bothers me more than I probably let on. A student spends weeks getting an IoT sensor to talk to a cloud platform, wires everything up, writes the code, stays up late debugging, and then… nothing. They submit the assignment, get their marks, and move on. Nobody outside that classroom ever knows the project existed.

That project deserved better. And honestly, so did the student.

The Culture of Hiding Our Work

I think we have a cultural habit in Malaysia of downplaying what we build. We are taught, from a young age, that showing off is rude. That humility means staying quiet. That if your work is good, people will somehow find out on their own.

But in the world we are living in today, that thinking is holding our students back.

I recently wrote about how some students in Malaysia are still learning IoT using Blynk, ThingSpeak or Favoriot, platforms that have genuinely served the community well over the years. My concern was not with the tools themselves, it was with the possibility that some students might complete their programmes without being exposed to more current, industry-relevant environments. The response to that piece was warm and it opened a much bigger conversation I want to continue here.

Because there is a second problem, and it sits right next to the tools issue. Even when students build something impressive, they rarely tell the world about it.

What “Bragging” Really Means

I want to be careful with my word choice here, because when I say I want Malaysian students to brag, I do not mean arrogance. I mean documentation. I mean visibility. I mean the courage to say, “I built this, and here is how I did it.”

In the global tech community, sharing your work is not showing off. It is how you contribute. It is how you invite feedback, attract collaborators, and build a reputation before you even graduate. Every time a developer writes a blog post about what they learned building a project, every time a student posts a short video demo on LinkedIn or YouTube, every time someone publishes their code on GitHub with a clear README, they are adding value to the community.

They are also building something that a CV alone cannot carry: a visible portfolio of thinking.

I Have Seen What Happens When Students Share

When students do step forward and share their work, remarkable things happen. I have seen students connect with mentors because someone stumbled across their blog. I have seen project ideas get picked up by companies that were looking for exactly that kind of solution. I have seen young engineers get job offers because a hiring manager found their GitHub repository.

And I have seen something perhaps more important: the student’s own confidence change. When you write about your project publicly, you are forced to explain it clearly. You start to understand what you actually built. You start to see what worked and, more importantly, what did not. That reflection is part of the learning that never shows up in an exam.

The Platforms Are Already There

There is no shortage of places where Malaysian students can share their work. LinkedIn is the obvious starting point, and yet I still see so many profiles with nothing more than a degree listing and a generic summary. Imagine if every final year IoT project at a Malaysian university had a proper LinkedIn post, with photos, a short explanation of the problem it solved, and the tech stack used.

GitHub is equally powerful. A well-documented repository says more about an engineer’s capability than almost anything else. Medium or WordPress and personal blogs remain excellent homes for longer technical write-ups. YouTube or TikTok are perfect for demo videos. Even short-form platforms have an audience hungry for genuine student work.

The tools to publish are free. The audiences are there. What is missing is the habit and the encouragement.

What Lecturers and Institutions Can Do

I want to be fair here: this is not entirely on the students. If we want a culture shift, we need to start from inside the institutions.

Imagine if project documentation and public sharing were built into assessment rubrics. Imagine if a student was graded not only on whether the sensor collected data correctly but also on whether they could explain the project clearly to a non-technical audience. Imagine if universities celebrated student projects the way they celebrate sports achievements.

Some institutions are already doing this, and I applaud them. But it needs to be more systematic. Students should graduate not just with technical skills but with the confidence and habit of communicating those skills to the world.

A Personal Challenge

If you are a student reading this, I want you to do one thing this week. Pick a project you are working on or have completed. Write about it somewhere public. It does not have to be perfect. It does not have to be long. Just write honestly about what you were trying to solve, what you used to solve it, and what you learned in the process.

That one post could be the start of something you cannot predict yet.

If you are a lecturer or a programme coordinator, think about how you can make sharing a formal part of the learning journey. Not as a burden, but as a skill that students will use for the rest of their careers.

Malaysia has genuinely talented engineering students. I have met many of them, worked alongside some of them, and been impressed by what they can build when given the space to do it. My concern is that too much of that talent is invisible to the industry because no one taught them that visibility is part of the job.

So tell me, if you could make one change to how Malaysian engineering education celebrates student work, what would it be?

Life on Stage: The Journey of a Speaker Who Never Asked to Become One

Mazlan Abbas  ·  Founder Reflections  ·  2025

Life on Stage: The Journey of a Speaker Who Never Asked to Become One

From a single university talk to hundreds of stages across four continents

If someone asks me, “Mazlan, how many times have you given a presentation?” I’ll just smile. Not out of arrogance. But because I honestly can’t remember. What I do remember is that it didn’t start because I wanted to be a speaker. It started because I had something worth sharing, and people began to listen.

This isn’t a post about achievements. It isn’t a resume list. This is a story about what happened between all those numbers. What I felt standing in front of a room. What I carried back to the hotel. What changed in me, one presentation at a time.

