By Khalil Majeed, Project Director, Suluh
This is a story about making mistakes. Big ones, small ones and a few possibly catastrophic ones. It’s also a story about finding opportunities in those mistakes, being self-critical and pivoting accordingly.
In August 2019, when Faqcheck Lab started, my business partner, Chan Tau Chou, a seasoned investigative journalist and communicator, came up with an idea that was ahead of its time: Build inter-newsroom collaboration to boost capacity and combat the incoming wave of fake news.
We spoke to nearly a dozen Malaysian chief editors. Many liked the idea.
I also met a bunch of enthusiastic academics and we started talking. Ideas began brewing.
As we moved into December 2019, COVID-19 struck.
Suddenly, with the world in crisis, those newsrooms understandably had to shift their focus. The project stopped before it could begin.
This is where our first pivot happened. It hit us: If newsrooms didn’t want to fact-check, the next best thing would be working with universities and their students, training them to fact-check and story tell.
In weeks, we signed up five university lecturers and a few dozen students. In January 2020, we launched Faqcheck Lab. For the next three years, we worked entirely remotely, training, managing and growing our knowledge base.
We shaved training for students from three months to two weeks. Simplified processes. Adapted global standards to local stories. We even started training other fact-checking teams that were popping up.
Everything was funded by donors and ancillary projects, including training organizations to provide their staff fact-checking and storytelling. Our unique way of doing fact-checks had attracted attention. This involved finding the one critical “domino” narrative hidden in a sea of noise within fake news and, using journalistic interviews and deep research, debunking just that, causing the rest of the fake narrative to collapse.
It made our fact-checks simple and easy to digest. We spoke at Google and we trained outgoing diplomats. We helped found JomCheck, the largest coalition of fact-checkers, academics and newsrooms in Malaysia that provided critical fact-checking during multiple elections and countered the rising tide misinformation.
But we weren’t generating the necessary revenue to sustain ourselves. A couple of years in, we realised the dangers of donor reliance: it is neither sustainable nor predictable. We realised that the narrow definition of our skillset was hurting us. We were seen as being just about fact-checking.
This came to a peak in mid-2024 when, after months of work, we began marketing ourselves as Faqcheck, a new AI-powered solution for corporate clients. The idea was to offer them a predictive disinformation report, using our tech to forecast potential ‘fake news’ crises before they impacted their brand.
All this while we were still working on communications-driven projects. The money was decent, but we were still seen purely as fact-checkers and people didn’t want to pay for a service they regarded as in the public interest, which should be free.
So, in March 2025, with MDIF in tow, we sat down and had one of the most honest meetings in Faqcheck’s history.
I call this moment: “Taking Faqcheck to the back of the barn and shooting it.”
We sat in a chilly boardroom gutting our past failures and successes. It was like therapy, but for the company. Eight hours in, we agreed that Faqcheck needed to evolve.
The biggest lesson? Don’t be so attached to an idea that you refuse to let it go. You need to grab the opportunities that are right there, rather than stubbornly flailing a dead horse. It was an ego check. As a business owner, you must let that ego go. Making mistakes and adapting quickly is the whole game.
In the last three months, we’ve made our biggest pivot so far. Faqcheck evolved into Suluh.
Our stories and the content we produce online are now aimed at not only generating leads but also informing the various stakeholders we engage with, PR agencies and industries, about how best to communicate with purpose, both through us and with our partners in the journalism field.
It’s this deep connection within the journalism sector that is key. We now develop deep, investigative and insightful industry reports as products to sell on our platform. We apply journalistic rigour to data to create something the market needs.
The plan is to invest the revenue from these products into funding journalism, fact-checking and media training – creating a sustainable engine that powers the public good.
Days after we began the pivot, we got our first major client.
So maybe Faqcheck isn’t gone completely and there’s still more to this story.
We want to thank everyone that’s helped us, especially MDIF’s Mayuri and our coach Ai Lian, who’ve supported us through this daunting journey of reinvention.
This essay is part of a series highlighting the journeys of independent media organizations supported through MDIF’s media business capacity-building program across South and Southeast Asia, as they experiment with business models, strengthen resilience, and adapt to challenging environments. Together, these stories contribute to a broader exploration of sustainability and innovation in independent media, which will be compiled into a full report following the release of the series.