FOUNDER STORY

I built Valoo
out of the ruins of my own life.

This is not a startup story. It is the story of one person who lost everything chasing income without a map — and then built the map he had needed all along.

Forty-two percent of Indonesia's online-loan victims are teachers.

42%of online-loan victims are teachers
52.01%of distressed borrowers are aged 19–34
49lives lost across 73 suicide attempts

Read that again. Teachers. The people who stand in front of a classroom every morning to build this country's children — and go home counting the days until the debt collector calls again. The people who should be thinking about their students' future are instead thinking about an unknown number that will not stop ringing.

And it is not only teachers. Indonesia's financial authority, OJK, records that 52.01% of all distressed borrowers are between 19 and 34 years old — Gen Z and Millennials. Not people who failed to try. The people who were trying hardest, at the age when the intent runs deepest.

The worst of it: this epidemic takes lives. Seventy-three recorded suicide attempts (mine among them), and 49 of them did not survive — driven by threats and public shaming that collectors broadcast to every contact in the victim’s phone.

These are not people who did not work hard enough. These are people who paid the price up front — in hard work — and were never handed the map.

For me, this is not data. It is my life.

After graduating, I spent six years trying to answer one question: what am I actually supposed to be doing?

Then I made the decision I believed was the most aggressive and the most correct one — raise my income with everything I had. For the next four years I forced four paths at once: employment, freelancing, stock trading, and entrepreneurship.

Across those four years I brought in more than two billion rupiah. Then four billion went out.

I came out of it completely bankrupt and suffocating in debt. I left the capital city and moved back to the village to live with my mother. More than ten years of my life, spent searching — and it amounted to absolutely nothing.

Exactly double what I had bled to earn.

And this is not just my story. This is Indonesia's story.

53%of workers are paid below minimum wage
57%of Gen Z chase more than one income stream
139.67 Trupiah lost to financially blind decisions
40%of Gen Z & Millennials feel financially unsafe

Repeated by millions. They follow whatever method scrolls past them on social media. No science behind it, no one walking beside them — and their hard work ends up spent for nothing.

The most dangerous part is not the money lost. It is the mental block that slowly starts dictating: this is just how far you go, so stop fighting. And sometimes, like those 49 people, they stop living. Indonesia loses its golden generation. One at a time, quietly.

The numbers are there, and they are not anecdote. 53% of workers earn below minimum wage — while inflation rises twice as fast as pay. Recognising that, 57% of Gen Z have started chasing more than one income stream. But with no framework to choose from, that urgency becomes something to harvest: 139.67 trillion rupiah has vanished into financially blind decisions.

These are not people who worked too little. These are people whose work was never given a direction.

I am a psychologist by training, and I spent years as a business consultant.

Then my own business went bankrupt — and I found I had no idea which way to earn next.

If someone with my education can be that lost about his own income, the ordinary person will have it harder still. That is where I saw it: I know the science, I understand the instruments, and I am still the case myself. So I thought.

Sitting in that ruin, I asked myself one question: what if we had guidance that connects with our deep potential and our actual limitations — guidance that knows why we stall?

So here I am, building Valoo. Valoo is built to help you raise your income and/or open a new income stream, and to raise your own self-value along the way — through the path that actually fits you. To be the buddy that walks with your progress and helps you read the map — your financial compass, on your phone.

The person building the cure was its first patient.

I took this as far as $0 allows.

15email addresses to keep the free trials running
5free tools I had never even heard of
4 hrsof sleep a day, for months on end

I started on Gemini’s free trial — back when it was not even called Valoo yet. It was Hidden Gold/Gem, built around the idea of a treasure compass. Then I used fifteen different email addresses so I could keep working inside free trials. Fifteen addresses, running almost five tools at the same time. Only in the last two months did I find the nerve to raise the monthly budget to $20 — and even that was a stretch.

Almost three months, solo, and not full-time. I want to be exact about that last part. I still run a small online business and take freelance work, because that is what feeds my family. And I split the time with my wife — raising our four children, and the gardening and the housework too.

Valoo gets six hours a day, of which maybe two to four are hours I can genuinely concentrate. Every two weeks, I take one day off.

The first months were worse than that, and the reason is specific: I was building Valoo on free tools — and those reset on a timer. So I set an alarm every five hours, around the clock, to use each window the moment it opened. Including through the night. I slept in fragments. Roughly four hours a day in total, for months on end.

I do not romanticise that, and I do not work that way now. It was not sustainable and it was not clever — it was just the only “dumb way” I had at the time.

What is holding Valoo back now is not effort. It is money.

Today the research design is filed and time-stamped on a public research registry, the product works as a Light MVP, and the algorithm engine is ready to run.

The wall stands somewhere very concrete: domain, hosting, paid tools, and funding the validation pilot. To keep moving, Valoo needs at least 10,000 users.

Right now I work as a freelancer on a platform. I have only secured two clients over the last few months, but living in a rural area, the gardening still keeps us fed. Some weeks I could only afford the cheapest daily internet top-up — about one dollar for every three days — just to keep the work going.

Your pre-order would not make me comfortable. It would let me clear the one concrete step that money (paid tools), not effort, is blocking.

I know how impossible all of this looks.

I only know two things: put your dream on the north star, and keep taking small steps until it succeeds. And that is exactly what Valoo does for you — it counts who you are and what you are already holding today, picks the one path that genuinely belongs to you, and walks it with you one small step a day. If the story above reads like your story, your own small step is right below this line.

Help Valoo Do Good

Increase your income from being you.