Every time I stepped onto a stage, I asked myself the same question: am I here to teach, or am I here to learn?

The answer was always both.

The expert in anything was once a beginner who refused to stop showing up.
Helen Hayes
2013 – 2015  ·  Seeds Planted

In the early days, I was talking about something most people hadn’t fully grasped yet. IoT. Internet of Things. Back then, when people heard “IoT” their faces went blank. I remember giving a talk at UTHM with barely any questions at the end… but I knew the seeds had to be planted early. Someone needed to walk away thinking, “Huh, that’s actually interesting.”

When I delivered the keynote at the International Conference on Soft Computing in Data Science 2015 at Pullman Putrajaya, I could feel the shift. People were beginning to take it seriously. “Internet of Things and Big Data: The Perfect Marriage” was the title I chose myself. Not for the glamour, but because I genuinely believed these two things were made for each other.

2016 – 2017  ·  The Stage Gets Bigger

These years were relentless. Singapore. Sydney. Jakarta. Kuwait. I was standing in front of people from different countries, talking about smart cities, IoT ecosystems, how technology could reshape the way we live. At the Smart Cities Expo World Forum in Sydney 2016, my message was about citizen engagement. Not just infrastructure. Not just data. People.

That’s what everyone always misses. Technology can be brilliant. But if citizens don’t engage, a smart city is just a smart facade.

Kuwait, Singapore, Sydney, Jakarta… not to collect passport stamps. But to bring back perspectives that no office or lab could ever give you.

2017 was also the year I realized something important: I was no longer just an academic or an industry guy. I had become a bridge. Universities invited me. Industries listened. Government agencies started calling. And with that position came a responsibility I didn’t take lightly.

2018 – 2019  ·  Local to Global

There is one moment I will never forget. Keynote at the Smart Cities Global Technologies and Investment Summit in Algiers, Algeria, June 2018. A single Malaysian standing before an audience from North Africa, talking about the IoT innovation ecosystem. There was a flutter of nerves. But far more than that, there was exhilaration.

Because what I brought to that room wasn’t just theory. It came from the real, lived experience of building Favoriot. From every failure and every struggle that no one in the audience could see behind the clean, polished slides.

2019 was even more intense. IIUM. UTeM. UCSI. Polytechnics. Borneo. Istanbul. Sarawak. Topics widened too, from IoT for the Construction Industry, to IR 4.0 for MINDEF. I had stopped talking about IoT in a narrow box. I was talking about transformation. About the future. About how human beings need to adapt or be left behind.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein
2020 – 2021  ·  The World Changes, So Does the Stage

COVID arrived. Everything moved online. Webinars became everyone’s new language. And I, someone who had grown used to feeling the live energy of a room, had to adapt. Talking to a camera. Q&A via chat box. A different kind of connection, but the same message.

What I valued most during that period was that people still wanted to listen. MaGIC, UTHM, UiTM, USIM, ADTEC, Politeknik Mersing, UKM… the 2021 webinar list was endless. That told me something: curiosity about technology doesn’t stop, even when the world is falling apart.

I gave a talk on “Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet.” Halfway through, it hit me: several of the things I do today didn’t exist ten years ago either.

The talk at MMU on “The Entrepreneurship Journey of Pre and Post Covid-19” was when I felt closest to my audience. Not because the slides were great. But because the story was real. Favoriot faced the same tsunami. We survived, but we carry the scars.

2022 – 2023  ·  Deeper and More Specific

By 2022, the nature of invitations had shifted. People no longer called to hear a general talk about IoT. They wanted specifics. ESG. Manufacturing. Financial services. TVET. Smart cities. The energy sector.

That is a sign of maturity, both in the industry and in myself. Penang, Smart Factory Conference, October 2023: ESG in Manufacturing. That same month, ICSIMA at Tamu Hotel: Smart Measurement with IoT. Then WCIT 2023: 10 Ways IoT Can Drive ESG Compliance.

Some weeks had two or three events. The body was exhausted. But the mind couldn’t stop.

And then there was the keynote I gave with the most heart: ICoICT 2023, August that year. “Humanizing IoT: Placing People at the Centre of Technology.” That wasn’t just a title. That was my philosophy. After years of talking about devices, sensors, and connectivity, I needed to remind the room, and myself, that at the end of every data pipeline there is a human being. A mother who wants to know her child is safe. An elderly man who wants to live with dignity at home. A farmer who needs to know tomorrow’s weather.

2024 – 2025  ·  Rethinking Everything

The DSA 2024 talk on secured IoT communications marked my entry into the cybersecurity conversation in a more serious way. Smart applications demand secure communications. That is not optional. It is a requirement.

UTAR Talk, November 2024, “The Ultimate Things about IoT.” The audience was energetic students, full of questions. The best one: “Sir, in ten years, will IoT still be relevant?” I smiled. In ten years, IoT will be like electricity. You won’t see it, but you’ll need it everywhere.

