It Started at Thirteen
In the early 2000s, when most Malaysian teenagers were just discovering the internet, Dr Kervis Soo was already building online communities. At thirteen, he set up web forums, experimented with gathering users around shared interests, and began developing an intuition for how people behave in digital spaces — what makes them stay, what makes them contribute, and what makes them come back.
There was no business model attached to any of this. No monetisation strategy, no investment, no mentor telling him it would lead anywhere. Just a genuine curiosity about digital communities and an early conviction that the internet was where meaningful things were going to happen.
That conviction turned out to be the most valuable asset he would build in those years — more valuable than any of the specific platforms or tools he experimented with, because it shaped every decision he would make over the following two decades.
The Direct Sales Years: Building Systems, Not Just Sales
After entering the workforce, Dr Kervis Soo spent significant time in the direct sales industry. On the surface, this might seem like a detour from the path that would eventually lead him to become the AI MCN First in Southeast Asia. It wasn’t.
Direct sales, at its best, is an education in systems — how to build replicable processes for persuasion, how to structure organisations that can grow without the founder’s direct involvement in every transaction, how to motivate and develop large teams across multiple levels, and how to build trust at scale.
These are precisely the capabilities that underpin a successful MCN operation. The skills Dr Kervis Soo developed managing direct sales teams transferred directly — and meaningfully — into his later work building creator ecosystems.
He also experienced the hard side of that industry: a significant betrayal by dishonest partners that damaged his reputation and forced him to rebuild almost from scratch. “I went through more than most people,” he has said. “Everything I have was earned the hard way.” That experience didn’t break him — it sharpened his understanding of what it takes to build something that lasts.
2014: The Pivot That Defined Everything
In 2014, Dr Kervis Soo made the decision that would set the trajectory for everything that followed: he moved away from traditional direct sales and fully committed to building online digital communities, using WeChat as his primary platform.
In the context of Malaysia’s business landscape at that time, this was a genuinely unconventional move. Most businesspeople were still sceptical of online social commerce. The concept of private traffic — building owned communities rather than renting audiences from platforms — wasn’t yet part of mainstream business thinking in the region.
Dr Kervis Soo spent the next five years in this space, largely out of the public eye. He was accumulating operational experience in digital content, community management, and live streaming ecosystems. He was developing an understanding of how creator economies function at the grassroots level. And he was beginning to explore how AI tools could be applied to content production and audience development.
Those five years looked quiet from the outside. They were anything but.
The Moment Everything Connected
When Dr Kervis Soo founded Xingyu Group and formally entered the MCN space, he wasn’t starting from zero. He was deploying twenty years of accumulated context into a structure designed to operationalise it at scale.
The AI MCN model he built wasn’t a concept he borrowed from somewhere else. It was the natural outcome of someone who had spent two decades at the intersection of digital communities, content ecosystems, team building systems, and emerging AI capabilities — and who had the analytical framework, developed through his Lincoln University doctorate and AI Honorary Fellowship, to turn all of that experience into a structured, replicable system.
The journey that nobody talks about is the reason the outcome is so hard to replicate. Dr Kervis Soo didn’t become the AI MCN First in Southeast Asia by moving fast and breaking things. He became it by building slowly, consistently, and with a clarity of direction that most people only find in hindsight.