… was awesome.
While the rest of the Tech in Asia boys such as Willis and Minghao have been in Jakarta for the last couple of months in preparation for our Startup Asia Jakarta event, this trip is my first foray to better understand the Indonesian tech startup scene. Albeit short, I think it was fruitful in helping connect with part of the local community who have given the Tech in Asia team huge support for the last couple of months.
On Monday, we were hosted by the MobileMonday team, along with the folks from Ideosource and International Design School (IDS). A big thank you to Andy Zain from Jakarta Founders Institute too, who mentored and helped us along the way. We saw a turnout of more than 50 people, along with some Singaporean and Indonesian startups, such as Phi Decks, Referoll, CloudyRec, Paywhere, Burpple, LobangClub, and ShopFair, who were there to pitch their ideas. It is heartwarming to see fellow entrepreneurs, despite coming from different backgrounds and cultures coming together to help one another to build the entire ecosystem. It was fun, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Activities and meetups like these are essential to connect people who are new to the tech and startup scene. I’ve received much feedback from some Singaporean startups on the session:
Mobile Monday was one of those truly local startup events. It was a great opportunity to share our ideas and gather feedback from the local audience on how they viewed [our idea]. - Ariff Munshi, founder at Referoll
I’m deeply encouraged and inspired by Adez from ShopFair (pictured right, breakdancing), who shared his experience in growing a social community on Twitter from zero to 15,000 followers in three months. There was really no airs or arrogance about them – even the folks at TouchTen, who recently had an app which received 60,000 downloads in a week. They were so humble to share their success and and so willing to learn from us – that’s the best part of the learning culture. I’m very impressed and greatly encouraged. - Elisha Ong, co-founder at Burpple
I’m deeply encouraged and inspired by The cool thing about Mobile Monday is that there are participants from varying age groups. One of them, Pak Sumitro Roestam from Mastel, shared kind wisdom and perspectives that only comes with experience. On the other end of the spectrum, Anton Wijaya from Ideosource is a really cool guy managing portfolios under Ideoworks and ShopFair. I think with more events like these, the Jakarta tech startup scene is bound to get really big soon. - Amin Nordin, founder at Phi Decks
I had a chance to pitch at MobileMonday Jakarta and it was really a great experience. A lot of questions were raised which showed their interest in our Backend-as-a-Service platform, CloudyRec. I received many leads which could potentially become our partners and customers. And oh, I won a BlackBerry Playbook during the lucky draw too! - Aung Sithu, founder at CloudyRec
I had takeaways myself too, and a special thanks goes out to Andrias Ekoyuono from Ideosource who provided valuable advice and feedback during the short chat we had. If you’re interested to keep yourself updated with MobileMonday here in Jakarta, you can follow them on their blog or join their Facebook group.
Sampai nanti!
[Photo credits: @elishaong]
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