And most recently, WCSC 2025. “From Smart to Regenerative: Rethinking Urban Transformation through IoT.” This represents a major shift in my thinking. Smart cities are no longer enough. We need cities that can heal themselves, adapt on their own, regenerate. Not just connected, but alive in a deeper sense.

Through all of it, I saw one common thread: I was never really talking about technology. I was talking about the people who use it, and the people who get left behind when they don’t.

At the National Address Conference, July 2025 at WTCKL, I carried a message about Technology and Data Sovereignty. This wasn’t purely a technical talk. It was about the future of a nation. Whoever holds the data holds the power. Malaysia must understand this.

200+Presentations
12+Countries
12Years on Stage
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

From 2013 to 2025. Hundreds of times standing on a stage. From UTHM to Algeria. From a small webinar to an international keynote. From speaking in front of 20 students to thousands of delegates.

What do I bring back every single time? Not the applause. Not my name in a programme book. Not a selfie with the organizer.

What I bring back are the questions people ask after the session. Simple questions, but deep ones. Questions that remind me why I started doing all of this in the first place.

This journey isn’t over. The next stage is already waiting. And I still have a great deal left to say.

Because technology keeps moving. And people need to move with it.

How AI Has Lightened My Load as Chief Everything Officer

Being a founder means being the Chief Everything Officer. Here is how AI has become the leverage that makes the load just a little lighter.

If there is one title that most accurately describes my life right now, it is not CEO. Not Founder. Not even the glamorous-sounding “Technopreneur.”

It is Chief Everything Officer.

And that is not something to be proud of. It is an exhausting reality.

The Monday Morning That Never Ends

Picture a Monday morning. Before 9am, my head is already full. A client proposal still half-done. A LinkedIn post I have not updated in three days. An email from an overseas partner waiting for a reply. A pitching deck for next week that is still blank. A financial report the accounts team has been asking for since yesterday.

All of it, simultaneously, inside the same head.

Back when I worked in large organisations, there were teams for all of this. Someone for marketing. Someone to handle social media. Someone to prepare slides. A PA to filter emails. My role was specific, focused, and contained. The moment I left to build my own company, I realised… all of that now falls on me.

That is the part nobody tells you about the startup world. They talk about freedom. About being your own boss. But nobody talks about those Sunday nights sitting alone in front of a laptop, trying to finish a company blog post, with a pounding headache from exhaustion.

Burnout Is Real

I have experienced burnout. Not once. More than once.

There were moments I would sit in front of the screen, hands on the keyboard, with nothing coming out. Not because I had no ideas, but because my mind was so overloaded it could no longer process anything. Like a browser with too many tabs open until the laptop freezes.

That is the most frightening feeling as a founder, because if you stop, everything stops.

I still remember one night, past midnight, trying to write a proposal for a major client. Hands tired. Eyes tired. But my brain could not stop because the deadline was the next morning. I asked myself at that moment, “How long can I keep doing this?”

The answer did not come in the form of rest. It came in the form of technology.

“Successful entrepreneurs are not those who work the hardest. They are those who are smartest about using every resource available to them.”

When AI Entered the Picture

The first thing AI helped me with was writing. Before this, a single article for the company blog could take half a day. Research, outline, draft, edit, proofread… hours of work. Now I sit down, have a conversation with AI, explain what I want to convey, and within a short time I have a working draft.

Not copy-paste verbatim. But a starting point. And that starting point is incredibly valuable when time is your most limited resource.

Then I started using AI for social media. Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram… each platform has its own tone. Before, even thinking of captions felt like a burden. Now I brief the AI on the message I want to deliver, the platform, the audience, and it helps me draft. I edit to match my voice. Fast. Efficient.

Presentation slides too. I outline what I want, AI helps me structure the flow, drafts content for each slide, and suggests what to keep and what to cut. I walk into meetings more confident, more prepared, calmer.

My 11pm Brainstorming Partner

This is what I love most. Before, when I wanted to think something through, I had to wait for a meeting, for other people in the room, for a discussion to happen. Now I can brainstorm with AI at 11pm after everyone is asleep.

I ask questions, push back, ask it to argue against me. It gives me perspectives I had not considered. There are times I come in with an idea I think is brilliant. The AI gives me a counter-argument that makes me think twice. That is not a bad thing. It is far better than proceeding with an idea that has holes in it.

AI also helps me prepare for meetings and pitching sessions. I describe the client I am about to meet, their industry, their likely problems, my product. I ask the AI to simulate the questions they might ask, the objections that might come up, the best way for me to respond. It is like a rehearsal. And it makes me walk into the room far more prepared.

Since using AI, I feel like I have an assistant who never sleeps, never takes leave, never asks for a raise, and is always ready when I need them.

