Gojek is an Indonesian and south east Asian on-demand multi-service platform and digital payment technology group based in Jakarta. When i first heard about it on a podcast, i was wondering what’s this unicorn that nobody have heard of. After little research, you quickly realise it is a startup of the magnitude of Uber. And yet, it is almost unknown except in it’s market countries.
Whereas western and most specifically US based companies are extensively covered by the media, and get tons of free advertising in the form of media coverage, you only hear about the rest of the world startups when they become really big.
So what’s up with Go-Jek? and how did it become so big ?
Some interesting facts about Go-Jek, they had to hire a private security team to protect their drivers from taxi mafias in the early days, they also had to build their own cash distribution centers to pay their drivers before mobile payment became feasible. They adopted sound marketing and branding strategies, they had brilliant growth ideas.
According to Kevin Aluwi, Go-jek cofounder:
Gojek started as a motorcycle taxi based service. So it’s a kind of uniquely Indonesian things where we have millions of motorcycle taxi drivers in all of the urban centers in Indonesia. And so we started with a very local problem and the first product was a on-demand super app, if you will, where you could ask someone on a motorcycle to give you a ride, send a package for you or buy something and deliver it to you. This then evolved over the years into a more general on demand consumer super app that also included car drivers and other services ranging from the ones mentioned to grocery deliveries and payments and financial services.
… We took the company public about a year and a half ago after we merged with Indonesia’s top e-commerce platform. And we’ve managed to also expand outside of just Indonesia, where today we have about 2.7 million drivers across Southeast Asia. We’ve completed about 3 billion orders last year, so that’s 3 billion orders. So the scale of our region is often under underappreciated, where we also have about 15 million merchants doing general e-commerce, but also restaurants on our food delivery service. And on that IPO, we’re pretty proud to say that it was Indonesia’s largest IPO of all time, where we raised over a billion dollars at something like 27, 28 billion dollars in terms of valuation.
In comparison Uber did around 3.6 billion rides per year (estimates 2021). Gojek 3 billion order puts it in tight competition with Uber, even though it is operating on a fraction of the markets Uber is operating on. Uber have however the $ value advantage, by operating on more lucrative markets, it can easily make more money.
source : https://backlinko.com/uber-users
