Pintarnya marketplace
Employee #2 and first PM. Built and scaled a two-sided jobs and fintech marketplace into one of Indonesia's largest.
The problem
The hard part was never the app. It was trust: a worker deciding whether to route their income, and their first formal loan, through a brand they had never heard of.
Indonesia has tens of millions of blue-collar and gig workers who can't easily find a job lead or get approved for a bank loan, and the two are linked. No payslip means no credit; no credit means a missed shift can spiral into debt. We set out to build one app to find work, get paid, and borrow, and the whole thing lived or died on whether people trusted it with their money.
I joined as employee #2 and the first PM, on the founding team, and owned products end to end across multiple verticals: opportunity and PRD through launch and post-release analysis. That meant building both sides of the marketplace and the earning layer between them: the job-seeker app, Rekrut for employers, and Cari Cuan, where workers earn from side hustles between jobs.
Decisions
Design for low trust and low bandwidth, not for us
Our users are not on flagship phones with fast connections. They are deciding whether to trust an app with their income. Every flow was built to be legible on a cheap device, on a slow network, in one hand: short forms, plain-language copy, status that is always visible. We measured drop-off per step and cut anything that did not earn its place.
Earn revenue by adding value, not by squeezing price
The easy way to grow revenue is to charge more for what exists. We did the harder thing: built new things people would pay for. New revenue streams across the marketplace and the financial products, priced to the value delivered. The result was growth that did not come at the cost of trust or churn.
Treat the payment system as product, not plumbing
Disbursement, repayment, subscriptions, employer top-ups, and incentive cash-out each have a different failure mode and a different moment of anxiety for the user. I built the payment system from zero across pay-in and pay-out, and treated reliability and clarity as features: a worker should always know where their money is.
Outcome
Figures as publicly reported (TechCrunch). Pintarnya has raised a $16.7M Series A led by Square Peg, with Sequoia, Vertex, and East Ventures across rounds. I also built and coached the PM team, and set the operating model, OKRs, and the PM career framework as the org grew.