Building a personal brand on LinkedIn isn’t easy, even more so if you’re a student balancing uni, part-time jobs, and life in a new country. But what if all that effort online could lead to something big, like a new AI tool?
That’s exactly what happened to Ashvin Praveen. You might know him as the creator of the viral “LinkedIn Unwrapped,” which took over the platform in December 2024. What you might not know is that he built a six-figure business purely through organic content on LinkedIn — no ads, no shortcuts.
Back when he was studying mechanical engineering at the University of Sheffield, Ashvin wasn’t exactly sure what path he’d take. Toward the end of university, he became curious about startups, tech, and how businesses grow. That curiosity led him to marketing.
“When I was starting on LinkedIn, I just wanted to make some extra money as a student,” he says. “I started posting content about what I was learning in marketing, and I also wanted to build a presence. If I were going to get a job in marketing, I wanted people to look at my website and LinkedIn and see that I knew something. That would give a good impression.”
That mindset of showing up and sharing insights led to much more than a side hustle.
“We were able to build a six-figure business purely from content on LinkedIn,” he says. “We never spent any money on ads or anywhere else. It was all driven by inbound traffic on LinkedIn for free. We didn’t need any capital to get started.”
As long as he kept creating content, the opportunities kept coming. Now, Ashvin wants to help others do the same, especially students. That’s where his latest venture, Cleve AI, comes in. It’s an AI tool designed to make personal branding simple and accessible, helping students grow their presence on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
Ashvin is building Cleve.ai to help busy business owners consistently create high-quality content without the time or cost of an agency. Source: Ashvin Praveen
From Malaysia to studying engineering in the UK
Ashvin grew up in Miri, Sarawak, a Malaysian state on Borneo. From a young age, he had a curious streak.
He enjoyed building things, especially anything related to music. He’d collect old speakers, wire them together, and build simple amplifiers to see how he could make them sound better. Around the house, he was always tinkering or modifying something — even cars.
His father used to service the family’s vehicles at home, and Ashvin picked up the basics by watching and helping out.
So when it came time to choose what to study at university, a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering made sense.
He chose the University of Sheffield, supported by an Undergraduate Merit Scholarship.
Here, his world started to expand beyond the traditional career paths he’d grown up seeing.
At 20, Ashvin chose to intern at a startup — a decision he believes was one of the best of his career. Source: Ashvin Praveen
By his second year, Ashvin wanted to take things further. Curious about marketing, he built his own content agency Whacked. The idea was to help CEOs and founders build personal brands online. More importantly, it was his way of learning marketing from the inside. Through Whacked, he gained real experience crafting campaigns, managing clients, and experimenting with strategy — all while balancing university life.
That’s when a bigger decision started forming in his mind. “I’m going to be working until I’m 60, probably even 70, given the current trend,” he says. “And what’s the worst that could happen if I take the first five years of my career to try something crazy and different? So, I decided on that and wanted to see where it goes.”
Making that choice was not easy at all. Everyone in his family — parents, cousins — were engineers. Business wasn’t something they were familiar with, and initially, his parents didn’t understand what he was doing.
“They thought I just didn’t want to work and that I was dropping out,” Ashvin says. “They were confused, especially because I was leaving everything behind. With the grades I got in engineering school, I could have easily joined a prestigious engineering company, done solid work, and earned a good salary. So, the opportunity cost was confusing for them — why would I choose something so different?”
It took time for his parents to see that Ashvin had a plan, and that the path he chose, while unconventional, made sense to him.
How personal branding led Ashvin to create Cleve AI
After a year of showing up consistently on LinkedIn, Ashvin started seeing results. During that time, he posted regularly, sharing thoughts, lessons, and topics genuinely interested him. “The goal is to share what you’re personally curious about and excited about, and what you’re learning,” he says. “Then, people in vastly different stages of their life or career will find you. That’s part of the magic of the internet.”
For Ashvin, that’s essentially what personal branding is: a tool for connection. Whether it’s someone ahead of you in your industry, a potential employer, collaborator, or client, the point is to find alignment. The internet levels the playing field by letting people discover you through your ideas, not just your résumé. It allows people to see how you think, and that’s often more powerful than a bullet point list of achievements.
Ashvin started sharing his marketing learnings on LinkedIn to build credibility, which unexpectedly led to much bigger opportunities. Source: Ashvin Praveen
Things shifted when generative AI entered the scene. Ashvin remembers the first time he tried ChatGPT — it felt almost surreal. Here was a computer responding in natural language, understanding context, and helping him work through ideas. At the time, he was running his creative agency and noticed that many of the value-added tasks they were doing could soon be automated.
But more than that, he saw something bigger: AI had the potential to understand how people think, and that could change the way individuals build their online presence.
