In the afternoon session for our Startup Asia Jakarta 2012 event, we were delighted to hear from Yazid Faizin and Pandu Wirawan, the founders of mobile and web ad network Adstars. They were interviewed by Willis Wee, and here are some of the highlight points of their talks:
#14:47: We started in May of 2010, and we built it because many intl players were coming to Indonesia, so we tried to build local inventories, we saw big inventories of local websites.
#14:49: (On competition) Adstars is one of the biggest in terms of inventory, I’m not sure about revenue, but it’s one of the biggest. We have 1.3 billion impressions combined across web and mobile. Mobile has huge traffic, about a billion and for web about 300 million.
#14:51: (On turning points) The first (few) months to get 10 million impressions was easy. But our turning point was in our first year, bloggers told friends about the network and that’s how we got a lot of traction.
We were lucky, I started selling when I was in Admax, and after I joined Adstars (that experienced helped). The work is fun and we have a great team. We’re like a family.
#14:55: We will resign to start a new company. If you are entrepreneurs, and we wil stil have a share of adstars. But we’re hoping to be a next level of entrepreneurs. Adstars was fun but we want to grow. We think it’s time to delegate and let others run Adstars, and then follow our dreams.
#14:57: We have a couple of companies right now. [With a laugh, indicates a Singaporean startup that starts with ‘G’. Moderator Willis guesses Gushcloud, and they note they are hoping to bring Gushcloud into Indonesia.]
#14:59: A lot of startups in Indonesia try to build on smartphone platform, but that only has a small percentage of the mobile users. So there’s a huge potential in feature phones. For us in our mobile network we have small traffic in local inventories, so I think there’s a lot of potential on feature phones. Mig33 has a lot of success here.
#15:01: There are only two companies in Indonesia which are quite successful in feature phones, and that’s Mig33 and (TMG’s) Kotagames.
#15:03: Mig33 is doing well selling virtual items, but we think that banner advertising is a good way to make money on mobile.
#15:04: I think it’s important for entrepreneurs to have a dream. But it’s also important to try to collaborate with other startups, and if you a team try to build your team and trust them. Don’t try to do it just by yourself. We believe in our team and we try to work with other startups.
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.