Dear startups: The honeymoon has ended!
Posted on July 1, 2011 by Budi Putra in Business, Tech
A bunch of venture capital and incubator companies have been launched in Indonesia with one single message: they wanted to help the country’s startups ecosystem grows. But looks like the mission is not that easy. Some investors guys told me that not easy for them to find startups with strong ideas and good co-founders in place [Daily Social has a good piece on this].
But I believe that Indonesia has talented people –but still “under-utilized”. Please do it something now. The honeymoon has ended, Dude. Forget about “the romanticism of Silicon Valley”.
My suggestion: if you really wanted to run a startup, all you need to do is creating idea about product or service to launch; determining the user or market that you are focusing on; and finding co-founders who will be executing the ideas and packaging the product. [If you got a mentor, that would be a great addition to your team.]
Please keep in mind: start small, play big, quick win.
Then you need to launch your product. Let’s see how your users react. If they love your product or service, they will start spread the words. Yes, you’ve got it clear: Just think about users. Not rivals or business model and so on. Just listen to them. If they asked you to add some features, please do that. [Do not create any features that only you like them, instead of users!]
Money or capital is no longer an issue here, I must say. Once you have users, investors will find you.
Starting a new day as a consultant for startups
Posted on June 20, 2011 by Budi Putra in Business, Personal, Tech
Startups
TODAY IS A NEW DAY FOR ME. Landed in Singapore yesterday, I am officially starting my new gigs as one of post my Yahoo era‘s adventures: helping some tech startup companies as a consultant. Basically, these startups need my expertise on how to address Indonesian market.
I wrote this last month:
- Basically, I want to return back to my ‘first love’: blogging! I will write to some tech blogs again, and run a blog-based media in Indonesia;
- I will help some startup companies as a consultant/advisor with a half-time basis;
- I will write a book on blogging and social media — yeah, this could be my 6th book
And let me update about the progress:
- This is an ongoing process – am learning the blogger’s applications now, then interview them and started building up the site.
- I am starting to assist some startups, will introduce its details later this week.
- Just found the scoop for the book. Will start doing research to gather initial data.
I will be staying in Singapore for a month — then going back and forth between Jakarta and Singapore.
That’s all at the moment. Until then, take care! :-)
Indonesia, a heaven to start a business?
Posted on May 26, 2011 by Budi Putra in Business
A recent survey conducted by BBC suggests that Indonesia is the best place for entrepreneurs to start a business. That’s really a good news.
Yes we see many tech startup companies, for instances, are coming and started to grow.
Let’s maintain this momentum and tell the world that Indonesia is indeed one of the most sexiest emerging markets in the world.
[Source]
How to find talents for your startup
Posted on April 12, 2011 by Budi Putra in Business, Tech
If you plan to build a startup, the first thing you should do is to find talents for your team. It can speed up your new company’s success or impress investors and partners to join.
“Start an advisory board,” Matt Mickiewicz suggests. “The best way to get experts involved in your business is to build out an advisory board that’s compensated with shares or options in your business.”
“Put the computer down and look outside,” Greg Rollett says. “My current partner and I connected at a conference. But it wasn’t at that conference that we formed our business relationship. It was over time. Over lunches, some afternoon beers, some business ideas, and even just talking about life.”
Check-out the complete tips here
Rockstars from SparxUp Award 2010
Posted on November 8, 2010 by Budi Putra in Tech
Gantibaju.com and Lewatmana.com won special awards after passed the SparxUp Award 2010‘s pitching program last Friday. Gantibaju.com, Indonesia’s answer to Threadless, received The Best Rising Star 2010; and live traffic service Lewatmana.com recognized as The Most Promising Startup 2010.
Winners list from each category:
Best Use of Technology:
Best Social Networking
Best Portal
Best E-Commerce
Best User Generated Content
Best Games
Best Mobile
Best WAP
SparxUp, Indonesia’s web competition event for digital startups, is a great forum for creative people, geeks, startups as well as investors to meet and communicate each others.
The event itself gains spotlight from international media and influential blogs. Congrats, SparxUp!
[via Daily Social]
Hell yeah! Indonesia has more than 200 startups now!
Posted on September 21, 2010 by Budi Putra in Statistics
Suddently everyone talks about Indonesian startups. That’s a good thing since Indonesia has more than 200 startups now and more to come.
What is startup?
According to Wikipedia,
A startup company or startup is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets. The term became popular internationally during the dot-com bubble when a great number of dot-com companies were founded.
I bet Indonesian guys on this field wouldn’t run out of ideas. And the most important thing, they’d love to share!
If you’re interested in following this discussion, you must read Aulia Masna‘s piece on E27 where he talked with Natali Ardianto, one of the country’s startup forum founders. Blogger Andre P. Siregar’s insight on startup’s business models is also interesting to read.
Nowaday is really a very exciting time in Indonesia’s tech scene.
