Rewriting Go-Jek — Learnings from Piotr Jakubowski (CMO)
BLOCK71 Singapore was privileged to attend Go-Jek’s keynote speech this year at InnovFest Unbound and these are some of key notes that we got.
About Go-Jek
Go-Jek is a technology startup that specialises in ride-hailing, logistics and digital payments. It is Indonesia’s first unicorn, and the only company in South East Asia that made it into Fortune’s 2017 list of 50 Companies That Changed the World, ranking at number 17. Its mission statement is “creating social impact through technology, with the aim to improve social welfare through ensuring efficiency in the market”, and its unofficial slogan is “life without limits”.
Go-Jek has continually rewritten itself as a business over the past few years of operations in Indonesia. The app, launched in January 2015, has gone from 12,000 monthly bookings to 100 million monthly bookings in less than 3 years.
Here’s are some of the rewrites as explained by Go-Jek’s Chief Marketing Officer — Piotr Jakubowski at InnovFest Unbound 2018 in Singapore during his keynote presentation.
Rewrite #1: Shattering artificial limitations to shift from why to why not
- Go-Jek drivers have always been around, but the app changed the game by connecting them to customers on demand and removing inefficiencies in pairing customers with drivers.
- Drivers see a 44% increase in revenue after joining Go-Jek as a driver
- Over 800 thousand drivers in network
Rewrite #2: Take the best from all of your previous experiences and build your own playbook
- When Go-Jek faced a severe driver crunch during their peak periods, they rented a stadium, did mass hiring, and purchased 120 thousand jackets, helmets and SIM cards for each newly hired driver.
- One of their attractions is that they offer day-to-day health and life insurance (in partnership with Allianz) as compared to the usual monthly plans, which allows drivers to work towards a daily goal and to only purchase plans when they need to. This allows them to build better credit which is essential to have better access to other things in the future.
- Innovation requires you to take some of your best practices, throw them out the door, roll up your sleeves and actually get to work.
Rewrite #3: Face your problems and deal with them directly, there is no other choice
- Go-Jek rewrote their allocation algorithm every year to boost their growth rate continually
- New features ranging from Go-Pay (e-wallet) to Go-Clean (professional house cleaning service) were released constantly in order to diversify into different industries
Go-Jek has recently announced that it is going to invest US$500M to expand into countries outside of Indonesia, Singapore being one of their targets. Their main rival in the region, Grab, also had a big announcement to make at Innovfest Unbound.
Full video here:
For tech updates straight to your inbox, subscribe to our weekly tech newsletter here.
