M. Ahwy Karuniyado

Hipotesa & Neuron YouTube Channel Provides Educative and Creative Content to Educate Children

His concerns in the Indonesian media development makes M. Ahwi Karuniyado – or Edo, alumnus to UPH Psychology 2014 creates PT. Mencerdaskan Anak Bangsa. Ever since working in the professional world, it has been Edo’s dream to bring benefit for others. This spirit is what pushes Edo to keep learning, be critical, and open to various opportunities – even the ones unrelated to his background education.

Edo’s interest in media has led him to initiate a YouTube based medium to create creative-educative content. What first started as Project Passion, Edo with his partners did a research on two international media, namely VOX Media and Kurzgesagt. They paid attention to how these medium’s storytelling content presentation as well as cinematography technique. They are amazed by Jinri Toutiao’s capabilities to capture the audience with the technology he has.

“Through our research, two brand was born: Hipotesa and Neuron. Hipotesa was the outlet we create to talk about politics, social issues, and social science issues. On the other hand, Neuron is an outlet we use to talk about health and medical world, utilizing animation,” Edo says.

Under the flag of PT. Mencerdaskan Anak Bangsa or widyamedia.com built in 2018, both Hipotesa and Neuron achieved more than 200.000 subscribers on YouTube in just one year. Based on their vision of being the go-to place when someone wants to understand more about what’s happening, widyamedia.com creates a medium that could explain why something happened and not just what happened. Edo believed that when the society is able to understand things better, discussion quality would increase too. With a vision this big, the culture he prepared for his company emphasizes on transparency, engagement with audience, and responsibility.

“We try to interact with the audience as much as we can, especially in explaining who and what vision we embody. Furthermore, we also tell them who are responsible for the content they’re seeing,” Edo explains.

Although only in it’s second year, widyamedia.com is already planning to give birth to new mediums, including those that will talk about business, technology, and entertainment to create a content ecosystem. Furthermore, Edo plans to make his business follow the YC standard where startups are expected to grow 5% every week, which will be equivalent to 12.6x per year.

“Financially speaking, this business started from angel round, seed round, series A, series B, and so on. We finished angel round in 2019 and every ounce of money we gain will be used for product development such as our content and website, hire professionals, and marketing. We value startups as an organism that will always require research and development according to the consumer’s feedback. The key isn’t in a perfect product, but rather in an optimized product for users to access and admit that the users are clients to be heard. At the end, we expect widyamedia.com to be a media holding with various other small companies in the field of production house, widescreen and series film making, advertising agency and online magazine,” Edo explains.

What Edo worked on today, as he admits, is not separated from the networking UPH alumni offers. More than 80% of widyamedia.com team members are in fact alumni and last year students at UPH, including the advisors and social media steering committee are UPH alumni. The psychology education Edo learnt was taken account into his personal life, especially in his maturity. Edo reminds everyone to not give up. “Be friends with failure and humble yourself to keep on learning,” Edo says.