Welcome to Hikode

I’m writing this on the day Hikode’s site goes live, so it feels right to start with why this exists at all, instead of jumping straight into a services list.

The problem I kept running into

Over the last few years of freelancing and leading frontend work for other people’s products — including a stretch in 2024 leading frontend for a fast-moving AI startup — I kept seeing the same pattern play out on both sides of the table.

On the client side: companies that needed real engineering help kept ending up with one of two bad options. Either a big agency where you talk to an account manager who relays everything to an engineer you never meet, or a freelance marketplace where the person who quoted the project isn’t the person who shows up to build it — and sometimes disappears halfway through.

On the engineering side: a lot of genuinely good developers, especially here in Indonesia, don’t get access to the kind of work that matches their skill, because the market connecting them to international clients is either non-existent or run by people who don’t understand the work well enough to vouch for it.

Hikode is my attempt to fix both sides of that at once.

What Hikode actually is

Hikode is founder-led — that’s me — backed by a vetted network of engineers I bring in as projects need more hands. It’s not a 200-person agency, and I’m not going to pretend it is. What it is: you get direct ownership from someone technical from day one, and real capacity to scale a team around a project when the scope calls for it.

Concretely, that means four things:

System integration. A lot of “we need custom software” requests are actually “we need our existing tools to talk to each other properly.” APIs, ERPs, CRMs, legacy systems that were never meant to share data — that’s plumbing work, and it’s most of what keeps companies stuck.

Product development. Taking an idea, or an existing half-built product, from where it is to something real users can rely on. Design, engineering, ship, iterate.

Outsourcing and freelance talent. This is where the network comes in. If you need a dedicated team or a specific specialist for a project, I can put together vetted engineers from Indonesia at rates that make sense for APAC budgets, without the risk of an unvetted marketplace hire.

AI integration and development. The newest of the four, and increasingly the most requested. Not proof-of-concept demos — actual AI features wired into a product people use, or automation built into a workflow a team already runs.

Why I’m also building my own product

Alongside client work, I’m building Cekipet — an offline-first app for tracking pet, animal, and plant enclosures. It’s not a side project I’m mentioning for padding. It’s how I hold myself to the same standard I’m selling: if I’m asking you to trust me with your product, I should be willing to ship my own and put it in front of real users too.

Cekipet isn’t public yet — it’s still in the run-up to an App Store and Play Store submission — but the fact that it exists, and that I’m building it the same way I’d build client work, is the point.

Who this is actually for

Companies across APAC who need engineering capacity or a technical partner, and specifically teams who’ve been burned before by the account-manager-in-the-middle model or by freelance hires who weren’t what they seemed. If you want to talk to the person who’s actually going to think about your problem, that’s what Hikode is set up for.

What’s next

More of the same, honestly: client work, Cekipet moving toward launch, and more of this blog as there’s something real to write about — case studies, technical notes, and whatever I learn along the way that’s worth sharing instead of keeping to myself.

If any of this sounds like what you need, the contact page goes straight to me.