“That’s when I thought, ‘This is definitely going to change the world’,” Ashvin says. “It felt exciting to be part of this space. Since I had been in the content space for a while, it was interesting to think about how we could use generative AI to build something for creators or within the content industry.”
Content creation was becoming more accessible with these new tools, and as people started trusting individuals over faceless brands, the importance of personal branding skyrocketed. But there was a gap. Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, as powerful as they are, lacked personalisation. They didn’t really “know” the creator — they couldn’t pull from previous posts or understand tone and style.
That’s when Ashvin and his team saw the opportunity. What if you could take a user’s past content, layer it with AI, and produce something truly tailored? Something that sounded like them and felt aligned with their voice.
From that idea, Cleve was born. The team built Cleve with one goal: to make it easier for people to share their ideas online in a way that’s true to who they are. While it started with LinkedIn, it quickly expanded. Cleve now supports Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and newsletters — anywhere people are building their brands.
“We’re largely building the product for ourselves because we’ve been frustrated with the existing workflows of tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude,” Ashvin says. “That frustration is one of the key reasons we started building Cleve in the first place — to create a better solution for creators like us.”
Unlike general-purpose chatbots that take time to learn about the user (if at all), Cleve is built to personalise from day one. It can scan your best-performing posts and generate content ideas based on what already works for you, not based on random prompts.
On top of that, Cleve offers detailed analytics and social media reporting, helping users understand what’s working and where they can improve. The writing experience is more tailored, yet still leverages the strengths of leading foundation models like ChatGPT and Gemini, only with a smarter, more relevant layer added on top.
The best part? You don’t have to write prompts at all. “Think of it more like using Apple Notes or Google Keep, where you just dump your raw ideas and then hit ‘Generate’ to turn them into a post,” he says.
In other words, whether you’re typing bullet points or recording a voice note, Cleve takes your input and turns it into content that sounds like you.
Ashvin and his two co-founders pulled four all-nighters in two weeks to ship the massive design and code behind LinkedIn Unwrapped. Source: Ashvin Praveen
Going viral with LinkedIn Unwrapped
Early last December, Ashvin and two co-founders were out having lunch, discussing how the year was almost over, and how far they still were from hitting their targets. That end-of-year urgency was kicking in, and they asked each other: what can we do that’s crazy enough to move the needle?
Among others, their conversation soon turned to Spotify Wrapped. It had just come out, and like everyone else, they were comparing stats. And that’s when it clicked — what if they built a “Wrapped” experience for LinkedIn? Something that gave people a snapshot of their year on the platform.
And they immediately went to work. They gave themselves two weeks to design, build, and market an entire product. And they did. “We launched it just before Christmas, thinking we’d be thrilled if it reached 3,000 users,” Ashvin says. “In the first week, it hit 30,000. By the second and third weeks, it had passed 100,000 users.”
The growth was global and wild. They’d watch in real time as users popped up across continents. One user in Poland would turn into five, then 20, then hundreds. Countries like Brazil, Hong Kong, and the Philippines suddenly became key markets. Every spike on the dashboard felt surreal.
“We posted a lot from our personal accounts, which helped drive early adoption,” Ashvin says. “One of my posts got a comment from Alex Hormozi, an American entrepreneur worth US$100 million as of 2025, and that opened the door to a whole wave of users in the US. From there, things just started spreading naturally. We also engaged with everyone who used the tool and shared it on LinkedIn — commenting, thanking them, and doing our best to keep the community alive and growing.”
The team has expanded with talented full-stack engineer Faw Ali (far right) who is now helping accelerate product rollouts and experiments in the coming months. Source: Ashvin Praveen
What’s next for Ashvin and Cleve
There’s a lot more coming from Cleve in the near future. The company launches new improvements and updates every month, ensuring that there’s always something fresh on the horizon. The focus remains on how they can leverage AI to enhance context and improve the outputs they deliver. As technology evolves, Cleve is constantly experimenting with new technologies to find the best tools that will enhance the user experience.
“Ultimately, our goal is to find the best tech, ship them to users, and provide the best possible experience,” Ashvin says.
For students interested in using AI to disrupt industries, Ashvin has some valuable advice: the opportunity is bigger than ever, as computers now have the ability to understand and communicate with humans at a deeper level.
“For example, I was recently fixing a ceiling fan and changing the capacitors because it wasn’t running fast enough,” he says. “I just took a picture, sent it to ChatGPT, and got instructions on what to do. I then followed those instructions and executed the task. Even something as simple as that is now possible.”
The engineering grad believes no one’s limited from building their own AI tool. “Know that AI is not expensive to build with,” he says. “You can create tools to solve your own problems, and it’s so much easier with the AI tools available now. Leverage platforms like Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, and start building. It doesn’t matter even if you’re not technical or studying computer science — you can just learn to build things. This is a really great time to get started.”
