Kulkul Technology, 2021
I joined Kulkul Technology in 2021 as a Digital Marketing Intern. At the time, Kulkul was a relatively small technology company working on software development and IT consultancy, while also experimenting with several products of its own. My initial scope was fairly straightforward: help with the company’s digital presence, work on the website, improve the content, and support some of the marketing activities around it.
A lot of my time during the first few weeks ended up going into kulkul.tech. The website already existed, but there was quite a bit that we wanted to improve, from how the company described its services to how the pages were structured and presented. I worked on the copy, SEO, visual direction, and some of the branding guidelines together with the team. We eventually managed to relaunch the website in around four weeks.
What made that project memorable for me was that the results became visible quite quickly. Before the relaunch, incoming inquiries were relatively sporadic, somewhere around one a week based on what I remember recording at the time. After the new website went live, the number started increasing, and there were periods where we were receiving several inquiries in a week. Over time, some of those conversations developed into potential projects with roughly IDR 100 million in combined lead value.
It was probably one of the first times I saw a direct relationship between the work I was doing on a website and an actual business outcome. Someone could find Kulkul through search, read through the pages we had worked on, fill in a form, and eventually speak with the team about a project. It made me much more interested in what happened around the website too, including how inquiries were handled internally. At one point I connected parts of that flow using Zapier and Discord so new leads could reach the team more quickly.
My work gradually expanded beyond the company website. Kulkul had several internal products at the time, including Kulcamp, Ngescan, and Ngecilin, and I started helping with their digital presence as well. That included things like product branding, visual assets, Google Play listings, and figuring out how each product should be introduced to users. Since I was already working closely with the products and the developers behind them, I also started becoming more involved with the interfaces themselves.
That eventually led to Masrouf.
A few months after joining Kulkul, I continued working with the company separately as a UI/UX Designer for Masrouf, an application built around budget allocation for an Arabic-speaking market. My work there covered interface refinement, visual assets, design guidelines, translations, and some early thinking around future product improvements and the roadmap.
Masrouf was particularly interesting because it was my first time working seriously with a right-to-left interface. Designing for Arabic forced me to pay attention to details I had previously taken for granted. Navigation, alignment, hierarchy, and the direction in which information moved across a screen all needed to be reconsidered. It was a very different design context from the Indonesian and English interfaces I had been used to, and a good excuse to learn something completely new while working on an actual product.
Looking back, Kulkul was a fun period because I was able to work across a lot of different things in a relatively short amount of time. I came in doing digital marketing, spent a good portion of the internship rebuilding a technology company’s website, got involved in lead generation and internal workflows, helped relaunch several products, and eventually found myself designing an Arabic mobile application.
I did not really think of those things as separate disciplines at the time. There was simply something that needed to be written, designed, improved, or figured out, and I happened to have the opportunity to work on it.
Kulkul ended up being one of the first places where I got to see a technology company from several sides at once, and I had a genuinely good time doing it.