🤯 He Almost Quit For Real Estate. Then Built TradingFXVPS to $1M.

Watched peers pull 6-figure monthly commissions while grinding through 18-hour days — years after being replaced by his own trainees.

Author

Admond Lee
June 07, 2026

New here? Join us to become the top 1% founder by learning from startup failures:

Hey Founders,

👋🏻 Welcome to The Runway Ventures (🎙️Podcast Edition) — where I interview founders and deep dive into their stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their startup journey and mistakes with actionable insights.

You can raise $30M, keep 20%, burn cash for years and hope for an exit that may never come.

Or you can build a $1M business, keep 100%, pay yourself a real handsome paycheck every year.

In today’s world with AI, bootstrapped is the default. VC is the exception.

That's why I just had Ace Zhuo on the TRV podcast. A Singapore founder who turned a forex side hustle into a bootstrapped $1M+ global VPS business — after almost walking away. Let's get to it! 🚀

Today at a Glance:

  • 🫡 1 Founder → Ace Zhuo (Founder & CEO of TradingFXVPS)

  • ⚠️ 2 Mistakes → One supplier, zero backup

  • 🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Manage remote teams on outcomes (not hours)

  • 🔗 The Runway Insights → 3 ways founders are building in public

  • 💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → Supabase raises $500M (Series F) to expand AI database infrastructure as vibe coding fuels backend development demand

🫡 1 Founder: Ace Zhuo (Founder & CEO of TradingFXVPS)

🌟 The Highlights

🇸🇬 Founded by Ace Zhuo in 2016, TradingFXVPS is a Singapore-based fintech infrastructure company providing premium low-latency VPS hosting purpose-built for retail and institutional forex, crypto, and futures traders.

  • The Problem — 🐢 Retail forex traders couldn't get institutional-grade infrastructure without institutional prices.

    • Home connections gave 200-700ms latency, killing automated strategies during volatile events like NFP releases.

    • Cheap VPS providers oversold resources, generic cloud (AWS, GCP) wasn't built for tick processing, and weekend support was nonexistent.

  • The Solution — ⚡ TradingFXVPS provides sub-millisecond latency via Equinix colocation, hardware purpose-built for MetaTrader, 24/7 support that actually answers on weekends.

    • 0.3-1ms latency across 8 global data centres, 99.99% uptime SLA, no overselling, dedicated IPs the company owns outright.

🫡 Founder Story

Ace was an M1 customer service officer in Singapore, paying his way through a part-time teaching degree when forex side-income led him to a Hong Kong forex services company.

He became their 6th employee. Did everything — sales, support, server setup, EA configs.

Then they let him go and replaced him with the people he'd trained.

So in 2016, he started TradingFXVPS — solo.

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Dedicated Server 🤯

🤑 By 2025, that solo bet had compounded into $1M+ annual revenue, all bootstrapped.

Zero VC for the first decade.

🌏 Not just that, they have 8 global data centres, customers in 120+ countries, 4.8/5 Trustpilot.

In mid-2025, TradingFXVPS won Best Low Latency Hosting Provider + Trading Technology Excellence Award at South East Asia Business Awards.

🚀 Plus industry-firsts — HFT servers with sub-300ns latency and the first VPS provider deploying AMD Ryzen 9 9950X chips.

Not bad for a guy who got replaced by his own trainees.

🌋 The Lowlights

❝

It's also one of my biggest regret that I didn't actually identify broker as one of our ICP in the earlier stage of business.

— shared by Ace in our podcast

For years, Ace ran TradingFXVPS as a pure retail-trader business — forum marketing, 50% first-month discounts, weekend support. It worked beautifully for individual traders.

But brokers were the bigger play. Higher contract values. Sticky B2B revenue. White-label deals. He didn't see it for years.

🥵 The first 5 years were brutal. From 2017 to 2022, Ace solo-operated TradingFXVPS — sales, support, server provisioning, all of it. 18-hour days. Live chat installed on his mobile to answer 24/7.

