Kiki (K): Hi everyone, back in Kartini Teknologi episode 19 and as usual Kiki and Galuh here will chat with a guest that we have invited today. I’m personally very excited because I have been following her since I was in college. If you know Storial, NulisBuku, you may also be familiar with Aulia Halimatussadiah. Hi Llia, how are you?

Llia (L): Hi Kiki, I’m good.

K: Llia is currently cofounder and CMO of Storial.co. Besides of that she is also involved in many activities, such as co-managing director of Girls in Tech, writing coach, and a writer herself. I think you published more than 30 books right? And if I look at your portfolio, you’re focusing on literacy. We’ll talk more about it, but let’s take a step back. How did you get interested in tech? You went to major in IT right.

L: In middle school I got a laptop, bought by my dad, and I had internet connection. That’s where I started to get to know people. I knew people who lived abroad, Indonesian students abroad. They were so cool, they already had their own website, and because I liked writing, I wanted to show my poems. So I want to put my poems on the web, add my photo there, just what kids do. And because no one told me how, I learned it by myself. So that’s how I got into tech. When I finally knew how to make a website, how to upload the photo, I added snows in the browser… those are what got me curious in tech. Turns out tech is so fun and we can create anything with tech.

K: If I’m not mistaken, this story is similar to Galuh’s.

Galuh (G): Quite similar, it started with a blog too, and I wanted to publish my writing, difference is after college I didn’t publish anything. But I wanted to show my writings, and I was quite amazed that other people can read my writings just by typing the URL.

L: I wanted to showcase my writings, right, and because I was stupid I didn’t use… what was it, search engine optimization? Right now what we usually use if we want to create a blog?

G: WordPress maybe.

L: I didn’t know that WordPress exists. So what I did was I create the WordPress itself. So it was quite complicated, every time I want to post something I had to build my own CMS, although something like that already existed.

K: Do you remember what programming language you used?

L: I usually use ASP or PHP.

K: If I take a look at your LinkedIn you also created a web consultancy and game studio. Did you also get to code?

L: Of course, an actually in my first business I coded it by my own. It was kutukutubuku.com and for that online bookshop I coded it myself. But for TukuSolution and game house I didn’t code. I only coded for my first business. The rest, I didn’t code, I already had a team, and it was getting more difficult too.

K: Did you learn ASP and PHP in college or did you study by yourself?

L: College only teaches you so much, so you have to learn by yourself. I have a group of friends that often work on projects together. We even created the Indonesian version of Facebook or Friendster called suka2kamu.net. It was just like Facebook back then. So I could learn while also hanging out with friends. Because if we only rely on what college teaches us, we will not develop.

K: You’re now a cofounder, a leader in your own startup. Do you think that having a technical background help?

L: It really helps, because my startups are technology startups, so I’m dealing with tech most of the time, so I have to talk to developers or other technical people. My tech background helps in a lot of ways especially in communication, expectation, flow becomes clearer. So I think it really helps, this tech background.

K: I thought of you because right now there’s this hype about the Korean drama Start-Up. When I was thinking about Start-Up and tried to find a woman figure who is active in start-up, I can’t think of any other person than you. Your experience in startups go way back, but the silver lining of the startups that you have built is always about books. How did you make your interest in literacy and tech meet?

L: By the way I haven’t watched the drama. I’ve never watched Korean dramas, so maybe that would be the start. As for literacy, I’ve actually always preferred writing, reading. Technology wasn’t on my mind in the early days. But why I went to technology, it’s my parents. My parents saw there is no future as a writer or a reader. According to them, those who have a future are people who went to study IT. Same like people who went to work in a bank, people who are engineers. So my parents already had a vision that technology will rule the future, so it’s better if you learn technology too. In the past I wanted to study literature, study English literature, but my parents didn’t allow it at that time. They said no, you can do it on the side. So I studied IT, and as for reading and writing, I did them on the side. But now looking back, I actually found it by accident. Because I found problems when doing what I like. When I was reading, I had this problem where the online bookstore didn’t have a shopping cart, so every time you shop you have to enter your personal data again, there’s no login either. I said this is terrible, so I finally made it myself, which made me make my first online bookstore. NulisBuku.com too, at that time I published the 16th book, and yes, I have published many books. But my 16th book is still rejected by the publisher. So I found another problem, Indonesia has a shortage of publishers, so people who don’t match the idealism of publishers should be rejected, even though it might be good too. So that’s how I made NulisBuku.com, it’s a print on demand platform. If you have books, you just have to upload the manuscript at our place. If someone buys it, it can be printed on demand and sent to the buyer, and the author gets royalties. For Storial, my parents’ personal experiences didn’t allow me to become a writer because they said writers are poor. With Storial, my fellow writers can write by chapter, even when the writing is not yet uploaded, and can get feedback from readers if someone has read it. And when many people start reading it, they can start making money even though the book isn’t finished. Everything happened by accident. I also realize that technology is a tool, because with technology I can reach out to more people, and I can make a big impact in society.

