I’ve spent most of the last 15 years building things for other people — hardware, backend systems, web applications, mostly in industrial automation and supply chain. Somewhere in that stretch I also trained as an actuary, which meant that even when I was writing code, I was really thinking in probabilities: what’s likely to happen, and what’s the honest cost of being wrong.
KheAi is the first thing I’ve built mainly for myself. Here’s how I got here.
Chapter 1: GeoSenti — reading everyone else’s sentiment
Back in Kuala Lumpur, my co-founder and I built GeoSenti, a hyperlocal marketing and social CRM tool for SMBs — restaurants, retailers, hospitality brands. The idea was simple: pull in what people were saying about a physical location across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TripAdvisor and more, attach sentiment and context to it, and turn that noise into something a small business owner could actually act on in real time.
It was a good idea, executed at the wrong time in the wrong market, and it eventually closed. But it taught me something that stuck with me long after the servers went dark: almost none of that data belonged to the businesses using it. It belonged to the platforms. We were building a nicer window onto someone else’s warehouse.
Chapter 2: nostr-seo — refusing to write on rented land
Years later, still writing and still building, I ran into the same problem from the other side — as a creator instead of a marketer. Every article I wrote lived on someone else’s platform, subject to someone else’s algorithm, someone else’s terms of service, someone else’s decision to keep the lights on.
So I built nostr-seo: a pipeline that publishes my long-form writing to the Nostr protocol — a decentralized, cryptographically signed network I don’t need anyone’s permission to post to — and then compiles it into a fast, SEO- and AI-agent-friendly static site at kheai.com, automatically, every few hours. I wrote up the full architecture on dev.to if you want the technical version.
The point wasn’t decentralization for its own sake. The point was ownership. My words, my keys, my audience, my archive — not rented, not revocable.
Chapter 3: kheAI — from owning my content to owning my life
Once I’d solved that for my writing, the obvious question was: what else have I been renting that I could actually own?
My time. My attention. My money.
kheAI is what came out of asking that question seriously. It’s a minimalist framework built around three commitments, repeated daily:
- 1 Project — build or create something that matters
- 1 Practice — meditation, journaling, or reflection, to keep the mind clear
- 1 Learning — usually Agentic AI, but always something that keeps me intellectually honest
Underneath the framework is a simple thesis: Body, Mind, and ₿itcoin are the three things you can actually own outright, if you’re disciplined about it. Everything else — your job, your platform, your fiat savings, your attention — can be rented back to you, edited, inflated away, or deplatformed on someone else’s schedule.
That’s why kheAI now builds Bitcoin-native tools — Lightning microservices, sovereign infrastructure, education for creators and small merchants in Southeast Asia who want to earn and hold value without asking a middleman for permission. It’s the same instinct that built GeoSenti and nostr-seo, pointed at a bigger target.
Chapter 4: back to hyperlocal — but this time, no landlord
Here’s the thing about GeoSenti I couldn’t shake: hyperlocal was the right instinct, just wrapped in the wrong model. Marketplaces solve discovery by inserting themselves as the toll booth — take a cut of every job, own the customer relationship, and quietly train the service provider to depend on the platform instead of their own reputation.
So the latest iteration of KheAi is a hyperlocal on-demand services directory — deliberately not a marketplace:
- Zero commission. You find a plumber, tutor, or handyman through kheAI, and you pay them directly. No toll booth in the middle.
- No app. No account to create, no walled garden to get locked into. If a directory listing needs an app to be useful, it’s not a directory anymore — it’s a marketplace wearing a discovery costume.
- Verified by your neighbors, not strangers. Star ratings from anonymous accounts are easy to fake and easy to game. Trust that comes from people in your own neighborhood vouching for someone is a much harder signal to manufacture.
And once a local provider is discoverable and trusted, the natural next question they ask is: now how do I handle the bookings, the reminders, the follow-ups, the invoicing? That’s the upsell — AI automation consultancy for the same small operators the directory surfaces. Not a subscription tax baked into every transaction, but a one-time or ongoing service they choose to buy because it actually saves them time.
The through-line
I don’t think of KheAi as a pivot from my earlier projects. It’s the same question, asked at increasing depth:
- GeoSenti asked it about a business’s customers.
- nostr-seo asked it about my own writing.
- kheAI’s Body/Mind/₿itcoin framework asked it about a life.
- KheAi’s directory asks it about a neighborhood’s service economy.
Who actually owns this — and what would it take to make sure it stays that way?
KheAi is not an escape from the world. It’s a return — to sovereignty over your time, your thoughts, and your value. Live awake. Die free.
If any of this resonates, you can follow the build in public at kheai.com, on dev.to, or check the code on GitHub.