'Fail fast, learn fast': She built a property startup from her garage. It's raised over $75 million

CNBC

21-05-2025

It's no secret that building a successful startup often involves risk, iteration and failure. Dayu Dara Permata knows this well.
The 36-year-old is the co-founder and CEO of Indonesian property transaction platform Pinhome. Over the course of about five years, she went from bootstrapping the business out of her own garage to raising over $75 million to date, according to a company representative and data from PitchBook.
"Entrepreneurship is really hard. There's no instant success ... You just have to be ready to fail," Permata told CNBC Make It. "If you are trying to avoid failure altogether, [then] you're just delaying it."
"Maybe you're not trying enough — that's why you've not seen failures, but what it does is it's really hindering growth," she added.
Permata, who was born and raised in Indonesia, has always been an overachiever.
"I'm born from a very simple family ... we didn't come from money, so I had to really earn everything that I wanted," she said, adding that her parents were always strict and demanding with her.
"I was always expected to deliver, to be number one, to succeed academically," she said. "I always liked property, because, living with very strict parents — [it was] my house, my rules. So, I thought I wanted to own my own house, so I could have my own rules," Permata said.
She said she was studious, competitive and "always focused on academics" as a kid. By the age of 23, she had already purchased an investment property, the first of several.
Upon graduating from university, she went on to pursue an almost decade-long corporate career, eventually landing a senior vice president role at Southeast Asian on-demand services platform Gojek, where she met Pinhome co-founder Ahmed Aljunied.
After working at Gojek for about four years, Permata said she felt ready to embark on her own entrepreneurial journey.
"I think at the end of my time at Gojek, [the company] was operating in 200 plus cities in all of Indonesia," she said. "I had worked with my CTO, Ahmed ... [He] was always very entrepreneurial. He had built businesses before, and he [said]: 'Why don't we start our own?'"
So in early 2019, the two began ideating and building the business out of Permata's home garage. Over the course of about nine months, Permata said she invested about $150,000 of her own savings into bootstrapping the company.
"My husband was my first employee. We had our first five team members working out of our [garage]. It was really like nine months of bootstrapping," she said. "I was also working full time at Gojek, and it was still quite long hours that [I was working there], but we managed to squeeze in time [for our startup.]"
Informed by her own experiences as a property investor, Permata knew she wanted to address the many pain points in Indonesian real estate. She said the process of buying and maintaining property was very "manual" and "fragmented."
"All the pain of searching for a home, and connecting with agents ... [It's a] six to nine month process, all on WhatsApp, and you're dealing with complete strangers ... and I thought: 'Why is it so traditional and why hasn't technology transformed the sector?'"
Permata and her co-founder felt that the real estate sector in Indonesia was ripe for transformation.
"We tested different business models ... In the first business model, we were exploring crowdfunding for real estate. The second business model, we were exploring property management. Then the third time, we were exploring ... co-ownership of real estate," she said.
"We went through that iteration almost every two or three months," she said.
After testing a few failed ideas, Permata and Aljunied landed on their fourth idea, which ultimately became what Pinhome is today — an end-to-end property transaction platform that offers brokerage, mortgage and home services.
Pinhome was launched in January 2020 and serves more than 3.5 million monthly active users across its website and mobile apps today, according to a company representative.
"Fail fast, learn fast. That's how you get closer to success," Permata suggested. "Try to fail every day, but learn from it ... I think that will help you with your stamina in the long run, because it isn't a sprint, it's a marathon."
"If you are not managing your energy well, then you might quit before you reach success," she added.