K: I really agree with what you said, that technology is a tool. I imagine that if you finally chose to study literature without understanding technology, maybe in the end there will be no Storial, no NulisBuku, kutukutubuku.com.

L: At that time I could not see it, because learning tech is difficult, very difficult so when I was studying it I was like “oh why did I take this major?” But now we have learned the lesson.

K: When it comes to startup, you have been making startups for a long time. I’ve actually worked at startup once, but personally I’m not familiar with the process, how is a startup developed from scratch. Can you tell us, what are the stages that you go through when making a startup?

L: Actually, I never knew how to formally start a startup, so I was really self-taught. From my experience, it comes with the problem first. There are problems that can be solved with technology. We have a hypothesis, that this problem can be solved by technology. We start to make some sort of prototype, or the term in startup language is MVP or minimum viable product. Or even as simple as making the design, show the people you trust who will be the users of your product. Go ahead and research, if I make a product for this problem, what is the target market? Immediately talk to them. What I usually do after I have the idea is to buy a domain, buy a URL, secure it. Then I keep looking for partners. For example, I want to start NulisBuku, I would look for a printing partner. And because I don’t want to handle the tech fully, I looked for a tech partner, like the CTO. From scribbles, I would submit the MVP to these potential partners. As soon as we have the founding team, we can slowly start building the product. This is also where we discover the product market fit, we prove that this product really is someone who wants to use it and wants to pay. There are various methods and it’s going to be a three-hour workshop for this, but once you get a product market fit, once your target market really wants to use your product, then you can start launching and find more team members. Anyway, before that, if there was no funding yet, you could use your own funds, or angel investors — mommy, daddy, and there are many angel investors now, angel networks that you can tap. Or there are many VCs who offer seed funding too, so you can search there. But my advice is use your own capital or the angel investor that I mentioned earlier. Just to validate your product first. After starting to recruit people, you run it and see, is your startup is developing according to the expectation? Because startup has to grow fast. 30% per month. If it doesn’t look like that, something is wrong and you have to review it again. So when you see the growth is good, you review it yourself, review it again, and continue with various organic efforts before you pay. Community, SEO, is it clear?

K: It’s clear. I want to ask the one about funding. You said it’s better to bootstrap first or get angel investors first before going to venture capital. May I know why?

L: You are still free to carry out your vision at the beginning. So if you receive funding too quickly from the start, there are too many voices that can affect what you do. So it’s better if you really focus on your vision. And it’s also risk management too, so if you still use your own money, it’s still relatively… if anything happens, like it has only been running for 3 months, there’s no growth. Just stop or pivot, change course. So there is no dispute, no strange problems with other people, it’s just dealing with myself.

G: From all the steps that you went through when building a startup, what was the most challenging part and why?

L: Hmm, what, maybe one of them is funding which is quite challenging. Because in my case, not all investors have the same vision as me in literacy. Storial, my company, is a storytelling platform which is essentially an intellectual property factory right. So we make intellectual property from the stories in Storial, and in the end we can make films, webseries, and audiostories. Not all investors actually have an interest in this. Because we have a mission to empower Indonesian storytellers, not all investors have the same mission. That’s one of the challenges for me. For others, what I didn’t experience but that other people might experience is finding a good cofounder or team. That might be a problem too. I suggest… I don’t know how to do it, I feel like I’m quite sociable and have enough personal branding, I’m also active on social media, so when I’m looking for a cofounder it’s easier for them to validate, if they want to partner with me it’s easier for them to assess because I’m out there, I’m open with people, and they can judge whether they can work with me or not.

K: I was curious about what you said earlier, not all investors have the same mission. Is it like looking for a publisher, where we have to find someone who has the same vision as what we want to convey?

L: Yes, really, the challenge is to make ourselves relevant. If I follow what I want, later I will really focus on the literacy part. Meanwhile it’s not sexy enough for investors, for others to join or support. So what we do is we also enhance our vision, so it’s not only the literacy that we see, but there is the entertainment part, the intellectual property part, so it’s not just tech but audio visual too, it’s bigger. So the chances of investors being interested are also increasing.

K: So you have to be smart in looking for business opportunities, right, to keep it sustainable?

L: It’s relevant, the keyword is “relevant”. Our relevance to … with the present, lah. Don’t be too fixated on our own idealism.