[Image - courtessy of GettyImages]
Apple’s secret sauce: Runs like a huge startup!
Posted on August 3, 2010 by Budi Putra in Featured, Tech
Gizmodo asks:
One of my favorite and most-used iPhone apps is Apple’s Remote app. It lets me remotely control iTunes, which is streaming to my living room stereo via an Airport Express. But why hasn’t it been updated in over 8 months?
Sachin, a good friend of the app’s coder, answers:
Yes, the Remote app is due for an update. But here’s why it hasn’t been updated: the person who wrote it is busy working on other things. Yes, the person, not the team (He’s a good friend of mine).
Apple doesn’t build large teams to work on every product they make. Instead, they hire very few, but very intelligent people who can work on different projects and move around as needed. One day you might be working on the Remote app, and the next day you might get pulled on to another project that needs your help.
Lesson learned: You just need small teams to create great products!
Jakarta, Asia’s next Silicon Valley?
Posted on May 28, 2010 by Budi Putra in Tech
TechCrunch’s piece on how Indonesians’ startups companies keep struggling and growing. One for sure, according to the article, Indonesia is absolutely unique among other countries –in term of the nature of start-ups companies. And their expectations.
What is the Biggest Challenge Indonesian Web Entrepreneurs Face? Surprisingly, no one I asked said capital or exits. The relative lack of big, lucrative coding jobs from the multinationals like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and the lack of venture capital have kept developer wages and costs of building a startup incredibly low. No one seems to feel a real pain for venture capital, because none of these companies are started with an expectation of it. This makes Indonesia absolutely unique among the 11 or so countries I’ve visited in the last two years. Instead, the pain point is finding developers.
Venture capitalists now hunting Indonesian startups!
Posted on April 25, 2010 by Budi Putra in Tech
It’s just the matter of time that global venture capitalists will be coming to Indonesia and agressively hunting any potential startups. At the moment, they consider Singapore as the entry point to penetrate the country’s market, as tech blogger Rama Mamuaya noted.
For Indonesian startups, just prepare yourself with unique service, content or application –which be able to draw users or communities to come or use it. Yes, you’ve got it right: Create the crowd and money will follow!What else? You must also be well-prepared in term of business-legal-aspects (at least you must have a registered company, business plan, etc).
You are the owner of the time now! Go for it!
[image courtesy of rampok]
Afternoon coffee with a Russian tech pioneer
Posted on March 27, 2010 by Budi Putra in People
In technology and entrepreneurship landscape, there is no doubt that Russians are very talented. Some of them have launched successful global tech companies. Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of computer game Tetris; Stepan Pachikov (software maker ParaGraph); Maxim Levchin (PayPal) and Greg Shenkman and Alex Milosavsky (call-center software giant Genesys) — to name a few.
“You may not have heard of serial entrepreneur Serguei Beloussov, founder of SWsoft, but Western investors go ga-ga over his startups,” Business Week wrote. With his college buddy Ilya Zubarev, he has launched a dozen technology companies. Today, they are both multimillionaires.Taken from his company website:
Mr. Beloussov is a successful self-made entrepreneur and business executive with an outstanding 17-year track record in building, growing and leading high-performing, multi-national high tech companies in North America, Europe and Asia. Noted as an innovator and a thought leader in virtualization, datacenter automation, and cloud computing space, Serguei is a frequent speaker at industry events
Serguei is currently the Chairman and CEO of Parallels (parallels.com). Parallels is a technology rich, high growth software company focused on enabling cloud computing services to SMBs. The Company is a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and cloud computing service providers across all major hardware, operating system, and virtualization platforms. Under Mr. Beloussov’s leadership, Parallels (formerly SWsoft) has quickly grown to profitability and #1 market positions with its innovative Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, Parallels Desktop for Mac and Parallels Plesk Panel product lines. Mr. Beloussov is also a founder, major investor and Chairman of the Board of Acronis (acronis.com), a global leader in storage management and disaster recovery software for consumers, SMBs and large enterprises.
internationally.
Recently, I had a chance to sit down with him in a coffee shop, Temasek area, Singapore. “Read your blog,” the 37-year-old Russian said to open the conversation. Thanks man. My first impression: he is a humble person.
Beloussov, who now lives in Singapore, told me how he expanded his businesses, to bring world-class products to most parts of the world. He also promises reinvesting some of his wealth in new startups. “I love Asia. This region’s markets are growing fast now,” he said. The Parallels’ customers in Asia Pacific now, include Softbank IDC (JP), Telecom Malaysia (MY), Sri Lanka telecom, VDC (VN), IINet/ Westnet (AU) and China Telecom (CN). Any secret recipe on how to deliver successful companies globally? “Try to find a niche market and stay focus,” Beloussov said. Thanks, Beloussov, for the great and insightful conversation. And the coffee. Really enjoyed it.