“The best technology is not the most sophisticated. It is the one that saves the most of our time and energy for what truly matters.”

Honest Truth: AI Is Not the Answer to Everything

I want to be clear about this. AI is not a cure for every problem.

AI cannot replace human relationships. When I meet a client, what makes them trust me is not a beautiful slide deck or a well-written proposal. It is the way I speak, the way I listen, the way I show that I truly understand their problems. That comes from experience and empathy, not from a prompt.

AI also cannot make strategic decisions for me. It can provide data, perspectives, and options. But ultimately, I am the one who must decide. Those decisions come from gut instinct built over years of experience, mistakes, and lessons learned.

And AI cannot replace real networking. Coffee with an old friend, connecting with another founder who understands the same struggles, attending an event and having organic conversations… all of that still matters, and still has to be done personally.

So the way I see AI now is this: it is leverage. Not a replacement. When you have good leverage, you can lift heavier things with the same amount of energy. AI is leverage for my time and energy as a founder doing many things alone.

To Founders Who Are Still Skeptical

I see fellow founders who have not yet fully embraced AI. Some are skeptical, some afraid, some feel it is “cheating” or inauthentic. I understand that feeling. I felt the same way.

But when I watch them struggling with things I can now resolve much faster, I feel for them, because I know how exhausting life is without that leverage. The world has changed. The tools have changed. The way we work must change too.

I am not telling you to hand over all control to AI. I am simply saying: try it first. Use it for one small thing. See what happens. Give it a chance to prove its value.

“Do not fear new tools. Fear the unwillingness to learn, because that is what will leave us behind.”

Still Chief Everything Officer, But With a Reliable Partner

One day, perhaps AI will be able to do even more. Handle customer service, manage projects, negotiate with vendors. Maybe the role of Chief Everything Officer will truly be shared between me and AI in a more balanced way.

But for now, I am still the Chief Everything Officer. Only now, I have a reliable partner. One I can “wake up” at 2am when an idea suddenly strikes. One that never complains, never has bad days, and always tries to give me the best answer.

And that is enough to make a founder’s life just a little bit lighter. Just a little. But in the startup world, a little means everything.

What about you? Are you still doing everything alone, or have you found your own leverage? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Founder’s Weekend Notes – Why Entrepreneurs Work on Weekends and Stop Apologising for It

My Weekend Has No Off Button
Founder’s Weekend Notes

My Weekend Has No Off Button

And I have stopped apologising for it.

By Dr. Mazlan Abbas · Reflections on founders, focus, writing, and FAVORIOT
© Dr. Mazlan Abbas · Founder reflections · FAVORIOT · IoT · AIoT · Writing · Strategy

My Weekend Has No Off Button — And I Have Stopped Apologising For It

Most people think a founder’s weekend is a time to rest. Mine is when the real thinking happens — about customers, strategy, leads, and the future of FAVORIOT.

It is 6:47 AM on a Saturday. The house is quiet. And I am sitting at my desk, coffee in hand, staring at a spreadsheet of potential leads I did not finish reviewing on Friday.

Most people would call this a problem. I call it my most productive hours of the week.

I did not plan to be this kind of person. When I left the corporate world after years at CELCOM AXIATA and MIMOS, after all the structured meetings and reporting lines, I told myself I would finally have balance. Work smart, not just hard. Take weekends off.

That lasted about three weeks.

Because here is the truth nobody tells you when you become a founder: the company does not pause just because the calendar says Saturday. The market does not wait. Your competitors are not resting. And that idea sitting at the back of your mind all week? It will not sit quietly forever.

What I actually do on weekends

Let me be clear … it is not random busyness. I have learned the hard way that unfocused hustle on weekends leads to burnout without results. What I do now is deliberate. I call it my founder’s thinking time.

Saturdays, I think about customers. Who are they? Where are they? What problem keeps them up at night that FAVORIOT can solve? I go through LinkedIn. I study industry conversations. I look at who engaged with our content, who downloaded our case studies, who asked a question at the last webinar but never followed up. I build a picture of our next ten potential customers.

Sundays, I think about strategy. Not operations — operations belong to the week. Sundays are for the bigger picture. Where is IoT heading in the next twelve months? What should FAVORIOT be known for? Are we too broad? Are we too narrow? What is the one message I want the market to remember us for?

It sounds exhausting. But these are the hours where I feel most alive as a founder.

The question that changed everything

Here is something I have never said publicly before.

In FAVORIOT’s early years, I worried constantly about leads. Where was the next customer coming from? Were we going to survive the next quarter? I carried that anxiety into every weekend like a bag of rocks.

But somewhere along the way, the worry transformed into something else. Curiosity.

I stopped asking “where are the customers?” and started asking “why haven’t they found us yet?”

“Where are the customers?” is a passive question. It puts the burden somewhere else. “Why haven’t they found us yet?” is an active question. It puts the responsibility squarely on me.

