Steven Wongsoredjo led Super to become the 1st Indonesian consumer technology start-up that went through Y-Combinator and raised from top tier investors like New Enterprise Associates, SoftBank, Insignia Ventures Partners and other top global investors. He is also the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 awardee, Tatler Asia Generation T listee, as well as a Curator Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum. Steven has a Bachelor of Science from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Science from Columbia University in New York.

QingGui Huang is the founder and CEO of Konvy, Thailand’s first and largest online beauty platform. Having founded and grown Konvy for most of his career, Qinggui leverages his experiences in marketing and fashion in pioneering ecommerce in Thailand. He received his Bachelors’ in Management and International Business from Purdue University.

Prior to Janio, Junkai Ng worked in venture capital and private equity. He held investment roles in Partners Group, Gobi Partners (Shanghai) and Venturecraft — covering the TMT, consumer and healthcare sectors across US, UK, and Asian markets. He now leads Janio as CEO, driving the company’s strategic development and growth.

Transcript

Yongcheng: So to kick things off, we can have a quick introduction from the three of you. 

Gui: My name is Qing Gui, actually I’m originally from China, but I’m representing Konvy today as an e-commerce beauty platform that is a leading beauty platform in Thailand. My business is not new anymore. We’ve been around for 10 years, but this is our first round of receiving investment from Insignia.

Steven: My name is Steven and I’m from Super. We’re building this social commerce for tier two tier three cities and rural [Indonesia]. And then [I’d like to share a] little bit of the story — people who [get] along with you so well at the beginning are going to always hold a special place in people’s hearts and definitely Insignia has some special place in our heart.

Junkai: My name is Junkai, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Janio. We have been around for four years. We are a shipment orchestration platform in Southeast Asia. So basically we are in the business of underwriting 3PLs in the region. We try not to do things ourselves, but we help brands, enterprises, and logistic companies ship in this region a lot easier.

Maturing Southeast Asia’s Ecommerce through Social Commerce, Beauty Retail, and Shipping

Yongcheng: And just to recap again, I’m Yongcheng, I help to cover internet consumer investments here at Insignia. So let’s kickstart the panel properly. So for the first question, it’ll be addressed to all three of you. I think the audience will be interested to know from your perspective the kind of role that your company has played in helping to mature the region’s ecommerce environment. So Steven, shall we start with you first?

Steven: So I would like to share two points here. The first point is about how we built Super. My conviction to build Super [started] when I was a kid. I grew up in a retail family business, which [has served] Indonesia’s rural areas.

So one of my greatest findings, when I used to travel with my dad, was that life is just so unfair in those areas. Whereas the GDP per capita could be lower than our capital city by 3x up to 5x, but the cost of the goods is more expensive in the range of 20% up to 100%. So we’re building Super to help our nation and contributing to fellow Indonesians to help the [improve] equality and economic distributions across second-tier cities up to rural areas.

I think that’s gonna be number one. And second is that we’ve seen that out of the first gen of e-commerce juggernauts that have been around in the market for a decade plus and billions of US dollars being poured to their balance sheet — they can only capture five to 10% out of Indonesia’s offline retail market.

Therefore, we believe this social commerce O2O model is the right model to crack 90% of the market and the role that we’re trying to do is to enable the first-time ecommerce experience for Indonesia’s villagers in rural areas. So that’s basically what we’re trying to do on the ground.

“Whereas the GDP per capita could be lower than our capital city by 3x up to 5x, but the cost of the goods is more expensive in the range of 20% up to 100%…we’ve seen that out of the first gen of e-commerce juggernauts that have been around in the market for a decade plus and billions of US dollars being poured to their balance sheet — they can only capture five to 10% out of Indonesia’s offline retail market. We believe this social commerce O2O model is the right model to crack 90% of the market…”

Yongcheng: Cool. Thanks Steven for the insights. Junkai, why don’t you share your views as well? 

