 "Nadiem Makarim")
Indonesian unicorn Go-Jek's founder Nadiem Makarim is in awe of the technology talent density of India, especially Bengaluru, where the company has based its India headquarters. Last week, Go-Jek acqui-hired Pune-based LeftSHift, an app development start-ups, its fourth in the country. The hyperlocal transport, logistics and payments start-ups, with investors including Sequoia Capital and DST Global, plans to stay out of the market in India but looks to double the India team. Edited excerpts of his interview with Anita Babu.
Could you talk about the Go-Jek journey?
So, we started with three services – transport, courier and shopping (free-flow shopping like Dunzo) after which we quickly realized that everything in shopping was ‘buy me food’. We then decided why don’t we connect all these drivers to be able to buy food, so that they just come in and pay with cash. We launched Go-Food and overtook FoodPanda in eight hours. It just exploded. Again, we realized that some of our users wanted to buy stuff from the mini-mart (supermarkets). We started Go-Mart and got in over 100,000 SKUs (stock keeping units). We were like if we can do this with bikes, why don’t with trucks, and Go-Trucks came in. Then it was a natural transition to Go-Tix (event ticketing) and Go-Pay (online payments). It just evolved from a natural innovative mindset. Competition pushed us eventually to become really differentiated and clear. There were looming threats of big companies competing with us with lots of money. But this was survival for us. And it worked, the gamble paid off. And now, our users are very sticky on the platform. Next, I’m quite excited about Go-Pay and waiting to see how the whole cashless payments is going to pan out.
What was the advantage that you had over your competition?
What was the advantage that you had over your competition?
The upper hand was that we were the first and had the largest user base. Everyone was already used to our user interface. That was a big advantage and people kept coming back to our app. The cashless experience of Go-Pay basically made the whole user experience so much better. There are many things that you can do to make the user experience look much better. But cashless is the ultimate experience. That’s hard to beat. And we’re the only one to have e-money licence to kind of do the Paytm strategy in Indonesia.
What are your current challenges?
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All kind of challenges that include competition, spending irrationally and scaling up our technology with so many products and so many users. Balancing management time and which products to focus on is also a challenge. Often questions like what should we do and not do are the biggest challenges. What should we not do is the harder decision.
How do you see India as a market? Any plans to enter the market here?
India is a big market and there are also big players in India. We do not have any intentions to enter the market here. It’s more of a choice. We have a finite amount of resource and time to actually focus on Indonesia, the most important market of Southeast Asia, where we are so far ahead. And we’re competing against incumbents who have partners across multiple countries. However, their rate of innovation is much slower than us. To go to a market like India, even though it is a huge market, and take on the likes of like Ola, food delivery market, etc, I think, is not the right strategy. It’s better to know where you’ve a competitive edge and really double down and dominate that market.
So India will be only a hiring ground for you?
Not India, it’s really just Bangalore. The kind of network in the Bangalore community is so strong and unique. We will look to double our team here.
What are the interesting start-ups that you have found in India?
I like Swiggy. Dunzo has an interesting concept. I’m interested to see where Paytm goes. I continue to follow Ola.
Do you think the Indian start-ups ecosystem is too crowded? With many players?
There has been a recent rationalization in the India market. Several runaway valuations were happening about three years ago. But it’s good and they have shaken off the crazy subsidies (discounts). More rationality is taking hold in some sectors. The Indian start-ups ecosystem is extremely promising and primarily driven by the amount of engineering talent that they see here. India’s consumers are still quite price-sensitive. They buy products sometimes just for the money value and that’s quite challenging for a lot of start-ups, especially when you basically spoil customers with freebies and discounts. Indonesia is also a similar market but less of discounts and is more consumptive in nature. Indian start-ups have to compete with how Indians do things. Indians find hacks to do things in a unique way, for instance the idea of ‘dabbawalas’. But the mobile revolution is taking over the world.
