index

I love building things on the internet, from software to writing.
The internet has opened up many opportunities for me.
I started writing my own code when I was a kid in a small city in Indonesia, just with a PC and the (slow) internet.
In my final year of college, I built a chatbot business that helps companies in Indonesia serve their customers on WhatsApp.
Learned lots of lessons (whether it was technical coding stuff, the market reality of software business in Indonesia, hiring people, and even learning about myself).

Currently I focus on things that I really like: build once, sell over the internet.
Now I build micro-saas with customers across the globe.
The idea of creating compounding impacts just by typing stuff on your keyboard and publishing it, is really fascinating.

But, it’s challenging.
Sometimes you build things and publish it, just to find nobody pays for it or even uses it.
You need to find something that really delivers value, compared to competitors on the market, towards the right market.
I’m going to share some of the things I learned in my journey below.

Market research is more important than just coding

You can save a lot of time & energy by doing market research first before jumping into building.

Find the opportunities first. Research what the values that’s worth it to deliver, the market, the existing players in the market, and how potential customers can find your product.
Spend your time, energy, or money on research first until you really understand the opportunity & challenges on your own.
If you are solving your own problem, that’s a fortunate thing since you might already know the ins-and-outs of the issue.

Don’t do the opposite way (build first then research later) - it’s gonna take much more energy, time, and money.

Also, if you’re a person who really cares about the value you’re delivering with your business, you really need to ask yourself, “What kind of business do you really want to do?”

Advice for young people or first-timers starting to build stuff

I see lots of young people or first-timers take a big risk from the start (e.g. the classic “I want to overthrow the giant”), and eventually never take entrepreneurship role again after they fail. Unless you have tons of privileges (big money to spend as capital, big network of successful people, etc), I don’t recommend taking big risks from the start.

I recommend letting your projects start naturally when building on the internet once you find the opportunity.
Don’t just build things for the sake of building things - unless your purpose is just about learning technical stuff.

You need to be clear about whether you want to do business or you just want to learn. If you want to sell, you need to start with market research.

One easy example for the first step is for micro-saas, you can start looking around add-on or plugins marketplace such as Shopify Apps, Zendesk Apps, Gorgias, Wordpress, Google Workspace, Microsoft, or more.
Take a look at the big popular add-ons but with bad reviews, and then try to build a better product or a better business model and then publish it on their marketplace ecosystem.
Since it’s a marketplace where users search about the product they want, you can get customers even without a lot of marketing effort.

This method is the lowest risk for young people or first-timers trying to build stuff online. Micro-SaaS typically only takes one or two days to build, which means the energy investment is minimal, so you don’t get burned out even if you fail. You can keep finding opportunities & building till you can earn your living.

After you get some success and familiarize yourself with small wins in the internet business space, you can move on to afford building bigger things on the internet.

Side Note: What I’m learning now

Now I’m learning about the new technical stuff (esp. AI engineering - very excited about the possibilities). I believe the application layer of AI has so much opportunities to work on.
Currently, the only AI applications that I find useful are:

• ChatGPT or other AI chatbots (Claude, etc)
• Cursor or other AI coding agents (Claude Code, etc)

I feel like there is going to be much more useful AI apps incoming, in the business, professional, or even consumer space.
There are lots of exciting ideas. I believe you may also already have some ideas that can disrupt the current way of doing things.
Examples include how we can re-think hiring employees should work, how dating app should work, how marketing and sales should work, how studying should work, how getting financial advice should work, and many many more with AI.

A lot of people are also building these stuffs, but we haven’t seen products that as widely successful as ChatGPT or Cursor.
It takes the right founder, the right time, place, market (& a lot of other things) to make things work & succeed.

Thanks for reading!