Following Startup Weekend Jakarta, we caught up with Chrissa Mahtani, project lead for competition winner Bill.e to find out a little more about the app and what her plans are for further development and whether she’s keeping the entire team of 14 people.
Mahtani isn’t a complete stranger to the technology startup scene. While currently she’s working for her family’s garment company, she previously worked for Zalora Indonesia as a web content producer. She said that her time at Zalora gave her a lot of insight and impression of the e-commerce business and got her interested in the larger startup landscape. Joining Startup Weekend was a way for her to take a dive into the scene.
Mahtani realizes that 14 people is a very big number to launch a startup with and she said that at this point, Bill.e actually consists of only two people, herself and another business development person. “Jakarta Startup Weekend gave me the opportunity to examine each team mate and evaluate their skills for long term benefit of Bill.e”, she said, and as a result, she is looking for programmers and designers to take the app forward. Many of the team members were apparently not prepared to join the startup on a long term basis.
Bill.e has yet to be launched on mobile application stores but according to Mahtani, it will have two versions, a USD 4.99 version with unlimited scans and a free version that’s limited to only 100 scans of receipts. At least for the moment. The plan may change at launch depending on a number of different factors but that is what the team is looking at at this stage.
A receipts scanner would be more useful if it has the ability to export its data to financial apps and Mahtani explains that it’s in the cards. “At this point in time Bill.e will not be able to connect to any financial software but this is something that we might explore in the future. With regards to exporting data to Excel, we are adding this into the functionality, however it will be a very standard form of Excel data report”.
The main reason why Bill.e is being kept simple is that “we want to appeal to customers who are more casual about their finances because most people don’t have the time or discipline to dig into receipts”.
“Jakarta Startup Weekend was the first startup event I attended and with the success of Bill.e, I will be moving more persistently to build this and be more prominent in the e-commerce scene in Jakarta and Singapore”, said the RMIT graduate.
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