coriander in pho

Hi Ario! Can you share a bit about yourself? Your preferred name, hobbies, the city you live in, anything!

Hi! My name is Ario. I love cats, music, and Lego, but not necessarily in that order 😆 I’ve lived in various places over the years — I was born in Bandung, but I spent a significant part of my childhood in Sydney, Australia. I’ve also lived in Bogor, West Java (Indonesia) and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, but I call Jakarta home now.

I am very much at home playing bass to uncomplicated songs, but I have anxiety about almost everything else, hahah. I’ve established a career in entertainment media after studying Industrial Design, spending the first 10 years in various companies before starting my own; KaryaKarsa — it is currently the third company I’ve built. 

I’ll just go straight to the point about KaryaKarsa: How did it all started? What prompted it? As in, has it been a process such as market research, industry analysis and the likes, or was it something like, “hey, it looks fun!”?

The idea of KaryaKarsa is not new.

We have Patreon in the US, but the first time I thought about doing something like Patreon in Indonesia, I did not believe that people would be willing to give money to creators!

I revisited that idea in early 2019 when I was thinking of transiting out of my company at that time, Wooz.in (now sold): “Why not make it easy for fans to give money to their favorite musicians using GoPay, which was already popular?”

After chatting with the late Aria Rajasa Masna, who became one of my business partners, he said such a concept would work for all types of creators, not just musicians, who are similarly not making money from their work. After that, we did some research and launched an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in June 2019 and the rest is history. 

From my perspective, entrepreneurship has always been about everything: Management, finance, operations, and all that. As the co-founder of KaryaKarsa and an entrepreneur in Indonesia tech industry, what are the things that you feel folks would need when they want to be an entrepreneur? Apart from the money and capital, of course…

There are two fundamental things that an aspiring businessperson must tackle before investing their time and money in actually building the business:

• Market reseach and validation. At the minimum, you should know what your user persona is and what their needs and pain points are. Ideally, you can determine the market size and potential spending per person. 
• Unit economics. Figure out how much money you can make in profits from each transaction. 

Everything else is basically iterating from market needs and scaling the unit economics. Of course, when you start building the business, you’d need to be able to manage people and delegate tasks, manage the finances, and understand compliance (business permits and all the needed documents with the legal aspects.)

Looking back at your experience in the music industry: Is there a skill or experience that you have been hold dear from your previous experience in Indonesia music industry to how you are right now in KaryaKarsa?

Yes! Making business plans.

I was in business development back then, so I was in charge of making new business and making money. I needed to be able to make ideas, find partners or clients, and be responsible for a profit/loss statement. The profit and loss statement will describe your sources of making money, and what costs you need to pay to make that money, so it will be very easy to see if your business is doing well or not from that P&L (Profit and Loss) statement. 

What is your most favorite part of working on KaryaKarsa?

It’s impactful.

It has an impact on a lot of creators, and that drives me forward to continue building KaryaKarsa. It’s not even about what I want to build any more — what I want can guide the way forward, but the way to do it is to prosper together with the creators since the incentives are aligned: KaryaKarsa makes money when the creator makes money. 

I want to “steal” some of your knowledge here, hahah. As a co-founder and CEO, your day is guaranteed to be really busy. What are the tools that you are using for time and project management?

I use almost everything on Google Workspace: Documents, Calendar, Chat, Tasklist. Any repeat tasks I put in my tasklist and I put tasks I need to remember to weekly update docs and, yes, tasklists. Since my work is not really task-based, I don’t use tools like JIRA or Trello much because a lot of my work is open-ended. 

This question is slightly off-track from the focus on KaryaKarsa, but I’m curious: Before KaryaKarsa, you also founded and managed two initiatives: Ohdio.FM and Wooz.in. How did you do that? What makes you have such courage to give it a try and start?

Ha! It was more of “let’s do something I will regret if I did not try it”.

I didn’t feel my skillset and my knowledge fit within the needs of what the industries I wanted to work in needed. For instance, I applied to Google many times, but all they had were sales positions so I wasn’t suitable.

Since I began my entrepreneurship journey in 2012, I felt it was just time to do it, and conditions were more favorable for me to go in that direction than, say, continue my corporate route. Honestly, I’ve never considered it a “courageous” step, just an inevitable one. I can’t say I’m a good entrepreneur, but I can say now that I am “experienced”, hahaha. 

What would you say to any aspiring 13-14 year old teenagers who also want to be an entrepreneur or starting a startup?

Learn the basics of market research & validation, and unit economics. BUT— work for others first. Your learning curve will be much faster if you work for an established company. Spend a few years in the field of your choice.

Also, making a business is not about what you want to make but what the market needs. I think at 13 and 14 year old, you can just try anything [legal!] that can make you some extra money, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your studies.