When Achmad Zaky moved from Indonesia to take up a scholarship in Oregon in 2009, he found there were plenty of things that Americans did a little differently. One habit would go on to change the trajectory of his life.
“I tried Amazon,” he recalls to MONIIFY. “One click, and then tomorrow, the product’s coming. Wow, it’s amazing. And everyone uses it.”
There was nothing resembling Amazon’s frictionless marketplace offering in Indonesia, where e-commerce was in its infancy. Zaky, a computer scientist and entrepreneur who’d been launching small business ventures since his school days, decided to change that in 2010.
After returning home, he and a friend launched Bukalapak, looking to adapt the e-commerce concept on a shoestring to an Indonesian context. The platform — its name means “open a market stall” in Indonesian — targeted small- and medium-enterprises, and the warungs, or small family-owned businesses, that are a mainstay of Indonesia’s economy.
In its early days, it was a bootstrap operation, with no real funding. “The reality is, I didn’t know venture capital back then,” he says. “I was a computer scientist, not a financial expert.”
But the platform soon found its feet, leaning on Indonesia’s strong community ethos to build a network of sellers who taught each other how to get results with the new technology.
And its timing couldn’t have been better, as Indonesians began to embrace mobiles, social media and e-commerce en masse in the 2010s, while low interest rates created a flood of readily available investment to fuel the growth.
Today, Bukalapak is one of the largest e-commerce companies in Indonesia, a unicorn with more than 100 million users.
Having helped transform the country’s economy by enabling micro-entrepreneurs to move online, Zaky — who resigned as the company’s CEO in 2020 — is continuing his mission of supporting Indonesian business through his venture capital fund, Init6.
In a conversation with Money Moves’ Muhammed Mekki, Zaky discusses navigating early setbacks, making a foreign business concept your own, and why he sees entrepreneurs as heroes.
Here are three takeaways from the conversation:
- Cross the chasm: The success of any tech disruption is going to rely on a critical mass of consumers adopting the new model. Understand that, and push towards it.
- Build a community: Tech platforms aren’t just about acquiring customers; they’re about building strong networks of users that find value in the community. A powerful sense of community can be a platform’s greatest asset.
- Get back on the horse: The best piece of business advice Zaky’s ever received? “Try, fail and try again.”
Muhammed Mekki: Bukalapak’s rise from an idea to a unicorn is an impressive story. Talk us through where the initial inspiration came from.
Achmad Zaky: I went to the US back in 2009. I saw many people use e-commerce. I tried Amazon. After [I was] back from this scholarship, I built Bukalapak.
That’s the idea, but I modified it for the local [context] because Amazon’s model is more centralized. They have a warehouse, high capex. I didn’t have capital back then: I only had a software engineer. I was the software engineer. We didn’t even have a vision to get funding.
I could code and then I just created the platform. So, it’s less capex, simpler than Amazon, and then: boom.
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- Mekki: When did you feel like things were taking off?
I think it happened in 2014, when we got massive funding. We got $10 million back then. If you compare it to now, maybe $10 million is not much. But for us, it was like — well, this is a real moment.
I think that’s the moment when everyone in Indonesia [got a] phone. They install WhatsApp, they install Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It’s like a mobile revolution, and everyone uses mobile suddenly. And then [we grew] 60x in a year.
- Mekki: In terms of getting to that point, though, you must have faced a lot of challenges in the early days.
There were many, many challenges. First, no one knows who Bukalapak is. When we hire talent, we cannot get the best. So, we have to compromise on many things.
Since I invest in many startups, I feel like that’s a common pattern. That’s the challenge happening in every early stage. If you can tackle that kind of challenge, it means you are a great founder. If everything goes smoothly, then everyone can enter, right?
[Then] customer adoption. Because many customers, especially on the merchant side, they didn’t know many things about e-commerce back then.
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E-commerce was a very new thing. It was still manual. Many people in Indonesia used bank transfers. They call, they transfer. Not many people believe in transactional e-commerce, a more modern version of e-commerce, using one click and then shipping the product.
[Also] the partner, the bank. You know, when we talked to the bank, they didn’t want to open the API (application programming interface). This is not going to work, they said. But when we showed them the numbers, they started to adopt.
It’s always like that, in any technology wave… it’s always like chicken and egg. We have to push the crossing the chasm.
- Mekki: That’s a really important principle. The real test is how you’re able to go from those early adopters to that early majority. How were you able to make that jump?
We were very lucky because the timing was right. Back then, so much capital was coming, especially because the Fed rate was so low and everyone was coming to Asia.
We call it the Golden Age of tech startups, 2015 until 2020. Then with that kind of funding, we can do many things… helping with crossing that chasm.
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- Mekki: Building a brand new ecosystem like Bukalapak must have required a certain amount of education of buyers and sellers to enable the platform to take off. How did you go about that?
I realized Indonesia is a very social culture. They like to be part of a community. What we built was a seller community.
So they teach each other. So we have many education sessions, to educate this kind of seller, and the educator is the successful seller. We are not the trainer — because we don’t know anything. They’re [the ones] who know how to sell.
It’s amazing because you don’t need so much capital to do that. I think that’s one of the biggest factors why Bukalapak was a success back then — because of the community. That’s the kind of relationship that we were trying to build.
I think recently, since I invest in many startups, many startups also explore this kind of community relationship. Because that differentiates local companies from global [ones] who enter locally. This is one framework or strategy that local startups can use in any part of the world — go community.
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- Mekki: Why the particular focus on warung — these family-owned, micro-entrepreneur businesses?
We realized that Indonesia is very unique. Seventy percent of retail sales are still happening in those small stores.
That’s why we explored that and started from small. The numbers looked good.
I admire entrepreneurs who create businesses. They are the builders. I really have respect for them because they try, fail and try again. The spirit is there. They are honest. They work hard.
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- Mekki: Let’s imagine you’re established in your first job and you’ve pulled together your first $10,000 of investable money. How do you invest it?
If it’s someone who has [expertise] and has skills that are very specific… you can start a company.
Start from something that you’re expert [in], interested in yourself, focus on the things that you’re passionate about. The start is always something that you are already strong at.
If you study AI, create an AI startup. AI is like the new internet. What kind of AI application in the future will be massively used by many people, we still don’t know.
Edited by Lin Noueihed. If you have any tips, ideas or feedback, please get in touch: talk-to-us@moniify.com
