Didi Nugrahadi (right)
As one of the early morning sessions for our Startup Asia Jakarta 2012 event on Thursday morning, Joshua Kevin interviewed Didi Nugrahadi of Detik.com and SalingSilang.
#10:45: On the history of Detik.com. In 1996 me and Budi (inaudible) thought about starting a new business. There were four founders of Detik.
#10:49: The only one person who knew the internet of the four founders was Abdul Raman. He told us what you can do on the internet and all the new possibilities that the other founders did not know about. Before Detik, we had a web developer service, and we targeted all media such as Kompas and Business Indonesia. All my colleagues in media said if you want to start internet business, you cannot just pull printed content to the internet.
#10:50: If you want to get into the internet media business, you have to adapt because most of the news is breaking news, 24/7, and it’s very different from once-a-day print media.
#10:51: On startup up in the 1990s as opposed to now. In late 90s it was easy to go into web development, because there were not many competitors. It was still new. The hardest thing was to tell potential clients, because as I said, it was a really new area. But we still had much free space to move around as a pioneer in the field.
#10:53: After selling Detik – I resigned in 2004, and in 2005 I decided to build a school. The reason was I saw my kids going to school, and the school had international curriculum. I wanted to make a school like this but at a reasonable price.
#10:58: On SalingSilang – After that we started Inmart [another online service] which had good revenue, we saw web 2.0 was getting bigger and bigger. We didn’t just make Saling Saling, but we wanted to see from the culture of Indonesia, but we drew from the roots of how Indonesians talk with each other.
#11:00: There are five aspects in Indonesia that we focused on: The first is interactive. After we met this first aspect across our web services, we moved to the second one, which is ‘platform’. We had to make it more scalable. As we grew we could see there were a lot of conversations, Twitter, Facebook, blogs. And this led us to the third aspect: data. After we gathered the data from these conversations, we had a revenue model. We could put it in a better package and sell it to brands and services that need to know how their brand or service is being talked about on digital. We also realized that people are not only talking online, but everywhere. Online is just one aspect. That leads to the fourth aspect, which is ecosystem, and we wanted to link all these conversations as community. The last insight that we are working on is mobile.
#11:06: Our mobile service to be launched in August will be focused on news. (Declined to disclose more, with a laugh).
#11:08: There are two things that make Indonesia social media different than overseas usage. Indonesia loves to do offline meetups. For example, if I follow Joshua on Twitter than we just virtually meet. But I would like to meet him in person to see what he is really like. Indonesians love to gather together and talk or chat in person.
#11:10: My view of entrepre in Indonesia is really positive. Of course foreign entrepreneurship is a little further ahead right now, but I’m confident that we can lead in the future just like those other prominent services from overseas.
#11:11: Practically Indonesia has everything it needs, there’s no lack of funding. Even the internet connection is pretty good, compared to back in 1998. My advice to entrepreneurs these days is to stay focused and patient. Revenue might not come right away.
This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Jakarta 2012, our startup event running on June 8 and 9. You can follow along on Twitter at @startupasia, on our Facebook page, on Google Plus, or via RSS.