Investor after investor said no. Natali Ardianto has written about that stretch, when the team behind tiket.com went from meeting to meeting and kept getting the same answer.
It was not his first rejection by the market. After graduating in 2008, Ardianto co-founded Urbanesia, an online lifestyle directory in Jakarta, with friends. He left it because he judged its future to be limited. He then launched Golfnesia, billed as Indonesia's first online golf course booking site. Both failed.
And a founder who already carried two failures, with nothing yet to prove it would be different.
Two failed ventures can harden a founder or end him. What happened next is the part few people know. Ardianto teamed up with colleagues Wenas Agusetiawan, Dimas Surya Yaputra and Mikhael Gaery Undarsa to rebuild as a new company, tiket.com, founded in August 2011. Some accounts speak of a larger group at the start, and Ardianto has said that after the investor rejections, only he and those three remained.
Think about what that costs. A founding group that shrinks as the money refuses to come. Friends who decided it was not worth the risk. And a founder who already carried two failures, with nothing yet to prove it would be different.
The turn was not a clever pivot. It was marketing. Ardianto later shifted strategy toward aggressive digital and conventional advertising, putting the brand in front of people who had never booked a ticket online. The result was striking: tiket.com's profit in 2013 was thirteen times the year before.
The story did not end at that peak. In June 2017, Blibli, part of the Djarum Group, bought the company. During the pandemic, when travel collapsed, its CMO Gaery Undarsa said the firm chose not to lay off staff, unlike some competitors. The company reports around 1,200 employees today.
For a first-time founder, the quiet lesson is that failure is cumulative data, not a verdict. Ardianto's earlier flops taught him what not to build, and the rejections taught him what customers would have to see before investors believed.