Junkai: For us, there’s quite a bit of ambiguity operating in Southeast Asia, also given the recent turmoil in the markets with fuel surcharge going up and stuff like that. Our thesis when we first started was quite simple. How can we help brands or even any companies come into and expand in Southeast Asia in a short amount of time, I would say, with less cost? 

When we first started, we were serving smaller sporting apparel brands like Nike and Under Armour. We realized that for them to come or enter into any of these markets, most of them will have to think about working with a portfolio of different providers. First and foremost, [they are not working] not a single provider. Supply chain is all about risk management at some point, and coming to this region, most of them will have to work with at least 30, 40, or 50 different companies in the first place just to make sure that they have a complete end-to-end supply chain strategy, not to think about the cost of managing these vendors as well. 

So the thesis we had at this point in time was that if [we] can help them manage these vendors in a more effective manner by underwriting our partners’ performance, capture the different performance attributes in a more succinct manner, maybe we can help reduce about 20% of those costs.

That will go a long way. That’s kind of how we looked at the premise itself. Over time, I think we have grown quite a bit in terms of helping some of these brands, not just growing in terms of logistics costs by reducing the logistics expansion costs by I think upwards of US$2 to $3 million a year, but also, I would say, replacing their legacy logistics in-house teams as well

That kind of helps them grow a little bit more expeditiously in some of these regions as well. So that’s how we think that we can help spur the e-commerce growth in this region a little bit more. And mostly for most parts of Southeast Asia, it’s still an archipelago, right?

So you look at countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, most of them, you can’t just use one provider. You have to use 15, 20, or 30 different providers, look at capabilities, look at coverage, and look at different forms of performance metrics. So for us if we can just provide a way for them to deploy their resources to these different portfolios in a more effective manner, in a more transparent manner, that’s how we make that change, I would say.

“Our thesis when we first started was quite simple. How can we help brands or even any companies come into and expand in Southeast Asia in a short amount of time, I would say, with less cost?…Over time, I think we have grown quite a bit in terms of helping some of these brands, not just growing in terms of logistics costs by reducing the logistics expansion costs by I think upwards of US$2 to $3 million a year, but also, I would say, replacing their legacy logistics in-house teams as well…you look at countries like Indonesia and Philippines, most of them, you can’t just use one provider. You have to use like 15, 20, 30 different providers, look at capabilities, look at coverage, look at different forms of performance metrics.”

Yongcheng: Yeah, and I do agree that the fragmentation of a very nascent industry does create pretty massive economic opportunities. So Gui, what’s your viewpoint on this? 

Gui: Konvy is my first startup. and some of you guys might wonder why a Chinese man would be doing business in Thailand. I had my first startup in America when I was in college, and I did two more startups when I was in Beijing. In 2011, I took my knowledge of e-commerce and technology, just holding my suitcase, and landed in Thailand because that was a place that absolutely, there was no e-commerce before. 

I did a lot of research and found that Thai people love to [purchase beauty products]. The amount of money a person is willing to purchase — and from what I know, even a very normal individual purchases 10 to 20 units of beauty products in a month — so that’s how the personal behavior is like in Thailand. Because of that, I built the first vertical e-commerce platform in Thailand around the same year 2011 when Lazada [started]. 

So [we were] the first to start a vertical platform helping brands to sell online. But until now, 10 years later, the business model itself has adapted, right? Because 10 years ago, e-commerce was new. No one knew how to sell online. But talking about today, everyone knows how to sell online. Now how can Konvy adapt to the ecosystems of beauty and also e-commerce now we are leading a lot of innovation on how people should shop online. [That has] become our role.

We talk to a lot of brands that would like to know how Konvy can shape the beauty business in Thailand as well. So that’s because we’re no longer a small company in Thailand. We are one of the leading beauty players in Thailand and every move that we make could somewhat impact the whole ecosystem of the beauty industry in Thailand. And that’s how we position ourselves. 

