How Seek Dance was founded.

Mei-Lin Ooi

Founder, Seek Dance · Petaling Jaya, Selangor · Yoga & pilates practitioner, 6 years

Mei-Lin has been a yoga and pilates regular for six years — enough to have cycled through a dozen studios across the Klang Valley, and enough to know exactly how unreliable Google's listings for them usually are. Seek Dance started the way most annoying side projects start: out of spite. In late 2024 she was looking for a reformer pilates studio near her flat in Petaling Jaya. Google turned up three options. One had closed eight months earlier. One's phone number rang out. The third's listed address pointed at a shuttered shoplot two doors down from the studio's actual unit — an easy five-minute walk, if the pin had just been right.

She'd also spent eight years in retail operations, the kind of job where a wrong address or a stale record isn't an inconvenience — it's a chargeback. So instead of just complaining about it, she started a spreadsheet: every yoga, pilates and dance studio she could find nearby, checked one at a time, called, mapped, confirmed still open.

The spreadsheet grew. By early 2025 it covered the whole Klang Valley. By the time Seek Dance properly launched, it had become the seed of a directory that now covers 934 studios across 51 cities in every state in Malaysia — every one checked the same way that first spreadsheet was.

“I don't think a directory should be allowed to list a studio it hasn't actually confirmed is still open. That's the whole standard.”— Mei-Lin Ooi