When I sit with that second question on a Saturday morning with no distractions, the answers actually come.

Maybe our messaging is not clear enough. Maybe we are targeting the wrong industry vertical. Maybe we have a great product but we are invisible to the people who need it most. These are not questions you can answer in a thirty-minute meeting between calls on a Tuesday afternoon. They need space. They need silence. They need a Saturday.

Why writing is part of the strategy

I also use weekends to write. These articles, in fact, are almost always written during weekend hours. Because writing is not just content creation for me — it is thinking out loud.

Every time I write about IoT, about smart cities, about the journey of building FAVORIOT, I force myself to clarify what I actually believe and why. And that clarity feeds directly into how I lead the company, how I pitch to customers, and how I talk about what we do.

Content is strategy — if you do it right.

I have seen founders who say they do not have time to write, to share, to build a visible presence. And then they wonder why nobody knows about their company. The market does not discover you by accident. You have to show up – consistently, visibly, with something valuable to say.

Weekends give me the time to do that properly.

This is not about glorifying overwork

I want to be honest about something.

Rest is real. Rest is necessary. I still take walks. I still have lunch with family. I still sit and do nothing sometimes — and in those moments of nothing, the best ideas usually arrive uninvited.

But a full day of deliberately switching off from the business? My brain will not allow it. And at this stage of the journey — building FAVORIOT, growing our IoT platform, trying to become the partner of choice across Southeast Asia — I am not sure I would want it to.

When you are building something you genuinely believe in, thinking about it does not feel like work. It feels more like tending a garden you love.

One question worth sitting with

If you are a founder reading this, I am not asking you to copy my schedule. Every founder is different. Every business has its own rhythm.

But I will leave you with the question I ask myself every weekend morning:

“If I had just this one day — no emails, no meetings, no interruptions — what is the one thing I could work on that would change the trajectory of my company?”

That question alone is worth sitting with. Even at 6:47 AM on a Saturday.

What does your weekend look like as a founder? Are you resting, or are you building and do you think the two are really that different? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

I Used AI to Write My Latest eBook. Here’s What Actually Happened.

Let Me Be Honest With You

The eBook you are looking at right now, Mastering IoT and AIoT with Favoriot, was built with AI. Not just assisted by AI. Built by it. And I think that is worth talking about honestly, because the story of how this book came together tells you more about where we are with AI than any think piece I could write.

Here is the confession: most of the infographics inside were generated through ChatGPT. The eBook itself was assembled using Claude Cowork. I pointed it at my folder of infographics, and it categorised them, selected the best visual style, and structured everything into a coherent ladder from awareness to mastery. And the post you are reading right now? Claude is pushing it automatically to this blog.

I did not type all of this. AI did a significant part of the heavy lifting.

So Why Am I Telling You This?

Because I think the dishonest version of this story, the “I wrote a book” version with no footnotes, does everyone a disservice. We are at a moment in technology where the tools are genuinely extraordinary, and pretending otherwise is a form of intellectual cowardice.

But here is the thing I want you to sit with: the book is real. The frameworks inside it are real. The five rungs, Awareness, Foundations, Methodology, Production, and Mastery, those came from twenty-plus years of watching IoT projects succeed and fail. They came from UTM, CELCOM, MIMOS, from REDtone IoT, from every Favoriot deployment where a client came to us six months too late because they had skipped Rung 2.

The AI did not invent the Build-Readiness Ladder. I did. The AI helped me package it.

And I think that distinction matters enormously, not just for me, but for anyone trying to figure out how to use these tools without losing themselves in the process.

Every Buzzword Wave Brings the Same Temptation

I have been in IoT long enough to remember when “digitisation” was the buzzword that made executives nod without understanding. Then it was “big data.” Then “Industry 4.0.” Now it is AI everywhere. Each wave brings the same temptation: to let the tool become the story instead of the outcome.

What I tried to do with this eBook, and what I try to do with every piece of content I create, is stay anchored to the practitioner’s reality. Not theory. Not a showcase of what the technology can do in a lab. What actually ships. What actually fails. What the team on Rung 3 needs to hear at 11pm when their deployment is fighting them.

That is what I hope the five rungs give you. A ladder you can put your weight on.

Here Is Exactly How the AI Toolchain Worked

I want to be specific because I think the specifics are useful.

The infographics came first, from ChatGPT. I gave it the concepts, the frameworks, the key messages, and it generated visuals that I reviewed and curated. Some were brilliant on the first attempt. Some took five iterations. A few I threw out entirely because they were technically wrong, and that is the part that requires a human who actually knows IoT. The tool has no idea whether MQTT is correctly positioned in an architecture diagram. I do.

Claude Cowork then looked at the full collection, forty-three diagrams, and did something I genuinely did not expect it to do well: it read the logical progression across them. It understood that the Awareness diagrams should open the book, that the Production use cases belong after the methodology chapter, that the Data Storytelling infographic is the bridge between Rung 4 and Rung 5. It organised the ladder better than my first draft did.

