Five lessons make a new business easier to test and sustain
Rizky Budiyanto built Acreativealt from an accidental photography practice into a seven-person Singapore creative agency handling about 120 projects a year. He nearly went bankrupt when agency clients paid late or not at all, moved towards direct clients and sold the company in 2025 when it stopped stretching him. His experience offers five practical lessons: set a deadline and income test before committing, manage time deliberately, solve a problem you know first-hand, recognise when it is time to sell and do not let a setback harden you.
My friend Rizky Budiyanto told a room of students that, and he has said it to me more than once. Before he started his own creative agency he played guitar seriously in bands and in cafes as a side hustle. From the outside it looks like a young creative’s dream. But he said he hated it. “It was an oldies bar and I didn’t like the songs.”
That was why I did a double take when I got an email from him. At the bottom was a list of ten passion projects, all started since he sold his company in 2025, and all finding some way to pay for themselves. Had he changed his mind, or was I missing the point?
I was missing the distinction. Rizky does not think passion should never make money. He thinks turning a hobby into paid work too quickly means giving up control. At the oldies bar, the customer chose the music. With his projects now, he chooses the problem, then looks for a model to keep the work alive.
I went to chat with him on how he thinks about building a business and came away with five practical lessons for aspiring founders.
1. Start your business with a deadline and a clear income test
Rizky stumbled into photography and running a creative agency by accident. At first, he hated photography because it felt too technical. Once he understood how it worked, however, he began to enjoy the complexity, and the demand was clearly there. Before long, he was completing around 120 projects a year.
Because he was single, he gave himself two years to test it. If he could earn as much as he had made lecturing in 3D design, where he had cut his teeth, he would stay with it. If not, he would move on.
The test worked. He founded Acreativealt, a corporate video production and creative agency. At its height, the company had seven employees and handled roughly 100 to 120 projects a year for long-term clients.
The lesson is simple: do not leave an experiment open-ended. Decide how long you will give it, what result would justify continuing, and what would tell you to stop.
2. Sell when you stop learning
A decade later, Rizky sold the business. The market was changing. Many companies had built their own digital teams, leaving agencies with either the small jobs that nobody wanted to do internally or the occasional very large project.
That was not the main reason he sold. If he had wanted to keep growing the company, he could have hired more people. The more important problem was that he no longer felt he was growing with it. The opportunities to learn and try new things were becoming narrower. Selling gave him room to choose what came next. It freed his time and attention before both drifted away from the business.
Founders often watch revenue, headcount and market share when deciding when to sell. Rizky’s experience suggests another measure matters too: whether the business is still stretching the person running it.
3. Running more than one venture forces you to manage your time better
“Most of the successful people I know own more than one business.”
He cites the example of property investor, who also runs a YouTube channel and now makes more as an influencer than from his day job. And his brother-in-law, who white-labels pet food and also keeps an eye out for run-down buildings, and when he finds one he pulls money together from friends who invest as angels, then renovates and flips it.
Rizky’s own portfolio now spans software, consulting, production, events and creative work. His argument is, having more businesses forces you to be more efficient with your time, instead of are dragging too long on tasks. There is also synergy between businesses. He says that the staff that builds his in-house products can also be deployed to assist with his consulting project.
4. Strong business ideas solve problems founders know first-hand
You may think that he’s running ten different products, but all of them revolves around a common theme. He’s trying to give people something that he didn’t have.
Rizky has a shelf of knick-knacks as his video background. I asked Rizky which object on his shelf meant the most to him. He picked up a small Garuda model plane. “This was my dad’s. He worked at Garuda his whole life and died a week before his early retirement.” He said there are things he might have learned from his father if they had been given more time. In April this year, he republished his father’s book, Risalah Alam Semesta dan Kehidupan, about the universe, life and how the Quran and science help us understand both. His foreword reflects on what he came to understand after his father’s death.
Watch: Rizky’s stories behind the objects on his shelf
In this interview with Eileen Soh, Rizky Budiyanto shares three favourite objects and the personal stories behind them.
“There were many things I only understood after he was no longer by my side.”
Then he picked up the first hand-made gift his daughter ever made him, one of those kindergarten cut-out flowers with the two of them inside it. He said his day runs around her now. He wakes up before his family to send his work emails, so that his team in Indonesia receives it first thing in the morning, then sets aside some time for himself before helping his wife prepare their daughter for school.
Rizky’s interest in continuity goes further back. His grandfather left a village in Banjarnegara to pursue a career in Jakarta, and became successful enough to donate an education and religious space back to the village, where he built a small house intended for his retirement. He never got to retire there. He continued working as a university vice-chancellor until he died. Rizky and his mother later rebuilt and expanded the house, and villagers now use the space for education and religious activities for free, and from time to time rent it out to companies for team building.