K: Whenever talking about creating a team for a startup, people often say we have to have…

G: Hackers … hustlers …

K: Hipster? Did you also implement it when you wanted to start a startup?

L: Actually, I never applied anything, because like I said earlier, I only have an undergraduate degree, so I’m not at all an academic or by the book, I don’t think so. So I really just followed my instincts and intuition for my needs at this startup. I think this is not popular among other people, because no one openly says “I just use instinct”. But for women, female founders used to use instinct. But that doesn’t mean we don’t see data, we always look at data, but the final decision is always intuition like I said earlier. So if asked, did I follow those three? No, though in the end I actually recruited those three roles too. But I was not really following by the book, like it has to be this way, it has to be that way. Not really. I always believe, you know your startup best. So if someone asks me something like “what is the answer, is it A or B?” I’ll always say I don’t know. You are the one who actually knows the answer and the answer is in the experiment. You have to try. That’s why there is such a thing as A / B testing. That’s why at startups there is no absolute answer. Just try it first. And let me know the results in a week. And that number will answer everything, so we don’t have to fight, right? So for me, the way I look at it is it must be balanced. Be rational, just test it. And be emotional as in using instinct. So it must be balanced.

K: So a few weeks ago, I watched a YouTube video about a person who tells about their changes from childhood, growing up, starting with teenagers until finally now. You must have gone through that kind of process too, right from the start to create your first startups until now building Storial And I was wondering, from the process that you went through from the beginning until now, according to you, what characters helped you to become the tough entrepreneur that you are now?

L: Yes, it’s all a process, the 21-year-old me and the current me are different, right. So there is a process to get here. But some things really help, and one of them is assertiveness which is the ability to make decisions. Know what you want and make the decision to go with it. And then action, so it’s like the executor. So if you already know what you want to do, don’t delay or have a lot of self-doubt, you can minimize that. If you already know what you want to do then do it. The experimental mentality is also important, nothing is wrong, nothing is right, you have to try it out. And resilience, the startup world is tough. We have to be able to… so for example, like me, I have to have two mindsets when running a startup. Sometimes you have to be detailed, take care of operations, sometimes you have to be visionary, so seeing from the big picture, how can you do this in the future and how to fundraise. So in the same time, you have to be adaptive and resilient. That is it.

K: You seem like someone who always seems to have plans for the future, right? With all that you have accomplished now, with Storial.co’s progress as well, what’s next foryou? Are there any startup ideas that you haven’t accomplished, or maybe you just want to go as a full-time writer or what?

L: For myself, I actually prefer to … not focus on what else to do, but more about for the ones that I already have, how do I maximize it? For example with Storial, so during the pandemic we just recruited an internal technology team, because previously our team wasn’t internal. Then of course going forward we want to be more advanced in technology, have various kinds of technology that can identify stories which are good, so it’s about focusing on what I already have and how to make it even better. In personal life, I always want to try new things. So I always want to do new things that I’ve never done before. And while in Bali, for example, I just learned to swim like in April. After that I learned to cook, so from not being able to cook at all to being able to make dozens of recipes, which means you can cook right. Then… I have just learned to surf, so going straight from not being able to swim to learning how to surf. I also learned how to sing, I recently learned to sing. Things that seem trivial also count, I’m afraid of dogs, but yesterday I actually held a dog myself.

K: You can’t live in Bali if you’re afraid of dogs.

L: That’s why, I’m afraid of dogs, but yesterday I wasn’t afraid and I was able to pet dogs. So yeah small things that I just tried to keep doing.

K: You keep on pushing your boundaries. Like from not being able to cook before, so you tried to learn. You used to be afraid of dogs, now you started to learn how to interact with dogs.

L: Actually, in my words it isn’t pushing boundaries, it’s more about experiencing life. So I want to have adventure, new adventure, new experience. Actually, that’s how it is. And I … actually, I’m a girl in tech, I’m also running a nonprofit called Girls in Tech and we had a campaign called Why Not. And this is actually the spirit of Why Not. If, for example, you are told to learn to code in Python, why not? And if someone tells me to surf, why not? Just say why not first, then you try after that. Do you like it or not? If not, stop. If you like it, continue. But don’t say no, or you can’t, or something before trying.

K: You mentioned about Girls in Tech Indonesia. I’m curious about that too. I myself have participated in the program several times, one that I remember was at the Ruang Komunal Faceebok in Jakarta. I forgot about what, if I’m not mistaken about personal branding. The impression that I got from that event was that it was really fun, very girly, something that girls actually enjoy. I’m curious, why did you create Girls in Tech?

