Journey

Direct selling

After university, I took an unexpected path: direct selling.

Roy Manik, my senior from ITB and mentor, encouraged me to explore direct selling as a way to develop five essential skills: communication, sales, leadership, emotional intelligence, and personal branding.

Along the way, I spotted a market gap: Western Indonesia was driven by MLM hype, while Eastern Indonesia had strong demand for health products but limited distribution.

I built a product-driven distribution strategy that eventually grew into one of the company's top-performing sales networks, generating over IDR 100 billion in monthly sales at its peak.

What started as a journey of personal growth became a decade-long lesson in leadership, strategy, and building businesses around real market needs.

See the strategy behind it

Brand building

Then selling moved to social media, and I moved with it.

To understand the shift, I joined Subiakto's branding seminar. It changed how I looked at products: not what I could make, but where a brand could stand.

My first plan was skincare. After working through the positioning, I went with feminine care instead, and co-founded Aishavcare with its founder, Helga Larasati.

Building that brand taught me the business end to end: social media, media buying, e-commerce, product licensing, and cosmetics. The products are herbal and natural, so the supply chain and manufacturing came with their own quirks. I learned a lot there.

Aishavcare reached a 4.9-star rating and became a top seller in its category.

Then other sellers started asking me for help. That became the next chapter.

Agency

So I started an agency in Bandung.

Helping other sellers turned into a business of its own. Later I joined forces with Katalis, working alongside its founder, Hilda Ayuningtyas, and its CEO, Yusuf Baraja. My mentor there was Razi Thalib.

Our clients include national public figures and large companies. Most of that work sits under NDA, so the names stay with us.

We are not affiliated with any political party. We work as a professional agency.

Manufacturing

Alongside Aishavcare, I bought a small packaging company.

It was one of Aishavcare's vendors. With my friend Delly and my relative Fauzan, I helped grow it in two years, from a workshop making tens of millions of rupiah a month into a supplier for well-known brands in Jakarta.

At its peak, we pushed production capacity from 2,000 to 150,000 hard boxes. A little crazy. For those few weeks we filled the order books of almost every small vendor in Pagarsih, Bandung. I mapped the fastest routes through the alleys and moved the work by angkot and becak, one workshop at a time. It was fun, and hard.

Manufacturing taught me discipline, along with determination and resilience. It is capital-heavy and leaves little room for error. I employed hundreds of people, and I learned to live simply.

Most of all, I learned the work ethic of people who have far less, and how hard they work. I'd pitch a project in a meeting room in SCBD, then drive back to Pagarsih for coffee at Pak Broto's stall. I became a kind of bridge between those two worlds. Few periods of my life taught me more.

I didn't stay long. Manufacturing in Indonesia still needs better support, regulation included. The company carries on in Bandung as Ontime Box.

See how we did it

Mindful

Then I stopped for a year and a half.

Close to forty, I had enough. Not a lot, but enough. I also felt I had drifted far from the path I was raised on. So I stepped away from business. I traveled, rested, and took an honest look at myself, what Muslims call muhasabah.

My father was a kiai. He ran a bookshop called LUCU, short for Laksanakan Usahamu secara Ukhuwah: run your business in brotherhood. It also sold religious texts, so I grew up surrounded by books. In this period I read almost a book a day, and went back to studying properly, including al-Ghazali's Ihya Ulum al-Din.

I studied my own history too. My grandfather came from Yemen, from a family of habaib, descendants of the Prophet. It is something I kept hidden for my whole professional life.

The rest I let curiosity lead: Islamic history, family history, branding, photography, programming, whatever came to mind. Learning freely like that sparked my creativity again.

Most of it, though, was about finding out who I am and honoring the people I come from. My mother fell ill during this time. I came out of it grateful, committed to being a good Muslim, and more conscious in my work: why I do it, and who it is for.

Generative AI

Then generative AI arrived.

I dug out my old notes. AI was one of my favorite subjects at ITB, knowledge-based systems in particular, and my time in Korea pointed the same way. But this felt completely different.

I started using it in my own life, then in my businesses and my friends' businesses. Soon people were asking me to teach it. So I started AISPEAK, a training institute that is now part of KATALIS+ in Jakarta. The field moves fast, and it is a different world from the programming I learned.

AISPEAK has since signed MOUs with several universities, and I recently paid a visit to ITS in Surabaya as well.

The training brought projects. For the technical work I partnered with Digital Oasis, friends from Polban in Bandung. Pak Firman and his team are the experts who build.

Now

Then I moved to Jakarta.

Together with Katalis, the agency from Chapter 03, I formed KATALIS+. Ocean Group and AIELITE came with it, as enablers for our projects.

Our aim is to speed up digital transformation, and then AI transformation, done with diligence, wisdom, and responsibility.

With partners, I also co-founded an investment company with Ocean Group. Our office is in Kemang. I help Nest Living too, along with a growing list of collaborations like these.

In between, I work as an editor and ghostwriter. The latest book I edited is Digital Finance & Financial Innovation, published by Deepublish in 2026.

Part-time, I also work as a business analyst, mostly on data, at Wiseco with Rizky Wihardi, a friend from high school.

I am also a certified BNSP assessor, assessing professional competence for Indonesia's National Professional Certification Agency.

These days my hobby is taking courses on Udemy and Coursera, reading, and learning anything new. It turns out generative AI rewards people whose knowledge is broad.

Right now I am studying governance closely. Next, I want to move toward the more fundamental, even philosophical, questions, while keeping my hands on the technical side of running generative AI.

Lately I have been enjoying design and art too, simply for the beauty of it. Now it is my creative side that is getting sharpened.

Most of my days now are spent meeting people and speaking. That is how my businesses grow, and it is what I do today as a speaker and an advisor. Want to collaborate on a business, start your digital and AI transformation, or spread something good together? Let's connect.

Life is good. Alhamdulillah.

Broad experience is my strength, and also my weakness.