“I built the first vertical e-commerce platform in Thailand around the same year 2011 when Lazada [started]…But until now, 10 years later, the business model itself has adapted, right? Because 10 years ago, e-commerce was new. No one knew how to sell online. But talking about today, everyone knows how to sell online. Now how can Konvy adapt to the ecosystems of beauty and also e-commerce now we are leading a lot of innovation on how people should shop online. [That has] become our role.”

Insights into Thailand’s Consumer Landscape

Yongcheng: Thanks. And just building on that question real quick, given that you have more than a thousand beauty brands on your platform and all this, I know you shared briefly about some of the consumer insights, but what kind of insights can you also share with the audience when it comes to growing the overall consumer landscape in Thailand? And what will all these insights mean to Konvy as a platform moving forward?

Gui: Over the last 10 years, my business wouldn’t say grow exponentially every year, but over the last 10 years, we’ve been growing every year substantially. Not exponentially, but steadily. It’s because I believe that a market should have its own pace. It takes time to understand how beauty works in a third country. It took me a lot of time to talk to the brands. I’m a very operational kind of guy.

I meet up and sit with the brand to understand their needs. Even today, 10 years later, I still meet with some brands like L’Oreal. I meet with brands like Amore Pacific. I talk to them, right? Five years ago, what were your needs? But now, today, what are your needs? Recently I met with them and they tell me that with the [changing] sentiments of the business, a lot of the strategy has to change

And if they talk to the offline players, the strategy is simply to open more shops, right? But that’s why they wanna talk to us. They say, “What’s Konvy’s plan? What should we do together? Can we come up with some new strategy to encourage people to shop more?” Because of that, you see a lot of new opportunities as long as you put in the effort to learn deeper [about] the market.

Yes, the market is not as bright as last year, but there’s a lot more opportunity for us to grab. So for us, with the consumer insight that we learn on one hand, and the other side with the information that we get from the brands, we are able to come up with new models, and new strategies to tackle the new consumer behaviors. Gen Z and Gen Y, each of their segmentation is very different. 

Three years ago when we started to [venture] into multichannel strategy — so Konvy is not just focusing on our own channel. Now we are everywhere. We are in TikTok or marketplaces. We’re penetrating the offline as well, helping the brands go everywhere. Three years ago, the problem they faced was that the marketplace was booming, but they had no individuals in their company to handle marketplaces.

But today, they do have a team for the marketplace now, but now the challenge is that social commerce is coming. TikTok is coming. What should [they] do? Those are the things that as a leading player in the market now, we continue to just explore new opportunities with the brands and with consumers.

“With the consumer insight that we learn on one side and the other side with the information that we get from the brands, we are able to come up with new models, a new strategy to tackle the new consumer behaviors…Three years ago, the problem [brands] faced was that the marketplace was booming, but they had no individuals in their company to handle marketplaces. But today, they do have a team for the marketplace now, but now the challenge is that social commerce is coming. TikTok is coming. What should [they] do?”

Opportunities and Challenges of Building a Cross-Border Logistics Platform in Southeast Asia 

Yongcheng: And just to finish it up, a fun fact is Konvy is actually Insignia’s first investment in Thailand, and we do look forward to working with Konvy more. The next question I ask is actually for Junkai. Janio has built a tech platform that’s aggregated an international network of logistic payers, right? So can you describe to the audience the kind of challenges and opportunities that you have faced when it comes to navigating the cross-border logistics network, especially in light of all the headwinds that the global supply chain has faced in the past two to three years?

Junkai: I think the best way to kind of tackle this question is, how do we help our clients kind of navigate expanding to different markets. So first and foremost, we are in the business of underwriting. When I say underwriting, it means that we actually do very little of the execution about ourselves.

We don’t actually move the physical parcels or move the goods. Our job fundamentally is to capture attributes of our partners’ performance. When I talk about performance, it can be a host of a few different factors, right? You can talk about things like capacity. You can talk about things like on-time delivery. You can talk about things like customer experience and NPS score. That’s fundamentally our business and our job at the end of the day. And our alignment with our clients — and that could be either brand, marketplaces, or whatnot — is to help them make the best decision possible based on the partners that are available in the market today. That’s kind of how we see our role a little bit. 