Is that intelligence? I do not know. But it was useful, and I am not going to pretend it was not.

What AI Cannot Do

If you are an IoT practitioner reading this, the lesson is not “use AI to write your book.” The lesson is that your expertise, your hard-won, field-tested, scar-tissue knowledge, is the thing AI cannot generate. It can package. It can structure. It can format and distribute. But the rung-by-rung logic inside this eBook? That came from doing this work for two decades.

That is what I want to give you. Not a showcase. A ladder.

Now It Is Your Turn

Download the eBook. Start at the rung that makes you uncomfortable, that is always the right one. And if you want to talk through where you are standing, find me on LinkedIn or drop me a message through Favoriot.

The tools changed. The climb has not.

What rung are you on right now, and what is keeping you there?

The Day I Realised I Was Becoming a Human FAQ

There was a time when I actually felt proud every time someone asked me about Favoriot.

Each question felt like a small victory.

It meant people were noticing.
It meant the story was spreading.
It meant our work was reaching somewhere beyond our small team.

Someone would message me.

“What exactly is Favoriot?”
“Is it just a dashboard?”
“Can it connect to this device?”
“How is it different from AWS IoT or ThingsBoard?”
“Do you support AI?”
“Can students use it?”
“Is it for smart cities, or factories, or farms?”

And every time, I replied.

Patiently.

Sometimes through WhatsApp.
Sometimes through LinkedIn messages.
Sometimes through emails that arrived late at night.

Okay, Mazlan… this is good, I told myself.
It means people are interested.

So I kept answering.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Until one day, after probably the hundredth explanation, I suddenly paused.

I stared at my laptop.

Then I asked myself a question that hit me harder than I expected.

Wait… am I building a technology platform… or am I becoming a human FAQ?

That was the moment something clicked.

A small but powerful realisation.

This was not really about repeating answers.

It was about something deeper.

Energy.

Focus.

And scale.

Because if the story of Favoriot only lives inside my head, then every explanation will depend on me personally.

And that is not scalable.

That night, I realised something important.

When people keep asking the same question, it is not a problem.

It is a signal.

A signal that your story is not documented clearly enough.

A signal that your knowledge is trapped inside conversations.

A signal that your platform needs a voice that can speak even when you are asleep.

That was my first aha moment.

The Emotional Side of Repeating Yourself

Let me be honest.

There were moments when I felt tired.

Not angry.

Not irritated.

Just mentally drained.

Imagine explaining the same thing dozens of times.

Sometimes, even after giving a talk or presentation.

For example, after speaking at events like The Star Cybersecurity Summit, where I was invited to share thoughts about IoT systems, AI, and the future of connected technologies, people would still approach me afterwards and ask the exact same question.

“So… what exactly does Favoriot do?”

Part of me almost laughed.

Did I not just explain that on stage for half an hour?

Then another voice in my head replied.

Relax Mazlan. Every audience is new.

Every listener hears things differently.

Every person arrives with a different level of understanding.

Some are engineers.

Some are students.

Some are policymakers.

Some are just curious.

And none of them is wrong for asking.

That was my second realisation.

Repetition is not the enemy.

Confusion is.

If people keep asking the same question, it simply means the explanation has not reached them in a form they can digest.

And that responsibility sits on my shoulders.

The Turning Point

One evening, while replying to yet another email asking the familiar question, I suddenly stopped typing.

I leaned back in my chair.

Why am I answering this privately again?

Then another thought appeared.

Why not answer it publicly once… and let it help hundreds of people instead of one?

That thought changed everything.

Instead of seeing repeated questions as interruptions, I began seeing them as content ideas.

Every repeated question was actually a signal about what people wanted to understand.

If five people ask the same thing, it deserves an article.

If ten people misunderstand a feature, it deserves a tutorial.

If customers keep comparing Favoriot with other platforms, it deserves a structured explanation.

That was the moment I started writing more seriously on IoT World.

Not random thoughts.

Not marketing slogans.

But clear explanations.

What exactly is the Favoriot Insight Framework?

How Favoriot moves from raw data to meaningful decisions.

Why IoT is not just about dashboards.

How universities can build AIoT labs.

Why local councils struggle with smart city projects.

How system integrators can deploy IoT faster.

Each question became an article.

Each doubt became a story.

Each confusion became clarity.

And slowly, something magical happened.

Instead of repeating myself endlessly, I started sending links.

“You might want to read this article.”
“This explains the architecture clearly.”
“This post shows the use case.”

The conversation immediately became deeper.

People no longer start from zero.

They started with understanding.

Building Something Bigger Than Myself

But something else happened, too.

After publishing several articles, people began asking another question.

“Is there one place where we can read everything about Favoriot?”

