My Story

Where do I start?

My name is Martin James Cooney. Born in Brisbane, Australia in 1958. Originally, from a family of 2 other brothers and a sister. My mother, father and one brother have now passed away.

Married twice, with both now finished. I'm often described by past co-workers as the 'youngest old-guy' they've ever met 😃

Work Life

An interesting journey, really.

The Repo Man

Started as an 'on the road' repossession agent for a finance company, of all things. Actually enjoyable work, to be honest.

Well there was this one time when I was shot at by an elderly Polish guy 😃 I was eventually promoted to internal collection work. Interesting people with different problems. Good grounding for reading character — a skill I still use.

Construction Work

First married and looking for something to bring in good money to pay off the first house quickly. Dry-wall/gyprock work — good base wages, lots of overtime, house paid off in a few years.

Cooney Computers

PCs started being popular and I was interested. Started building and selling computers — a cut-throat business in Australia but my first real experience in customer service, which was to later serve me well.

PowerUp / WebCentral

The internet started to flourish, still mainly in the BBS era. I joined PowerUp BBS as a phone-call technician helping customers with BBS and dial-up problems. After a few years PowerUp split in two and WebCentral was formed — Australia's first web-hosting business.

I stayed 9 years, running Technical Support (the largest department, around 50 people) through the dial-up-to-broadband boom, including the migration of Telstra's 4000+ customers onto the platform. The department ran with near-zero staff turnover the whole time, which I'm still proud of.

Fun fact: the founding CEO titled department heads 'VP'. When a McKinsey-backed COO arrived to prep the company for its ASX listing, titles were flattened to 'Manager' — role and scope unchanged. I answer to either.

This was when I bought the cooney.com.au domain, incidentally.

Traffika / HEARIS

General Manager of a digital-marketing agency (people, process and KPIs), then Program Manager for a SaaS social-media platform, taking it from concept to commercial release.

Bangkok: SKAINET Limited

In 2014 I moved to Thailand and, with my business partner Stephane — a friend from the fintech startup years — built and ran three online-dating platforms (ThaiRomances.com, PinayRomances.com and IndonesiaRomances.com) for over a decade: he coded, I ran strategy, customer support and billing.

COVID shifted the market, so we ran an orderly wind-down, sold the three member bases to competitors, and deregistered the company in 2025. A full business lifecycle, build to exit — rare and valuable experience.

Since then

A print-on-demand e-commerce experiment (CafeVibe — closed deliberately: the lesson was modern customer-acquisition economics), ongoing markets research, and consulting through expert networks on customer-support operations, SaaS launches and startup due diligence.

What Am I Doing Nowadays?

Bangkok, these days. After winding down our three SE Asia dating platforms (see the story on this page), I kept busy with a print-on-demand experiment, and now consult through expert networks — customer-support operations, SaaS product launches, startup due-diligence — and do markets research.

If you need someone who has actually run support organisations, launched SaaS products and closed a company in an orderly way, my LinkedIn on the Contact page is the fastest way to reach me.

Please do enjoy the site and the blog posts too.