I would say fundamentally our job at the end of the day is to provide this information and transparency of information to them when they make their supply chain decision. Who should they use? In which market? Who should they allocate their money or resources to? To which players at what period of time?

When we look at a brand or when we work with a client and they say, “Look, my supply chain strategy is to expand into Thailand, into Singapore, into Malaysia.” Our job would be to say, “Okay, where should you put your fulfillment centers? How should we build a digital twin of a supply chain? How do we map it out? And these are the players available and these are the players available for you,” and how can we react as your portfolio manager to say, “Look, for $10 million, for example, this is how you should optimize your route,” and how do we maintain a portfolio for you today, and how would that weight change depend on risk appetite? That’s kind of the role we play today. 

Has our approach changed over the last three years? I would say not that much, but I would say the only thing that really changed is the way we capture performance attributes. So for example, I would say the scope of what we capture has increased significantly. We never used to capture things such as capacity or things such as node level information or let’s say multimodal information or things such as flag capacity and stuff like that. 

Now we start capturing a lot more of this granular information and then present it to our clients. I would say that’s the fundamental thing that has changed. And ultimately we need to remember that we are acting as their fiduciary. I mean the thesis we put to our clients is if you have a million dollars to spend, would you rather spend it on logistics or would you spend it on your marketing to grow your GMV?

That’s kind of how we put it across. And despite how the micro headwinds have changed, our job at the end of the day is to say, “These are available options. You used to do it like this, but with us, you can now talk about four other options you have on the table. Without us, you have to build your own in-house teams, build your own technical teams, build your own whatever teams, and start to do all the RFQs and RPs.”

And fundamentally, these are all course discovery and capabilities discovery exercises, right? All we are trying to do is to make the switching costs as low as possible so that we can act on your behalf. Either we act on your behalf, or you have the information to make better decisions, and somehow we get a piece of that pie. So that’s how I think our role has changed a little bit over the last X years.

“I would say the only thing that really changed is the way we capture performance attributes. So for example, I would say the scope of what we capture has increased significantly…Now we start capturing a lot more of this granular information, and then present it to our clients… the thesis we put to our clients is if you have a million dollars to spend, would you rather spend it on logistics or would you spend it on your marketing to grow your GMV?… And fundamentally, these are all course discovery and capabilities discovery exercises, right? All we are trying to do is to make the switching costs as low as possible so that we can act on your behalf…and somehow we get a piece of that pie.”

Yongcheng: Got it. Maybe just to dive a little bit deeper into that, given that your business is more regional in nature, do you see any particular interesting insights when it comes to interacting with like regional clients versus like single-market clients?

Junkai: Obviously for us, one of the core tenets, or at least one of the core metrics we go after is not really just pure revenues, but how can we grow their share of wallet with them over time? 

Regional clients kind of give us a lot more leverage and we can act better as their advisor in terms of how they should map out their supply chain decisions. With businesses of a certain scale, we will only see value in what we bring because they are off a certain size. If you are, let’s say an SME or below, or let’s say a retail shipper where, let’s say if your GMV is less than a million a year, you will not see the value in what we are creating because you don’t need to maintain a portfolio of different 3PLs, for example, because you do not have the same leverage as the big boys do, and these are usually limited to domestic players or players who are stuck in the domestic market. 

Again, this is not a reflection of Indonesia or the Philippines because of the population size; this is just what we observe so far. Regional players tend to have a more complex supply chain strategy and they’ll think a bit more long-term in terms of where they should go — because, let’s stop with e-commerce, right?

E-commerce is not just about outbound logistics with parcel-level deliveries. You need to start thinking about, “Okay, where I put my fulfillment center, where should I do my inbound logistics? How frequently should I do re-fulfillment? Where should my manufacturing HQ be?” Our job at the end of the day is to map the entire chain for them so fundamentally what we’re really trying to distill is time to market.