Then came 2018. Real estate agents around him in Singapore were pulling 6-figure monthly commissions. Ace got his own licence. TradingFXVPS was still small — the math of selling condos looked stronger than running forex servers.

He nearly left.

 🚀 The Comeback

The wake-up call came in March 2020.

🦠 COVID-19 hit. Singapore's circuit breaker shut down property viewings overnight. Real estate froze. Retail forex trading exploded. TradingFXVPS demand surged.

For the first time, Ace saw it clearly — TradingFXVPS was recession-proof. Real estate wasn't.

He recommitted. Killed the side bet. Started building properly.

🌏 Built a remote team across Vietnam, India, Indonesia, and Singapore — results-driven culture over micromanagement, most stayed 5+ years.

🚀 Then the business compounded — broker partnerships with FXtrading , MakeCapital and Mena Capital. In Feb 2025, Ace even rescued a struggling competitor — taking over CheapForexVPS and restoring service for affected clients for free.

📌 Here’s the TLDR of TradingFXVPS:

  • Pre-2016

    • M1 customer service officer in Singapore, pursuing a part-time teaching diploma, exploring forex side income.

    • Joined a Hong Kong forex services company as the 6th employee, covering the entire Asia time zone solo.

    • 😭 Got let go and replaced by the people he'd trained.

  • 2016 — 🚀 Founded TradingFXVPS solo, deliberately positioning premium against the $5/month race-to-bottom.

  • 2017-2022 — The brutal solo years. 18-hour days, live chat on his mobile for 24/7 support.

  • 2018 — 🏠 Got a real estate licence while watching agents pull 6-figure monthly commissions in Singapore property — nearly walked away.

  • Sep 2019 — ⚡ Launched HFT Virtual and Dedicated Servers with sub-300ns internal network latency.

  • Mar 2020 — COVID circuit breaker shut real estate, forex demand surged. Recommitted to TradingFXVPS.

  • 2021 — 🌏 Added Tokyo and Hong Kong data centres, reaching 8 global locations.

  • Nov 2024 — First VPS provider to deploy AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processors with DDR5 RAM across the fleet.

  • Feb 2025 — Took over struggling competitor CheapForexVPS, restored service for affected customers for free.

  • Mid 2025 — 🏆 Won Best Low Latency Hosting Provider 2025 + Trading Technology Excellence Award at South East Asia Business Awards.

🙏🏻 A decade ago, Ace got fired and replaced by people he had trained.

In 2018, he almost walked away to sell condos. Then COVID hit. Property viewings froze. Forex trading exploded. And Ace finally saw what he was already sitting on.

🤑 Today, his bootstrapped company runs 8 global data centres and hits $1M+ in annual revenue — fully bootstrapped, brokers knocking on the door.

Want to learn more about TradingFXVPS?

⚠️ 2 Mistakes

Mistake 1: One supplier, zero backup

Ace built TradingFXVPS on a single IP supplier with no redundancy. When that supplier changed their IP ranges, clients' IP-locked trading algorithms had their licences revoked overnight. Strategies stopped mid-market.

🤦🏻‍♂️ Customers don't care whose fault it is — they only see your brand fail.

Ace compensated affected clients with free subscription months, then owned the dedicated IPs outright (a 6-figure investment) and built multi-provider redundancy to prevent single-point-of-failure from happening again.

Mistake 2: Missing brokers as an early ICP

🥶 For years, Ace ran TradingFXVPS as a pure retail-trader business — forum marketing, 50% first-month discounts, weekend support. He was good at it.

But brokers were the bigger prize → higher contract values, white-label deals worth far more than any retail subscription.

By the time he started chasing them, brokers had entrenched relationships with incumbent providers. In B2B infrastructure, trust takes years to build — and Ace had lost the head start.

🧠 3 Lessons Learned

Ace and his remote team member

Lesson 1: Manage remote teams on outcomes, not hours

Ace tried tracking software with his remote team — all it produced was busywork. He scrapped monitoring entirely, switched to outcomes-only, and because of that, most of his 15-person distributed team has stayed 5+ years.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

  • Activity tracking measures effort, not output — and people always game what you measure.