L: Yes, Girls in Tech actually was created in 2011, yes, we are part of the global Girls in Tech. Initially, I was really concerned about the number of girls working in the technology sector, especially the lack of women who are founders. So we made Girls in Tech to… we call it inspire the geek in every girl, all girls have their geek side in them, and we want to inspire it by showcasing lots of technology that they can adapt and learn to use, whether for pleasure, productivity, or solving problems in society. So at first we made Girls in Tech so that we can get together, talk about technology, have workshops. The end goal is as simple as wanting to change the mindsets of girls about technology from such a complicated, difficult thing into something fun. And we are also concerned when seeing that back then, in a tech team, usually we saw the boys wearing sarongs when they were working overtime, smoking especially inside the room. Whereas we girls want to be clean, smell good, have flowers if necessary, use colorful nail polish when coding. So it’s different. That’s what we want to show to the girls—that we can still be pretty, fashionable, and talk about technology and other complicated things—things that seem difficult but are actually things that we can do too.

G: I really like the tagline, to inspire the geek in girl, because people like to say that it’s wired in the girls to not have interest [in tech], even though I also agree that in fact there’s the geek side of every girl, but perhaps it does not come out because of the environment for example. And it’s really nice to see communities like Girls in Tech Indonesia who are encouraging that, so I’m very happy to hear it.

L: Thank you so much.

G: I want to ask the next question, right, you were involved in many activities, both as a mentor, initiator. What motivates you to share your knowledge with others?

L: Actually it is more like… that’s my passion. So it turns out that my passion is actually sharing. So it’s like… that’s why I do everything from writing to teaching. I do that online or offline. It’s just my passion to share what I learn. So I would study first then share it. I love doing that. I like to do it, I like to tinker around, so if I’m interested in something I can really research it. Then I can do that quickly, because fast reading is something I’m used to. So like for example one 250-300 page book I could finish in three hours. So my research process was fast. So as soon as I can understand a subject, I would immediately teach it. Because the knowledge will stick with us even more, right? Some say to make the knowledge stick to you by writing it down, I would also add that you can do it by teaching it too. Because of that, we will master more and more knowledge if we teach it to other people. It’s more fun to do. That’s what I like doing. And it’s a reward for me if there are people who, when I finish teaching, they tell me their lives change because I teach them. I think it’s something that is very rewarding for me.

K: I think people who have the talent to become mentors or coaches are really lucky, because not everyone… maybe people can learn, but there are people who seem very difficult to teach it to other people. I feel being a mentor is something that not everyone has. As for you, because you have done it for so many times, what do you think is your mentoring style like?

L: Like I said, I didn’t learn how to be a mentor. So I also don’t know what my mentoring style is. But basically it depends on whether this is a big class or a 1: 1 session. If it’s a 1: 1 session, I always approach by listening, basically. Listening a lot and try to see the person’s core. Who am I talking to. I have the methods to know what kind of person you are, what do you have to do in life, I have several methods and once I understand them, the mentoring or coaching goes even deeper. So even though for example the coaching is a matter of writing, I also want to see what kind of personality you are. So I adapt my coaching or mentoring to your personality. So you could say that my coaching style is very personalized.

K: This is interesting. So you’re the one who tries to adjust to match your mentee.

L: Right, right. I would also listen to them first, then adjust to their needs. It’s very rare that I repeat my materials. Like most of them are either improved according to the audience or they are completely different, because I’m a person who likes to explore new things, right? So I have a lot of weird classes. Like a personal branding class, yesterday I made a product marketing class, and then after that I made a philosophy class, how can I not get stressed easily. The philosophy is stoicism, adopting Marcus Aurelius’ book, which Indonesian version I am currently editing. So I tried everything and made materials out of them.

K: If there is one thing that maybe you could share to the listeners of Kartini Teknologi, for our friends who might have an interest in the world of technology, what would you say to them?

L: The keyword for me here is curiosity. Curiosity. So always develop your curiosity. Actually, it’s not just for technology, it’s for everything. So for example instead of saying that “ah that’s really hard, I can’t” how about you replace it with the question “what do I need to do so I can do it?” so it’s already different. How about “how can I create an app”, for example. The questions are different and the answers are totally different, from the earlier “ah, it’s hard to make an app”, it’s already a full stop. But if you are being curious, you will really do it, it’s all on Google. Google has all the answers. It wasn’t like this in the past, now it’s easier. There’s Google, there’s YouTube, you can learn on your own. And mostly for free. So mostly in you now. The decision is yours to be successful. So might as well be successful, right.

K: Yes, that’s Llia from Storial.co. Thank you, Llia.

G: Thank you Llia.

L: Thank you so much Galuh and Kiki.