That’s one metric and cost to market, that’s another metric. Everything else is just an input variable. If you can make the input variable as simplified as possible and put that in a very rudimentary formula, I think we have done our job. So I would say that scale is the biggest difference, at least scale and complexity are problems and we kind of thrive on complex issues.

That’s kind of how our systems are built because we are built modularly in nature, right? We underwrite multiple partners across the entire supply chain, not just domestic players. It’s also a function of how commoditized those assets are. If you look at, let’s say last mile, everyone’s doing the same thing, right?

Everyone’s doing next-day delivery, same-day delivery, right? And the only difference is the only value creation you have is price. And that’s a problem, right? But if you’re talking about things like last mile plus a little bit of fulfillment, plus a little bit of sorting, plus a little bit of customs plus freight, plus a little bit of whatever, right? The complexity compounds. So that’s kind of the main difference we see. 

“…one of the core metrics we go after is not really just pure revenues, but how can we grow their share of wallet with them over time? Regional clients kind of give us a lot more leverage and we can act better as their advisor in terms of how they should map out their supply chain decisions…Regional players tend to have a more complex supply chain strategy and they’ll think a bit more long-term in terms of where they should go…we kind of thrive in complex issues. That’s kind of how our systems are built because we are built modularly in nature, right?”

Building the Walmart of Indonesia with a Scalable Hyperlocal Supply Chain

Yongcheng: Thank you. And Steven, the next question is for you. Super has built a very strong advantage and leadership, especially in Indonesia for hyper-local supply chain, for FMCG and all this. Moving forward, how do you think you can leverage Super’s advantages in scaling up your supply chain across the whole of Indonesia and even across product categories as well? 

Steven: Probably the big thing that we would like to do in the next few years first is geographical expansion, and second is three points on the business strategy that we would like to do.

If you’ve seen the data, the propensity of Indonesia’s middle-class income based on the World Bank data is immense. And if you look deeper into our GDP, 60% of Indonesia’s GDP is driven by practical consumption, [and] one-third of it actually comes from rural areas. So actually Super has a huge total addressable market that is US$200 billion. So there is no way for us to go to the capital city. We’re just going to go on to the rural areas to go deeper especially East Indonesia. So from the business perspective, we’re gonna do three things. 

First is we’re going to expand to more new cities and add more agents. Right now we do have [around] 30 thousand and of course we would like to triple that and quadruple that in the next few years ahead. And the way we’ve seen the opportunity is so humongous right now we are in East Java. So we do have a different approach when we are expanding. We are not going after the whole Indonesia, we’re going it step by step because for us locals who really understand what’s going on on the ground, supply chain is a very complex business and it’s going to take a while for us to reach economic efficiencies, network effects, and so on.

In fact, Super is only in its first three years as a company and is only in East Java. And right now we are expanding to only one new province, which is in South Sulawesi. But look at it this way — most of these first generations of e-commerce got to unicorn status by having 70% of their transactions from Jakarta only.

And Jakarta has US$200 billion GDP. And then right now in East Java, it’s US$160 billion-plus US$40 billion in South Sulawesi. And then if we could take 5% of it, we would become a very meaningful business. And what we’re trying to do — we’re now in 35 cities, Yongcheng, and there are still like 480 cities left that have GDP per capita lower than US$5000. We’re gonna go there. And typically per city density, we could get around 2000 [agents] and each of these agents would make around US$1-2 thousand GMV for Super per month. So we’re going to generate an amazing cash flow in the next few years ahead. 

Second of all, we’re not just building market share and volume, but at Super here we’re also thinking about revenue because the more funding you raise, the more you’re going to get closer to IPO. And of course, you need to build these fundamentals as part of your backbone. So the next plan is — you’ve known about it — we’ve been successfully purchasing and acquiring [products] through private labels. We are going to acquire more down the line, but it’s different. The difference with these private label products is that most of the competitors are distributing first-tier cities’ brands. We’re actually partnering with local underdog players on the ground and acquiring them and amplifying their growth with us. So that’s the thing that we would like to do on the ground. 

