Everyone has heard a story about an entrepreneur who had an idea in college and turned it into a successful business. For Andy Christiawan, the story he knows is his own.
In 2010, while majoring in systems information at Bina Nusantara University in Indonesia, Andy and his friends started some website projects, including an e-commerce business selling jeans. As a result of their success, soon after, they found themselves pitching their website and application development skills to the advertising agency heavyweights in Jakarta.
Today, the company they created—Mineral, which began like so many others as a college idea—has grown to become a successful interactive agency like the ones Andy once pitched. Based in Jakarta, Indonesia, Mineral specializes in designing websites, apps, and mobile development along with technical infrastructure maintenance. Projects include high-traffic fashion e-commerce websites for local brands such as PVRA and KLAMBY, food and beverage businesses like KAUM and Re.juve, and hospitality destinations Potato Head and Katamama Suites.
“We begin every project with a passion for internet technology, design, and the digital world,” said Andy, Mineral’s founder and CEO. “We do our best work when we’re able to effectively communicate our clients’ messages with better experiences through their website or another platform, and help our clients get their products known not only in Indonesia but globally.”
While using Amazon and DigitalOcean for the company’s cloud infrastructure, Andy saw an advertisement for Linode. On a whim, he decided to move one of Mineral’s clients to Linode’s Singapore data center. The Mineral team quickly realized that Linode outperformed its competitors when it came to speed, ease of use, and cost.
Mineral now puts Linode at the front of a multicloud strategy.
“A lot of customers don’t realize they have alternatives to the big-name cloud vendors. Linode’s technology, performance, and price give them an option for their cloud infrastructure,” said Andy. “For us, Linode is our primary choice.”
Andy relies on a variety of Dedicated Linodes for everything, from serving APIs to Redis and proxy servers. The company also uses Linode for backups. “Linode provides the infrastructure we need and the processing power, allowing us to focus on our core business development,” he said. “Our DevOps team also works closely with Linode to make sure we can scale and grow quickly.”
Linode’s Singapore data center is an instrumental part of Mineral’s cloud infrastructure, reducing latency and improving performance while satisfying in-country data localization and sovereignty requirements, an increasingly important requirement for many of Mineral’s clients. Unlike other cloud computing providers, Linode offers consistent pricing across every one of its 11 worldwide data centers. Every data center includes 24/7 on-site security, access control, and high availability. Linode also leverages two decades of operating expertise to build relationships with peering partners that allow traffic to travel faster on its Next Generation Network.
So, the next time you hear a story about how someone took an idea in college and turned it into a business, think about Andy Christiawan in Indonesia and his application design and development agency. No doubt, Andy will appreciate you sharing his story.
