For Klicco founder Abdul Adzhim Abdul Khalid, building a business has meant navigating rejection, personal branding, and the hard lesson that being seen is not the same as growing.
By Kartina Rosli
The Fine Print
Eight months into building his first technology company, Abdul Adzhim Abdul Khalid came face to face with a big problem. His bank account was down to two digits. Not only that, his laptop crashed and broke.
For the founder of an artificial intelligence company, the timing could not have been worse. His wife, who ran her own business and had also become Klicco’s first customer, stepped in to help him buy a replacement.
It is the kind of moment rarely seen behind the polished LinkedIn posts about entrepreneurship, the launches, milestones, photographs and announcements that make building a business appear almost linear.
Adzhim’s journey has been anything but that.
Today, Klicco has achieved five-figure revenue without external funding. His growing presence on LinkedIn has brought customers, media attention and opportunities he could not have imagined when the company was incorporated in January 2026.
However, the more interesting story is perhaps what happened before anyone knew the name Klicco and what Adzhim had to learn about himself before others would believe in the business he was building.
An Unlikely Route into Technology
Adzhim did not grow up imagining himself as the founder of an AI company. A former Madrasah student, he watched many of his peers continue their Islamic studies overseas. His own path led him to Temasek Polytechnic, where he studied Business Processes and Systems Engineering. After National Service, he signed on as a regular with the Singapore Police Force.
“For a while, I genuinely thought that would be my life for the next thirty or forty years,” he recalls. But something never quite settled.
“I wanted to create, not just maintain.”
He eventually left the force and moved into operations at the Health Sciences Authority. At the time, each chapter seemed disconnected from the next. Looking back, Adzhim sees the thread.
Madrasah gave him grounding and discipline. The police force gave him the confidence to speak, lead and deal with difficult situations. HSA taught him systems thinking and accountability.
“Each of those worlds felt separate when I was living them. But they were not,” he says. “The entrepreneur I am today is not despite that unusual path. He is because of it.”
When Something Clicked
Adzhim had actually been looking for a business opportunity for almost five years. Gold and silver interested him. So did cryptocurrency and livestock investments.
Then, around 2023, AI caught his attention.
He immersed himself in it, sometimes spending eight hours at a stretch watching videos and experimenting with tools. He wasn’t particularly interested in becoming a technologist. What fascinated him was something far more practical: What could an ordinary person actually do with this?
AI helped him organise information, learn faster and make sense of his thoughts. Soon, he began wondering what it could do for business owners buried under invoices, administration, customer enquiries and the thousand small tasks involved in keeping a company moving.
Then his future co-founder, Muhammad Najib Bin Ismail also Klicco’s Chief Operations Officer showed him an automated workflow. Adzhim encouraged him to apply it to a real business problem. Najib automated invoicing and payments for his home-based business. And that’s when – something clicked.
Najib could build the technology. Adzhim could take it to market.
A conversation with another friend pushed the idea further. Why build these systems for large organisations, he asked, when smaller businesses in the Malay-Muslim community could benefit from them?
The more Adzhim listened, the clearer the problem became.
Business owners were hearing about AI everywhere, but many were still looking at it from the outside. It sounded technical. Complicated. Built for people who understood prompts, workflows, integrations and systems.
Adzhim did not think the problem was people’s ability to understand AI.
“The gap was not the technology,” he says. “It was the translation.” And somewhere in that gap, Klicco found both its purpose and its name.
The name was inspired by klik — “click” in Malay.
At first, it was simply a name that felt right. But as the business took shape, Adzhim began to see another meaning in it.
A click is tiny. Almost effortless. Yet a click can open something, begin something, take you somewhere you could not access a moment earlier.
That became an apt metaphor for what he wanted Klicco to do.
He wasn’t trying to turn small business owners into AI experts. He wanted to make the technology simple enough that the moment they saw it working for their own business, something would change.
Oh. I get it.
I can actually do this.
That was the click. It gave Klicco a belief bigger than the technology it sells: technology should never make people feel left behind. It should make them feel capable.
Becoming The Brand
There was, however, one immediate problem.
Nobody knew Klicco.
Adzhim could build a company, explain AI and demonstrate what it could do. But if nobody knew who he was, why would they trust him with their business?
An old friend, Imran Tahir of Black Vault Marketing, gave him an answer: build the person before trying to build the company.
Adzhim invested between S$3,000 and S$4,000 in a LinkedIn personal-branding programme, no small amount for a founder watching every dollar. What emerged was not a slicker version of himself. In many ways, it was the opposite. He stopped trying to sound like a technology expert. Instead, he built his positioning around the truth: he was a non-technical founder who had figured out how to use AI and could explain it to other non-technical people.
It worked.
His LinkedIn posts began generating leads. Other opportunities followed. Adzhim says every major opportunity during Klicco’s first six months came through his personal brand rather than paid advertising.
