Rentrips.id
One day in 2021, while still studying remotely, a good friend of mine contacted me and said he had information about a competition called the Rookie Innovator Challenge (RICH), organized by the Ministry of Industry at Balai Dikat Industri Denpasar. He mentioned that he had a connection there, and that we could get access to a coworking space if we submitted a business idea. As a student who had spent a long time stuck at home due to COVID, I thought why not? We eventually formed a team of five Udayana Management students and proposed a business idea called “Sewakuy”, an e-commerce platform for renting various items. Our idea was accepted, and we secured a spot there for a year.
As things progressed, we realized that the name Sewakuy sounded a bit silly and unprofessional, so we came up with Rentrips.id, with a slight adjustment to focus on renting outdoor equipment by connecting renters with item owners. Our system gained a lot of traction, but we struggled with monetization.
At Rentrips.id, I served as Chief Technology Officer, though deep down I preferred to think of myself as a Web Developer, as I didn’t feel I had truly earned the CTO title yet. If you’ve read my story up to this point, you’ll know I had no solid experience in web development, only a childhood interest in computers from playing video games and my role now required professional skills.
So I pushed myself to keep learning and learning about building websites. Initially, we built Rentrips.id using WordPress, but we faced many limitations that were difficult to overcome. We decided to rebuild it from scratch using React.js andNode.js. At first, I tried designing the front end entirely from scratch, but the result was terrible. After searching for alternatives, we found a website template that suited our needs called Chisfis.
Even using a template wasn’t easy. I had to learn how the template was built and how to operate it. To make the workload more manageable, we opened internship positions, and four talented individuals joined our team to assist me. I divided the tasks: two handled the front end, and the other two the back end.
The backend was built from zero, and we spent a lot of time figuring out how to deploy the application. It was almost comical, creating something successfully but not knowing how to run it. Fortunately, with many mentors around, we learned from them and decided to rent a Virtual Machine and deploy it there, assisted by Docker and GitHubActions. Many sleepless nights were spent just to ensure the system could be deployed properly.
The system took about six months to complete, and it became a source of pride for us. We successfully ran Rentrips.id for another six months afterward, but disagreements and frequent miscommunications eventually led to the end of our business, and we decided to go our separate ways.
