Over the last 12 years of trying—and often struggling—to build technology products in Indonesia, I have come to understand something that most people overlook: the most formidable barriers to entry in this space are not solely technical and not financial. The real resistance comes from deep within—Indonesians’ collective mindset, a lack of systems thinking, and the absence of a national framework for innovation. This perspective is reasonable, given that Indonesia’s tech identity has traditionally leaned more toward usage than invention.
Suppose the nation is serious about becoming a tech-driven, industrial nation. In that case, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as building shopping malls and start thinking of ourselves as building living, evolving systems, because that’s what real technology is.
I have to realize that one of the biggest misconceptions about technology creation, particularly in Indonesia, is the meaning of “build.” We claim to be building technology, but are we truly?
There is a fundamental distinction between integrating tools, launching platforms, and genuinely developing technology. And that difference matters—because it defines the level of resilience, independence, and long-term value that a product or a country can create. In this country, most people still don’t understand what it means to build a product from scratch. For many, it simply means launching a product, onboarding users, and generating revenue. But that’s only part of the equation. In the true sense, building technology means creating your own engine and architecture.
Too often, they labeled “building” as assembling third-party services, relying on imported systems, or white-labeling someone else’s codebase. It’s not inherently incorrect, but we must be clear: This is implementation, not innovation. The two are fundamentally different in terms of effort, risk, and impact.
Real product creation involves ambiguity, making decisions no one has made before, and even making mistakes. That’s the intellectual burden of truly building a technology product. In the true sense, building technology means creating your own engine and architecture.
In this nation’s context, when you decide to build a tech product from scratch, let me tell you what happens: The process feels slow, expensive, and mentally exhausting. Not because the talent is weak, but because it’s supposed to be hard. You’re not just building a UI; you’re building back-end systems, architectural logic, scalability layers, internal tools, CI/CD pipelines, and possibly even infrastructure logic, such as your own cloud.
In this phase, you will bleed, lose sleep, and even doubt everything. You will also hear questions like:
“Why are you still red?”
“Why is it taking so long?”
“Why aren’t you profitable yet?”
That’s normal. These questions often come from good intentions, but they seem to lack understanding about creating a tech product from scratch. Unlike physical infrastructure projects, where blueprints are predictable and delivery can be scheduled, technology products are constantly evolving. They don’t get built once. They get built, broken, rebuilt, and iterated again. In tech, red is ot a failure state. It’s the cost of creating something that can last.
The gap between these mindsets is massive. What stops us from becoming a true technology nation is not our talent, capital, or market. It is all about how we think. Until we embrace complexity, normalize the red phase, and stop comparing software development to shopping mall construction, we will continue to build shallow systems that cannot scale.
We need to stop romanticizing adoption and start respecting the process of building our own design. Without deep design thinking, Indonesia wouldn’t own its technology. And if the nation doesn’t own its tech, Indonesia will always be the most anticipated market for other countries.