The lesson was uncomfortable but powerful: before people trusted Klicco, they needed to trust Adzhim.
A young company could never outspend the established technology players.
But, as he puts it, “we could out-human them.”
Marketing Without Advertising
Its early customers did not arrive through elaborate campaigns or large advertising budgets. They came through LinkedIn, community events and referrals. Adzhim joined communities, attended events and spoke to business owners. More importantly, he listened.
“I did not identify the market by sitting down and drawing a perfect customer profile on paper,” he says. “I found it by showing up and listening.” And the market did not always tell him what he wanted to hear.
Klicco initially targeted the Malay-Muslim business community broadly. Price quickly emerged as an obstacle. Instead of continuing to push larger implementation projects, Klicco introduced training as a lower-risk way for customers to experience AI first.
Learn it. Try it. See what it can do. Then decide whether to build. “Positioning is not something you figure out before you start,” Adzhim says. “It is something the market teaches you, one conversation, one rejection and one pivot at a time.”
When Visibility Isn’t Growth
For someone whose business was propelled by personal branding, Adzhim has also discovered its trap. Being visible can feel remarkably similar to making progress.
A founder can post every day, attend events, collect likes and watch their follower count rise. From the outside, the business looks busy. But busy and growing are not necessarily the same thing.
“When you are a founder at the beginning, you are doing everything,” he says. “Marketing, sales, delivery, proposals, reports, content, follow-ups.”
There are now days when Adzhim deliberately disappears from social media. No posting. No networking. Those are the days for the work nobody applauds: proposals, operations, strategy and delivery. The lesson is particularly relevant in an era where founders are increasingly encouraged to become content creators themselves. Visibility may open the door. But there still needs to be a business behind it.
The Part LinkedIn Doesn’t Show
Then there were the rejections. Friends who seemed enthusiastic disappeared when prices were mentioned. Prospects sat through several meetings and then stopped replying.
There were months when very little came in.
At one point, Adzhim looked at his bank account and saw two digits.Then came the broken laptop. His wife helped him replace it.
“The reality that nobody sees when they look at a founder’s LinkedIn posts,” he says.
Curiously, the experience did not make him bitter about hearing no. It made him appreciate the value of hearing it clearly. For a small business, a prospect who keeps a decision hanging can affect cash flow, staffing and an entire month’s planning. “A clean no is always better than silence.”
Behind that statement is perhaps one of the biggest changes entrepreneurship has made in him.
The man who once imagined the security of a 30- or 40-year career now lives with considerably less certainty.
Yet he continues.
Keeping The Human In AI
There is an interesting contradiction at the heart of Klicco.
Its founder believes deeply in AI. Nevertheless, he also believes there are things AI should not touch.
Adzhim is wary, for instance, of content created entirely by machines. AI can help organise, refine and polish an idea, but he believes the original experience, emotion and point of view should come from a person.
The same applies to decisions involving judgement, relationships and character.
“A resume is a document. A person is far more than that.”
Perhaps that explains why Klicco’s philosophy feels less concerned with replacing people than with giving something back to them: time.
“Use AI to protect your time,” he says. “Use your time to invest in your people.”
The Next Click
Eight months in, Klicco has a very different problem from the one it started with.
It is growing. And growth is heavy.
“I am exhausted in a way that goes beyond tired,” Adzhim admits.
With his two co-founders supporting the company while balancing other commitments, much of the business still sits on his shoulders. The next stage will require sales, training and product teams capable of carrying Klicco beyond its founder.
“The truth about fast growth is that it is exciting right up until the moment it becomes dangerous,” he says.
“Build the team before you desperately need it.”
His ambitions stretch beyond Singapore. He hopes Klicco will eventually become recognised for AI adoption across South-east Asia, with its KlicForge platform becoming a familiar part of how businesses work.
Yet one of his most personal definitions of success has almost nothing to do with AI.
Adzhim hopes the business will one day generate enough resources to support free Islamic education and Quranic classes for the community.
In a way, it brings everything back to where he started.
A Madrasah student who became a police officer. A police officer who moved into operations. An operations executive who spent hours on YouTube trying to understand AI. And eventually, a man who left the predictable path to build something of his own.
None of it looked particularly connected while he was living it. Now it does.
Asked what he would tell the Adzhim of 2023 – newly married, working shifts and still trying to work out where all this learning might take him — his answer is simple.
Keep learning. Keep going. And spend more time with his wife before their son arrives and life becomes even busier.
“The path was always going to lead here,” he says. “You just needed to keep walking it.”
Perhaps that is the other meaning behind Klicco.
Sometimes you don’t see the whole path at the beginning. You just need the courage to make the first click.
Click here to find out more about Klicco or connect with https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdul-adzhim/ Adzhim on Linkedin