I smiled when I heard that.

Alright, Mazlan… now the next step is obvious.

That was when the idea of a Favoriot Resources Page was born.

Not a marketing page.

Not a product brochure.

But a knowledge hub.

A place where people can explore the ecosystem properly.

A place where they can learn at their own pace.

On that page, anyone can now explore:

What Favoriot really is
Tutorials and technical guides
Real IoT project challenges
Case studies and architecture explanations
The Favoriot Insight Framework
AI and IoT integration concepts
Videos and learning materials

I wanted it to feel like a digital campus.

Because Favoriot is not just software.

It is an ecosystem.

And ecosystems require structure.

They require stories.

They require documentation.

Without those elements, people only see fragments.

With them, people see the full picture.

The Hidden Lesson for Founders

Many startups face this same challenge.

We assume people understand our product.

We assume our website is clear.

We assume our explanation is good enough.

Most of the time, it is not.

People are busy.

They skim.

They scan.

They make assumptions.

And sometimes those assumptions are completely wrong.

So when people keep asking the same question, the worst reaction is frustration.

The better reaction is curiosity.

Ask yourself:

Why is this still confusing?

Which part of my explanation is missing?

How can I make this easier to understand?

Repeated questions are feedback.

Free feedback.

Valuable feedback.

And if you listen carefully, they tell you exactly what your audience needs.

When the Story Finally Clicked

After writing consistently and building the Resource page, I noticed something interesting.

My explanations became sharper.

Writing forces you to think clearly.

When you write publicly, your ideas become structured.

And suddenly the narrative becomes easier to communicate.

People begin to see the bigger picture.

They understand that Favoriot is not just a tool.

It is a framework.

It is an ecosystem.

It is a learning platform.

It is an AIoT foundation.

Without structure, that sounds confusing.

With structure, it becomes powerful.

The Resource page helped me connect the dots.

From devices to cloud ingestion.

From data streams to analytics.

From rule engines to AI insights.

From dashboards to decision intelligence.

That clarity changed everything.

The Unexpected Reward

Today, people still ask questions.

Of course they do.

And I welcome them.

But the feeling is different now.

Instead of feeling drained, I feel grateful.

Because each question tells me that someone is curious.

Someone is exploring.

Someone wants to understand.

And now I have something meaningful to share.

Not just an answer.

A pathway.

When someone tells me,

“I read your Resource page, and now I understand what Favoriot is.”

That feels incredibly satisfying.

More satisfying than closing a sale.

Because understanding builds trust.

Trust builds relationships.

And relationships build ecosystems.

The Aha Moment

Looking back, I now see that the repeated questions were never the problem.

They were actually guiding me.

They were telling me exactly what needed to be documented.

Exactly what was needed was clarity.

Exactly what was needed was storytelling.

And once I finally organised all that knowledge into structured content, something powerful happened.

The pressure disappeared.

The message became scalable.

And the story of Favoriot could travel further than my own voice.

That was my real aha moment.

When people stop depending on your explanation and start learning from your ideas, you know something meaningful has been built.

Favoriot is not just about connecting devices.

It is about connecting understanding.

And that journey started with a simple realisation.

Sometimes, the most annoying repeated questions are actually the best teachers.

Now I am curious.

Have you ever experienced the same situation in your own journey?

People asking the same question again and again?

What did you do about it?

Did it frustrate you, or did it push you to build something better?

FAVORIOT Resources

We Gave Our Favoriot IoT Platform Away for Free—Here’s What Actually Happened Next

A quiet, honest story about how Favoriot found its way

I remember the early days of Favoriot very clearly.
It started with a simple belief. If we make it free and easy, people will come. They will build. They will stay.

So we did exactly that.

We built the platform.
We opened the doors.
We told the world, “Come in. Try it. It’s free.”

And people did come. Students. Lecturers. Curious engineers. Friends I met during talks at universities. I would personally invite them. Sometimes I would even hand out complimentary access codes for a full year of the Beginner Plan.

I thought to myself, this is how adoption works.

But something felt off.

When subscribers were not really users

On paper, the numbers looked comforting.
Subscribers were growing. Accounts were created. Dashboards were viewed.

But deep down, I knew something was missing.

Why are so many accounts quiet?
Why do I see logins, but no devices connected?
Why do dashboards stay empty?

That was my first hard lesson.

A subscriber is not always a user.
And a user is not always a builder.

Many people came just to look around. They clicked. They browsed. Then they left. Some even won vouchers but never built a single IoT project.

It hurt a little. Not because of revenue. But because I wanted Favoriot to be used. I wanted it to matter.

The wrong assumption about behaviour

I used to think users would log in every day, tweak dashboards, run experiments.

Reality taught me otherwise.

A typical IoT builder behaves differently.

Once the device connects and the data flows, they step back. They look at the dashboard occasionally. They only return when something breaks or when the project evolves.

