Five companies, one thread

Indonesia's first modern digital pharmacy. I co-founded it in 2019 and run it as CEO.

The problem

Patients with chronic illness stop taking their medicine when refills are hard. I wanted a refill to take no effort at all.

What I did

• Built an aggregator API that pulls digital prescriptions out of hospital EMR systems and routes each one to the partner pharmacy nearest the patient. Hospitals need no new hardware.
• Put our Tetama API inside the software thousands of pharmacies already run: 3,500 on VMedis and 600 on Apotek Digital.
• Built Lifepack for Medic, where more than 800 doctors write e-prescriptions directly. Our busiest doctors each generated up to IDR 245 million in transactions a month.
• Partnered with ManaDr, a Singapore teleconsultation company handling 100,000 consults a month, so Indonesian patients who see Singapore-based doctors get their prescriptions filled by us.
• Bought straight from pharmaceutical principals, skipping the distributor chain, at discounts of up to 92%.
• Turned our partner pharmacies' inconsistent stock lists into one clean catalogue of about 10,000 medicines, and made delivery of prescription medicine free anywhere in Indonesia.
• Set the company up as three entities so each part is properly licensed: ITMI for health technology, IFMI for pharmacy operations and GLM for pharmaceutical distribution. I own the architecture, the product strategy and the unit economics across all three. Lifepack was one of the first few to hold a PSEF licence, Indonesia's e-pharmacy licence, and it is ISO 27001 compliant.

The result

Revenue reached USD 16.49 million in 2023, and GMV passed USD 1.7 million in August 2023 alone. At the peak we handled more than 66,000 transactions a month, and in the early expansion phases we grew 63.8% to 69.5% a quarter, compounded. Our network has facilitated more than 4 million teleconsultations. In 2024 we sold about IDR 18 to 19 billion a month across e-commerce.

Over USD 10 million raised across four rounds, including a USD 7 million Series A in 2022, a valuation that reached USD 42 million, and millions of users. For our hospital partners: faster delivery and fewer dispensing errors.

Pluang is a licensed multilateral commodity-trading fintech that sells fractional gold and derivative-based products to people the banks never served.

The problem

When I joined as co-founder and CTO, the platform handled 700 transactions a minute. Far too few for a mass-market product.

What I did

• We lifted transaction capacity from 700 to over 1,000,000 per minute in eleven months.
• I shipped a new B2B distribution system that reached more than 70,000 offline outlets.
• It ran at 100 percent uptime through launch.

The result

Revenue grew 566 percent in those eleven months. Pluang went on to raise a Series A led by Go-Ventures after I left to start Lifepack.

Tiket.com is Indonesia's leading online travel agency. I co-founded it and ran its engineering for six and a half years.

The problem

We had to build a booking platform from nothing, fast, then keep it standing when a flash sale sent 150,000 people at it at once. On a startup's budget.

What I did

• Our founding team took the product from nothing to a live booking platform in 100 days.
• I designed the platform to hold 150,000 concurrent users during flash sales, selling tens of thousands of tickets in minutes.
• I built a B2B2C API layer so more than 8,000 partners could sell Tiket inventory inside their own travel agencies, promoter sites and corporate portals.
• We held credit-card fraud loss to 0.0025 percent of transaction value in 2016.
• All of it ran on 120 production servers kept alive by three sysadmins.
• I built a technology team of 73 people, 37 of them engineers.

The result

USD 1 billion in gross merchandise value between 2012 and 2017, across flights, hotels, trains, events and car rental. Blibli, part of Djarum Group, acquired Tiket.com in 2017; the group is now listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange as BELI. The platform won Best IT System at the e-Corp Awards 2015, and I was named Best CIO the same year.

An Indonesia-Japan joint venture for golfers flying in from abroad.

The problem

Golfers flying into Indonesia needed a way to book their tee times before they landed.

What I did

I built Golfnesia.com, the booking platform, plus Golftex, the multi-course management system that ran behind it. Three months, two engineers, and I was one of them.

The result

The product worked. The market didn't move fast enough, and we shut it down knowing the product-market fit wasn't there. I count it as the cheapest lesson of my career: Tiket.com started within the same year and went on to a billion dollars in bookings.

My first company, run by PT Ayoklik Indonesia: Jakarta's first Web 2.0 city directory.

The problem

Jakarta had no Web 2.0 city directory: nowhere to search for a place, read ratings and find what was near you.

What I did

• Wrote the search engine myself on Sphinx, ranking places by distance, pageviews, ratings, recency and keyword weight, with stemming and synonyms for Indonesian.
• Hit a page render target under 200 milliseconds with Squid, memcached and eAccelerator.
• Signed a content partnership with Google for Maps and Places in 2010, and went deep on Yahoo Southeast Asia: Login, SearchMonkey rich snippets, YAP and YQL.

The result

East Ventures in Singapore invested, and Batara Eto, former CTO of Mixi, advised us. Kompas Gramedia, Indonesia's largest media group, acquired Urbanesia in 2012. It was the first of my two exits.