If you have visited Jakarta, chances are you are familiar with the term ‘ojek.’ These are the taxi motorcycles you see on the sideroads. Go-jek, a winner of the Global Entrepreneurship Program Indonesia, wants to connect you to such motorcycle taxis, ensuring the booking, safety, and experience is seamless. The basic idea is to act as a middleman between customers and drivers, and so far they seem to be doing very well. I spoke to Nadiem Makarim, the co-founder of Go-Jek, in an effort to find out more about the service.
1. How was Go-jek founded? Why has it excelled where similar services have failed?
We are actually quite different than [those], as most of them are just out to replicate taxis using motorcycles… With Go-jek the response time is higher, and we are a social enterprise so we don’t really compete with anyone but we are focusing on increasing [driver] income. We see that 70 percent of the time, motorcycle taxis are actually idle, and that is a waste of an economic value.
2. How do you gain drivers’ trust?
I think that at first it was really tough but we really continue to build our brand and gain their trust by using recruiting staff that used to be motorcycle taxi drivers as well. As for the revenue sharing, the drivers take the majority and we only take the minority of it, so they can really feel that their income is increasing after joining us. Actually we never had a driver that quit from our system [yet].
3. How has winning the GEPI awards affect you guys as a startup?
It actually affects us in the biggest way possible. There was so much media hype. Orders increased rapidly, brand awareness increased very, very high. We get to meet a lot of startups and they told us some great scaling advices. So we are really thankful for the awards and the program.
4. With initial investment received, a lot of VCs might be attracted to fund you for the next round. Do you think it would be necessary or do you think it’s best to keep lean and fast?
We are trying to find the best deal possible, but we would like to hold out as long as possible. We would like to keep lean and just grow organically, but of course we will scale up in the future. In tech startups you might find yourself needing to scale early because of competitors, but it’s quite different for us as we have more offline engagement than online.
5. You are one of the few successful startups that are actually solving real-life problems in Indonesia. How do you feel about this?
I agree with you that we are solving an immediate and urgent problem. When we founded Go-jek back in February last year, we felt that it was kind of cool to help out. A lot of startups, a big chunk of tech startups actually, suffer from ‘me-too-ness,’ too idea-driven and less execution-driven. As for us, we see the Jakarta traffic and the overload of motorcycle taxis as a problem that’s going to get worse so I think we are ready to try to address this problem.
6. Can you give us any stats or milestones you may have hit so far?
I can’t really [disclose] many numbers but we can safely say that we have 15 employees for now, with 350 drivers or motorcycle taxis. 4,000 unique customers (most of them are repeat customers) and 25 corporate users. Surprisingly 70 percent of our usage is for delivering stuff. For example, someone who forgot to take his Blackberry or laptop, or if there’s an important document that needs to be delivered soon.
7. 2011 has been a great year for you. What is the plan for 2012 to sustain this success?
We will expand to Jabodetabek (Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, and Bekasi for short) after only operating in Jakarta so far. We will also continuing to expand partnerships and cooperation with e-commerce services regarding Cash on Delivery, which is still important here in Indonesia.