Pin Your Dreams Up High and Your Feet Down Low

Following its win at AngelHack Jakarta, the team behind Pintails spent several weeks under the mentorship of Robin Malau (Musikator, Cerahati) and Fajar Budiprasetyo (Ice House) polishing the app and the ideas around it. Last weekend, two of the team members, Radita Liem and Asep Priandana, flew to San Francisco to participate in AngelHack Global Demo Day and TechCrunch Disrupt. We will be chronicling their trip beginning with today's post from team leader Vincent Putera.

Pintails is a mobile app that aims to tackle e-commerce in a different way by leveraging trust among immediate friends, family members, and colleagues. It is being developed by Radita Liem (CTO of PT. AdWays Indonesia), Asep Bagja Priandana (CTO of Amazing Milk), Victor Koesoemadi (Lead UX/UI designer at Inspira) and Vincent Putera (Lead creative at Inspira).

It was that one weekend in June, which got the ball rolling (or, tail wagging). The whole ordeal was a last minute arrangement scrambled out of curiosity and appetite to do something more productive with our weekend. Our initial thinking was: “Let’s do something!” We quickly got a team together, thought of a “product” on the go, and made it believable.

24 hours later we won the inaugural AngelHack with Pintails, a social commerce app, which is now en route to be showcased at HACKcelerator Demo Day and TechCrunch Hackathon in San Francisco. That’s the Valley.

Just a thought – you know, doing a hackathon and winning it is like having a one-night stand and finding out that the girl is pregnant the next day. Yes, it’s that fast. It’s hacked.

You spend the next two months thinking whether or not you should go on and have the baby, or abort it. Could you afford it? Are you ready to parent another product, and lead it to maturity? Do you have long-term commitment with all related parties? And who’s paying the bills?

Remember that fun, positive thinking of “let’s do something!”? Well, months later and it’s now “what have we done???”

So, anyway, as a result of winning the AngelHack, we got invited for a full ride for two team members to experience the Valley in all its glory – tech conferences, meeting with investors, and tours to tech startups. Fun!

Unfortunately, we later learned that the fully accommodated trip for two was a bust, and eventually got downgraded to half a ticket plane to fly to San Francisco. Fuck!

Tough luck, right? But then again, it’s not startup without shits and fucks – sorry, I meant twists and turns.

Thanks to a little fundraising later, we got our gas money to fly out to San Francisco. I’m looking at you, the good folks at BlackBerry. It wouldn’t be possible without you guys. Literally, you “keep us moving”.

So, we’re inviting all the kind readers of DailySocial to come back for more juicy actions in Silicon Valley in our follow-up posts. We are treating this as a chance to share our experience from winning a global hackathon to making a run for it in the Valley. DailySocial has been gracious enough to be our official media partner.

Over the next few days our developers will be writing about their experience being running around Valley – the Mecca of all-things-techie – and pitching at Demo Day, hacking at TechCrunch Hackathon, and attending TechCrunch Disrupt with speakers such as the CEOs of Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

So, we’ll be right back!

Feel free to follow @raditaliem (on second thought, her account's protected) and @bepitulaz for sound bites straight from the Valley.