Apparently having a rockstar team is not a guarantee for a successful startup. Tasterous was one of the most anticipated startup back in 2011, it was led by a young talented businessman Ronald Ishak who previously (and successfully) grew Blackberry app Domikado.
Ishak was leading a team of rockstars as well, former Urbanesia and super talented mobile engineer Deche Pangestu and also one of Indonesia’s rare UI/UX high profile designer Richard Fang amongst other amazing engineers. Tasterous is also backed by Kaskus CEO Ken Dean Lawadinata and Urbanesia CEO Selina Limman as advisors and shareholders.
The project started early 2011 and they launched the service in July 2011 where we publish the exclusive news for their Blackberry and Android, and they received huge interest from people interested to try the app and asking for the invite codes. After that, we kinda lost track of what’s happening with Tasterous but in hindsight it seems that the user traction is so insignificant and they lost a lot of user interaction after launching the service. A month later they launched the iPhone app for the service hoping it can get them more traction from high end user. Apparently that didn’t worked as well.
Tasterous decided to halt the whole operations since late last year and offered employment opportunities for their employees to Kaskus, since Kaskus’ CEO is sitting on the board. Two employees took the opportunity working for Kaskus and the rest of them took a job elsewhere.
As for Ishak, he’s now focusing on his new adventure with a new breed of e-commerce startup called SatuTempat, which is a subsidiary of payment gateway company Doku.
any possibility to open source the failed startup?
I remember last year when they are presenting at the JVN. It’s great product.