Students behave differently, too.

They come intensely during one semester. Final year project season. Late nights. Panic. Excitement. Then, silence.

And to make it harder, many of them already knew other platforms. Some popular. Some free. Some are recommended by seniors.

Favoriot was often an unfamiliar name.

So ,how do you enter the education space when choice is already wide open?

Teaching before selling

I stopped pushing plans and started focusing on learning.

We introduced public IoT training. Beginner. Advanced. Mastering IoT.
Lecturers started attending. Some became trainers themselves. They went back to their universities and taught students using what they learned.

That felt good.

Then we went a step further.

Professional certificates.
Either embedded into the curriculum or offered as short intensive training. Students could finish the course and receive a certificate, or sit for an exam and earn a more formal credential.

Interest grew. Enquiries came in.

But adoption was still slow.

Universities move carefully. Curriculum changes go through committees, boards, and senate meetings. Nothing moves overnight.

I had to learn patience.

Labs instead of just logins

That’s when we bundled everything.

Not just software.
Not just subscriptions.

We created labs.

An IoT Lab with devices, Beginner subscriptions, training, and ready-to-use kits like indoor air quality monitoring.

An AIoT Lab with more advanced tools. Edge devices. Developer Plan access. Machine learning features. Analytics. A space for research, experimentation, and deeper thinking.

Suddenly, Favoriot was no longer just a platform.
It became an environment.

That changed the conversation.

Why Favoriot stayed a platform, not an app

People sometimes ask me, why not make Favoriot simpler? Why not hide everything?

Because IoT is not simple.

If everything is hidden, nothing is learned.

Favoriot is a Platform-as-a-Service by choice. Builders can see the flow. Devices. Protocols. Data ingestion. Visualisation. Rules. Actions.

When something fails, they learn how to troubleshoot.

When they graduate, they carry understanding, not just button-clicking habits.

That’s the skill that survives in the real world.

The restaurant analogy that finally made sense

One day, while explaining our plans, I caught myself using a food analogy. And suddenly, everything clicked.

The Free Plan is peeking into a restaurant.
You look at the menu. You walk around. Then you leave.

The Lite Plan is tasting the food.
You sit down. You try a dish. You smile.

The Beginner Plan is a full meal.
You are satisfied. You build. You complete your project.

The Developer Plan owns the kitchen.
You cook. You create menus. You serve your own customers.

The Enterprise Plan owns the whole restaurant.
You decide everything. Security. Scale. Who gets served and how.

When I explained it this way, people finally nodded.

Overseas users and a quiet mystery

Here’s something that still amazes me.

Favoriot has users from more than 130 countries.
Yet most revenue comes from Malaysia.

How did they even find us?

Blogs.
E-books.
Social media posts.
YouTube. TikTok. Facebook groups.

They came. They explored. Most stayed free.

And that taught me another lesson.

Free users overseas were often explorers. Platform shoppers. Comparing interfaces. Looking around.

Not every visitor is ready to commit.

And that’s okay.

Personas matter more than pricing

Over the years, I stopped blaming pricing.

Instead, I studied personas.

Browsers.
Tasters.
Builders.
Integrators.
Operators.

Each one needs a different message.

Each one enters the journey at a different door.

And that was the missing piece all along.

Partners instead of long walks alone

I also realised something else.

We cannot do everything ourselves.

We do not have endless arms and legs to reach every market.

So we shifted.

System integrators.
Hardware partners.
Domain experts.
Universities.

They already speak the language of their customers. We just give them the kitchen.

That felt right.

AI as my late-night thinking partner

I will admit this honestly.

AI changed how I think.

When I was in corporate life, clarity came from meetings, workshops, and committees.

Today, clarity comes at night. Quietly. One question at a time.

I talk.
I reflect.
I get challenged.

Not every suggestion is usable. But every session sharpens my thinking.

Sometimes, you just need a friend who listens without ego.

Community as the long game

Lately, I spend more time on LinkedIn.

I see students from India proudly showing their projects. Some use other platforms. Some barely send data to the cloud.

I comment. I encourage. I invite.

“Try Favoriot.”
“Show us your project.”
“We will feature your story.”

Because visibility matters.

When builders are seen, they stay longer.

And when they grow, they remember.

This journey is still unfolding

Go-to-market favoriot

Favoriot did not arrive here overnight.
It took years of confusion, wrong assumptions, quiet learning, and small corrections.

But today, the path feels clearer.

Free curiosity has a place.
So does tasting.
So does building.
So does owning the kitchen.

If you are just browsing, welcome.
If you are ready to build, stay.
If you want to serve others, let’s talk.

And if you are a student building your first IoT project somewhere in the world, remember this.

The platform you choose today might become the one you trust tomorrow.

I would love to hear your thoughts.
Where are you in this journey?
Peeking, tasting, cooking, or running the whole place?

Leave a comment. Let’s talk.