And the third is that we are exploring and expanding more vendors’ exclusivity on the ground because at Super here, we do sell some like P&G, Unilever, and some of the top brands, but most of the SKUs that we’ve sold are from local brands. So people that have never heard or never seen these products in the capital city, and we are partnering with them. We kick in the exclusivity on the ground to increase the gross margin and revenue over time. 

In the end, it’s like an art of jiu-jitsu that we’re playing here, so people think when they are fighting Super, they’re fighting with this e-commerce general player. But hey, wait, actually, this guy is actually also a private labeled brand that actually has an FMCG kind of like angle that have very strong revenue. Then people think that they would like to file us in the FMCG category, but hey, actually this guy has network effects on the ground and is utilizing these local vendors in distributing the product. We’re not using this like the local supply chain that we actually find in the capital city. And some of those folks are freelancers, truck drivers, and so on. So we’re gonna be like a deadly animal to deal with. 

And in the end, the big vision of the company is we would like to become the Walmart of Indonesia, without having the presence of retail stores and having a very efficient [supply chain] on the ground. So that’s the big plan for the company for the next few years ahead. 

“In the end, it’s like an art of jiu-jitsu that we’re playing here, so people think when they are fighting Super, they’re fighting with this e-commerce general player. But hey, wait, actually this guy is actually also a private labeled brand that actually has an FMCG kind of like angle that has a very strong revenue. Then people think that they would like to file us in the FMCG category, but hey, actually this guy has a network effects on the ground and is utilizing these local vendors in distributing the product…And in the end, the big vision of the company is we would like to become the Walmart of Indonesia, without having the presence of retail stores and having a very efficient [supply chain] on the ground.”

How Commerce Platforms and Enablers are Unlocking Economic Impact in Southeast Asia

Yongcheng: I like the vision of the Walmart of Indonesia. One last question, a quick one probably for each of you. E-commerce has right now become a new channel for consumers to spend money. It has improved access to products. It has also improved pricing as well for a lot of consumers here in Southeast Asia, and enabled brands to be a lot more productive just in terms of reaching out to consumers and all this. So how would you say, you know, for each of your companies, how can you go about creating more economic impact in this part of the world?

Gui: Thailand’s beauty industry, I would call the stage that we are at is a little bit different from neighboring countries in Southeast Asia.

A global report says that Thailand has the most complex beauty market in the world. A lot of you guys have been to Thailand before, and you see there are so many beauty brands. Probably every celebrity owns a brand of their own, right? The reason behind this is because Thailand has been the manufacturing hub for a lot of international brands for more than 40 years

So the whole landscape of manufacturing, consumer demands, and retail channels are very fulfilled in the market. But Konvy came into play being the first in e-commerce for those brands. But right now we’re seeing new challenges, right? Especially after COVID, the behavior of shoppers has been driven towards online shopping. People now are getting information from multiple channels like social commerce, now they’re getting a lot of information from live commerce as well. So how do we provide more impact in the economy? 

As the behavior is starting to change, you start to see that traditional brands are trying to come up with something to defend their own strategy. But there are a lot of new brands popping up into the market. Gen Z people — now they’re looking for consumer upgrades. Before we’re looking at consumer products. Maybe for Super, for example, in Indonesia, accessibility is still a problem in Indonesia, but in Thailand we’re looking for consumer upgrades. 

Gen Z people are willing to spend, they’re looking for a [product] that’s US$30, they don’t have much income, but they’re willing to spend that much of our amount. So for Konvy, can we be a player to help those new brands, but at the same time, how can we also help the traditional brands to be in the present with the markets? That will be a balance that we have to find to position ourselves. And if we could do that right, then we’ll be able to capture a lot of bigger market share in Southeast Asia. 

“So for Konvy, can we be a player to help those new brands, but at the same time, how can we also help the traditional brands to be in the present with the markets? That will be a balance that we have to find to position ourselves. And if we could do that right, then we’ll be able to capture a lot of bigger market share in Southeast Asia.”

