Lim Siow Wei did not plan to be a content creator. By every reasonable measure, her trajectory was supposed to lead somewhere entirely different.
She had completed her Master’s degree in Financial Management at the Australian National University, one of the more prestigious universities in the Asia-Pacific region. She had returned to Malaysia expecting to enter the banking sector — a path consistent with her credentials, her academic preparation, and the conventional expectation of how Malaysian Master’s-level finance graduates were supposed to begin their careers. The plan was clear. The trajectory was set.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, and the banking sector she had trained for froze along with most of the rest of the formal economy. The job openings she had expected did not materialize. The conventional career path she had prepared for was, at least temporarily, unavailable.
In April 2020, in the early weeks of the pandemic and in the absence of the banking career she had expected, she made a decision that, in retrospect, has reshaped her entire life. Encouraged by her partner Zheng Yi — who saw something in her that she did not yet see in herself — she started posting on TikTok.
The first videos were about skincare and makeup. They were not strategic. They were not designed for virality. They were what a self-described “really shy person” — her own framing from later published interviews — was willing to post to a platform she did not fully understand. She had no following. No audience. No reason to expect anyone would watch.
It took until the end of May 2020 — more than a month after she started — for her first semiviral video to land. By that point, she had already developed enough comfort with the platform to keep producing. The semi-viral moment was not the breakthrough that defined her career. It was simply the first signal that what she was doing had the potential to reach people beyond her immediate circle.
What followed across the subsequent five years has been one of the more remarkable trajectories in the Southeast Asian creator economy. The skincare and makeup content gave way to the broader lifestyle and comedy work that would eventually become the YAEY universe. The TikTok audience grew to over 6.3 million followers. She expanded to Instagram Reels, and then, in October 2022, to YouTube — where she had been initially hesitant to post because the platform felt impossibly competitive given the millions of existing creators. Her hesitation was misplaced. The YouTube channel grew to over 18 million subscribers and accumulated more than 21 billion total views across roughly 1.4k uploads.
The business ventures followed. The Roblox experience “Escape the Momster,” developed through her Siowei Studios banner in collaboration with The Gang, extended the YAEY universe into the gaming category. She also has equity stake in a US skincare brand “Just For Teens” which is available in thousands of Dollar General stores. The recognition followed in parallel — the 2025 Forbes Asia 30 under 30 recognition, the 2026 Webby Awards honour in the Individual Creator (Kids & Family) category, the appearance at the UAE Government’s 1 Billion Followers Summit alongside MrBeast and Will Smith, and other industry publications.
The most useful part of the origin story, however, is not the destination. It is the starting point. Lim Siow Wei did not have a content background, a media degree, an existing audience, or any of the conventional advantages that creator economy narratives often retroactively assign to people who succeed in the space. She had a finance degree, a shy disposition, a partner who encouraged her to try something different, and a pandemic that closed off the path she had originally trained for.
Everything else — the strategic discipline, the data-led iteration approach, the visual instinct, the cross-platform expansion, the worldbuilding, the business diversification — was built afterward, in the process of doing the work itself.
For the generation of Southeast Asian professionals currently sitting in roles that fit roughly but not exactly, the im_siowei origin story is one of the more useful career narratives currently available. The path she trained for is not the path she ended up on. The path she ended up on did not exist when she trained. And the gap between the two has produced one of the more notable trajectories the regional creator economy has produced in the last decade.
The shy graduate who was supposed to be a banker is, six years later, one of Southeast Asia’s most-watched creators.