So it is no surprise that everything he is building now has got to do with giving continuity. HRTG (short form of Heritage), at hrtgapp.com, is an encrypted journal that started out as a project for himself, probably because he didn’t have the chance to get to know his dad better. Now, being a father himself, he wishes to impart these things to his daughter. It is like the box that you pass over to your kids when you die, and he wants it to be a one-stop shop eventually, including a will and other features that a parent wants to give to their children.
Then he created the company version. Most of us who have been in the civil service know the pain of the Hand Over Take Over (HOTO) document, where you attach PDF proof of cancelling and transferring your permissions, clunkily pasted into the email you send on to your successor and your boss. HRTG B2B does the same job properly. The departing CEO records his learnings, or uploads the documents, and it builds the handover 101 for you in a systematic way that you can search. He has three client projects running on it and a completed franchisee platform for an enrichment school, plus two property agent websites in progress.
And when he sold his business he found there was no marketplace to buy and sell businesses, so he built Business Exchange SG, the Carousell for businesses.
5. Commit fully without allowing business setbacks to harden you
“You haven’t tried hard enough as an entrepreneur if you haven’t been on the brink of bankruptcy,”
Rizky said. He came close because much of his work once came through agencies. They paid late and sometimes did not pay at all. Going to court was rarely a real solution because the fight could cost money and years, while the other company could close and reopen under another name.
People told him that was simply how the industry worked. He refused to accept it. He moved towards working directly with end clients and later made a video explaining the trap to younger creatives.
You might expect that experience to make somebody hard. Rizky is the opposite. He is one of the most halus people I have met in a long time, using the Javanese word for somebody refined and softly mannered. The day before our interview, he asked whether I drank tea or coffee because he wanted to buy me a latte. When we met, he handed me Indonesian tea, coffee and fried spinach snacks with both hands.
It probably runs in the family, given that his grandfather and father are community leaders. Rizky is a socialpreneur at heart and community is big for him. He launched Talk Shop Do Good, a donation app. He believes that when business people gather to talk about business, they should also do something useful for somebody else. He build this app, probably the first app in Singapore that lets you donate directly without holding the funds in escrow, charging just a small platform fee to keep it alive. It is already underway as he has acquired all the permissions and certifications from government.
He also built Doa Bersama, which helps people explore the Quran without needing Arabic, and its Catholic equivalent, Prayer Buddy. He is building this as much for his daughter, who is being raised as Catholic and Muslim, so she gets to choose when she is older.
Growing a business requires judgment, not blind persistence
If one of Rizky’s ten projects sounds like something you need, or you have an idea of your own that has been sitting in your head for too long, find him at budiyanto.co.
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Written by Eileen Soh
If you are planning what comes after salaried work, continue with these practical guides on building a portfolio career, making your expertise visible on LinkedIn and deciding how much money is enough.
Frequently asked questions
How do you know if a business idea is worth leaving your job for?
Set a fixed test period and a clear result that would justify continuing, such as matching a defined level of income or demand. Decide in advance what would make you stop, so the experiment does not remain open-ended.
When should a founder sell a business?
Revenue and market conditions matter, but learning and attention matter too. Rizky sold when the business no longer stretched him and he wanted to direct his time towards new problems.
Why do some founders run more than one venture?
Related ventures can force better time management and share people, knowledge or customers. The advantage comes from genuine overlap, not from collecting unrelated side projects.
About Rizky Budiyanto
Rizky Budiyanto is a Singapore-based Indonesian entrepreneur, fractional creative director and founder of a corporate services technology group. He founded and later sold Acreativealt, a corporate video production and creative agency that completed more than six hundred corporate projects over roughly a decade, and he now advises companies on digital campaigns. His work covers corporate video production and production training for in-house teams, software development for businesses, web development and website design, app development, and succession and business continuity planning for founders.
About Eileen Soh
Eileen Soh is a Southeast Asia geopolitical and cybersecurity intelligence analyst at a Fortune 500 company, with 13 years of experience in Singapore national security. She works to find threats and opportunities in cyber and geopolitics, and translates complex ideas into clear policy recommendations for senior leaders.
Before writing publicly, Eileen spent more than a decade writing for senior decision-makers in government. Working for readers with little time taught her to get to the point quickly and catch the attention of busy people in 90 seconds.
Today, she applies the same discipline on LinkedIn, where she writes about intelligence, cybersecurity, geopolitics, strategic communications and professional reputation. She also leads Block173.com, which interviews successful people in Singapore to find out “how they did it”.
She has spoken at Women in Tech and the Singapore University of Social Sciences, and has been featured in The Straits Times and on The Flying Dutchman’s Morning Drive radio show.
Want to bring your business story to her 9,800 followers? Drop her a message at here.
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