Echelon 2013 Jakarta Satellite was held this past Saturday, 29 March 2013 at Medco Energi at The Energy building, featuring pitches from eleven startups and speakers from major technology companies and experienced startup figures. This year’s winner, which will go to the Echelon main event in Singapore on 4-5 June, was TanyaDok, the medical consultation site backed by over 200 doctors and medical practitioners.
TanyaDok won thanks to its comprehensive support structure in delivering an important and essential service which helps people to get professional and accountable medical advice online. With every consultation session archived, patients and doctors can easily access previous consultation sessions and doctors can provide patients with the most appropriate action or advice for any medical query. While this does not fully replace in-person sessions, it does let people reach doctors remotely which saves a lot of travel time, not to mention waiting time at clinics and hospitals.
e27 co-founder Mohan Belani kicked things off with a welcome speech, highlighting this years changes to Echelon and announcing the e27 Startup Kit. Aryo Ariotedjo, managing partner of Grupara Incubator, which is part of the Medco Group, expressed his excitement and enthusiasm in the industry and spoke about Grupara’s Freeware co-working space which now hosts a handful of small startups who had been looking for a base of operations.
Tiket’s co-founder Gaery Undarsa spoke about jumping into an industry he knew very little about. Having spent ten years living in Canada, the decision to join Tiket as a co-founder in Jakarta had been a challenge that looks to be paying off. Tiket, which has been operating for less than 18 months, became the first company allowed to sell tickets over the Internet to the country’s inter-city train service, solving serious complications and bypassing scalpers at train stations. Today, PT KAI, the state-owned and only train operator also sells tickets its website. Tiket was also the first to sell online movie tickets for blitzmegaplex, Indonesia’s second major cinema chain.
Tokopedia director Leontinus Edison described the challenges in creating his e-commerce company and subsequently facing an even greater challenge from the many e-commerce companies that have emerged since Tokopedia was founded in 2009.
Touchten’s Anton Soeharyo gave an entertainingly informative talk on how he and his brothers worked to push their games to become some of the most popular games on the App Store across the globe. Among the six points that Soeharyo highlighted in his talk, perhaps the most useful is not letting your mother and people closest to you become your QA advisors, because they will support you regardless and often skip on being critical of your product, which is what you really need. Seeking feedback from an echo chamber won’t push your product ahead.
There were ten startups scheduled to present at Echelon Jakarta but on the day, there was a late entrance by GigOut, a music concert information app based in Singapore, which was given an opportunity to pitch. While it offers a service similar to SongKick, GigOut claims that because it’s based in Singapore it will have better access to information about concerts being held in Asia. Co-founder Keith Tan said that foreign services tend to miss out listing Asian gigs and by being able to deliver those more reliably, GigOut sees an opportunity to become the leading provider of concert information.
Greg Gopman, CEO of AngelHack, was at the event to find out for himself what the Indonesian startup scene is like. Gopman was excited to see the startups that were on hand to pitch and was impressed with Touchten’s growth story and he singled out Tees as the highlight of the pitches.
The one thing Gopman wants to see from Indonesian founders is the vision to create billion dollar businesses. He said that the ideas and services that he’s heard at the event are on point but many of them lack a certain push to become big companies, whether it’s a lack of developers, a lack of capital, or other resources.
It’s important to note that the investment scene in the country as far as the tech startup industry is concerned is still very young and many are still approaching the scene with caution. Regardless, events such as Echelon contribute in some ways to help shape tech startups in delivering more robust and more polished technology-based products and services over time.