  • Ownership beats surveillance for retaining distributed talent.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

  • 🎯 Define the deliverable (not the schedule)

    • Replace "X hours per week" with concrete weekly outputs — "support ticket response under 4 hours" or "Q3 data centre migration deployed on schedule".

    • If you can't define the outcome clearly, the role isn't ready to be remote yet. Clarify the deliverable first or no tracking tool will save you.

    • Tools → Linear for engineering outcomes, Notion for weekly written status updates.

  • 📊 Run a 90-day outcome trial before reaching for monitoring software

    • For each remote hire, set 3-5 measurable outcomes per quarter (i.e. 99.99% server uptime, ticket SLA under 2 hours, monthly NPS above 8).

    • Review weekly. If outcomes land, autonomy continues. If outcomes miss, dig into the cause before adding surveillance.

Lesson 2: Don't abandon slow-compounding businesses for quick wins

🏠 In 2018, Ace nearly chased Singapore real estate when other agents were pulling 6-figure commissions. Then COVID shut down property viewings while trading exploded — and his slow $25/month subscription business proved recession-proof.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

  • An adjacent industry with 6-figure monthly paychecks can mask the compounding power of your current bet.

  • Subscription and infrastructure businesses often take 5-7 years to mature.

  • Side licences and side bets drain focus from the business that actually needs it.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

  • 🛑 Run a “stay-or-leave audit” before any pivot

    • Ask 3 questions:

      • Is paying customer count growing year-on-year?

      • Is gross margin improving annually?

      • Would the business survive a 6-month founder absence?

    • If 2 of 3 are yes, you have a compounding business that just needs time — walking away is the expensive choice.

    • Document the answers. When your gut conflicts with the data, trust the data.

  • 🌱 Pre-commit to a compounding horizon

    • For SaaS, fintech infrastructure, or subscription businesses, lock in a 5-7 year horizon before judging the bet. Carousell's Quek Siu Rui ground through 2012-2018 before the business compounded — the early years looked nothing like the eventual trajectory.

    • Diagnostic question → would you still want to leave if no shinier opportunity existed right now? If no, sit with that answer for a week before deciding.

Lesson 3: Domain expertise is your first moat

Ace could only build TradingFXVPS because he'd lived every pain point as both a forex trader and a support engineer at his previous Hong Kong employer.

Without that domain expertise, he couldn't have diagnosed the supplier crisis that nearly broke him in year 2.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

  • Customer empathy can't be reverse-engineered from market reports — you have to feel the pain.

  • Familiar industries let you make confident calls during the crises that decide survival.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

  • 🔍 Run a domain audit before you commit

    • Spend 6 months in the industry as an employee or customer first.

    • Forrest Li built Sea Group's Garena because he was a serious gamer himself — he knew exactly what gamers wanted because he was one.

  • 📚 Become the deepest customer before you build

    • Use the product or service yourself for 6-12 months. Track every frustration in a notes doc — those frustrations become your roadmap.

      • Ace's pain as a forex trader literally became TradingFXVPS's feature list (weekend support, no overselling, dedicated IPs).

    • Talk to 30+ practitioners doing the daily work. Not founders or VCs — actual operators with current scars.

🔗 The Runway Insights

  • 3 ways founders are building in public (Read)

  • How my non-engineering team at Sentry learned to ship (Read)

  • How to build an outcome-based pricing plan (Read)

  • How AI changes the software value chain (Read)

💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar

  • Supabase raises $500M (Series F) to expand AI database infrastructure as vibe coding fuels backend development demand (More)

  • JumpStart secures funding to expand AI-powered vending machine network connecting Japanese brands with Indonesian consumers (More)

  • SG Enviro bags funding to provide industrial water treatment and wastewater solutions across Southeast Asia (More)

💃 Rate Today’s Edition

What'd you think of today's edition?

Your feedback helps me create better content for you!

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

That’s all for today

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.

You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.

See you again next week.

- Admond

Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.

Reply

or to participate.