Can the Indonesian Startup Battle please begin?
August 15, 2011 by Remco | 9 Comments
Indonesian Startups have become more and more the focus of attention of VC because the Indonesian Internet market is booming! Well, at least that’s what the world is saying and in terms of Internet users and potential that’s fairly accurate. Consequently in rapid pace a pretty big startup scene has arose in Indonesia, mainly young people inspired by te successes of giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Full of passion and ambition one by one they’ve launched or preparing to launch their social media platform, e-commerce site, street directory, real estate directory, clothing shop or whatsoever.
Both foreign and local investors have taken their positions or will do so soon so you could say all ingredients are there for some huge successes. But apparently there’s something lacking, that’s not me saying but the consumer. So far the Internet is dominated by the usual foreign suspects except some big media companies, a forum, some portals, banks and a classified site. All of these so far successful local players are already long time operating and from that perspective can’t be classified as startup anymore. And when going further down in the Alexa ranking for Indonesia it’s pretty shocking to see the long time lack of any fast movers.