Junkai: For us, I think three things [on] how we can help create bigger economic impact is ease and cost of entering new markets. For most new companies trying to come to Southeast Asia or most larger conglomerates trying to enter the ecommerce space in this region, the cost of entering new markets also goes down quite significantly.

The second point is we also give them access to I would say, different vendors. I think more than about 2-300 different vendors through a single integration, but more importantly, not just, I would say, access to these vendors, but someone to manage these vendors on their behalf. Because we are already representing a thousand brands, right? So the cost of representing another brand, it’s marginal in that sense. 

I think the last one is how we can help drive greater economic impact is how we can help them deploy their resources and their budgets a lot more effectively. We are doing it consistently on a daily basis, procuring better rates, negotiating with our partners on a daily basis, doing performance management, doing let’s say API integrations and stuff like that. Those are things that we are already doing consistently as part of our day-to-day job. I see that as one way to help push brands to come to this region a lot more.

“…how we can help create bigger economic impact is ease and cost of entering new markets…more than about 2-300 different vendors through a single integration, but more importantly, not just, I would say, access to these vendors, but someone to manage these vendors on their behalf…the last one is how we can help drive greater economic impact is how we can help them deploy their resources and their budgets a lot more effectively…I see that as one way to help push brands to come to this region a lot more.”

Steven: Sure. Actually three things from my side. First is definitely job creation. Typically at Super, [our agents] could make around 60 bucks per month, and the minimum wage in that area is around 140 bucks.

Therefore, imagine if you do have — well, I mean we’re talking about like second-tier cities and rural areas 140 bucks is kind of like a big deal. That’s the way that you have to see that. Let’s say you make US$10,000 per month, and suddenly your wife could make US$5000, that’s going to be very meaningful for your household, right? So that’s basically what we are trying to do and what we are trying to continue to do in the next few years ahead. 

Second of all, by actually acquiring private label brands, it’s not only working one side for us. Basically the production is still being taken care of by the people who own the brand, but now we own the brand and amplify all of the growth. They’re gonna grow with us. So empowering more of these underdogs to basically fight with the first-tier city brands is [what] we’re trying to do over here. 

Lastly, there has always been like aspirations of Indonesians who spent time back in the day growing up in rural areas. If you’ve seen all of those like decacorn and unicorns that are now born and raised in the city, probably those are like metropolitan kids. We would like to become the villagers kids building this app, built by those who were born and grew up in rural areas. And still [no other] company has done this properly to build this tech ecosystem [for] East Indonesia. And we hope we could become one of the voices of this East Indonesia economy.

I mean, five years ago I still remember, we started as underdogs. And I think one of the reasons why Yinglan picked us is because why are these guys trying to make their life harder by building the business in rural areas, you know? And then, I got passed by a lot of like investors back in the days because they were just saying, “Why don’t you just launch in Jakarta, right?”

And rural five years ago was just jargon. It was not like a big thing. But now we’ve seen that more and more people are going to build companies for rural areas. And I think we were one of the ones that started the tide and hopefully in the next few years ahead would love to see and inspire more people who come back to the country and not just build this tech ecosystem in the capital city, but also think about how to solve problems outside of the capital city.

“First is definitely job creation. Typically at Super, [our agents] could make round like 60 bucks per month, and the minimum wage in that area is around like 140 bucks. Therefore, imagine if you do have — well, I mean we’re talking about like second tier cities and rural areas 140 bucks is kind of like a big deal…Second of all, by actually acquiring private label brands, it’s not only working one side for us…we’re empowering more of these underdogs to basically fight with the first-tier city brands is [what] we’re trying to do over here…now we’ve seen like more and more people are going to build companies for rural areas. And I think we were one of the ones that started the tide and hopefully in the next few years ahead would love to see and inspire more people who come back to the country and not just building this tech ecosystem in the capital city, but also thinking how to solve problems outside of the capital city.”