At 15, most students are still deciding what to study. Syarif Rousyan Fikri had already started at the Bandung Institute of Technology, in electrical engineering. He was the kind of student who finishes early and then looks for the next thing to do.
The next thing was a PhD at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he reconnected with Mohammad Ikhsan. In 2016 the two started a side project that had little to do with their theses: a YouTube channel called Hujan Tanda Tanya, built around popular science. It won YouTube NextUp Indonesia in 2017.
The app combined animated lessons with game design so that studying felt closer to playing.
What surprised them was the comments. Students wrote that they understood basic science better from the channel than from their classes. Fikri has described seeing big value in that, in the mix of science, teaching and filmmaking. A channel was a hobby. A product built the same way could be a business.
He took the next step the way few people do. Fikri left his doctoral program, a path that had held him since his teens, and founded Pahamify in 2018 with Ikhsan and Edria Albert, a game designer and ITB alumnus who ran a small studio in Bandung. The app combined animated lessons with game design so that studying felt closer to playing.
The hard part was not the content. It was the customer. Parents were willing to spend heavily on offline tutoring but resisted paying for online lessons, and Fikri has named that as the main challenge. The pricing stayed freemium, with a live exam session for Rp20,000, a month for Rp40,000 and a year for Rp400,000.
Then 2020 arrived. Schools closed, families went online, and Pahamify's user base grew fiftyfold that year while paid subscribers rose tenfold from 2019. It joined Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch, and in November it raised a Series A from Shunwei Capital, Insignia Venture Partners and Lien Family Office, in an undisclosed amount.
It still competes with larger names, Ruangguru and Zenius among them, and the founders have talked about adding younger students.
The lesson is about listening to an audience before building for it. The channel was the research, and the comments were the proof, long before there was an app.