Brian’s Startup Journey — 6. The End (for this chapter)
This is a continuation of my startup journey series. You may find the previous story here.
It has been 3.5 months since I wrote my last blog. Things happened so fast, from the time when I was overconfident, to now I have decided to close this chapter of my startup journey. So what happened in those 3.5 months? I’ll tell shortly after this quick review about the startup, menuu.id.
About Menuu.id
Menuu.id is a mobile app to find restaurant promotions (discounts, cashbacks, etc.) in malls in Jakarta (Indonesia).
What problem do we solve?
As discounts and cashbacks go crazy these days in Indonesia, we saw a shift in customer behavior: “customers tend to decide restaurant based on the promotion (discount, cashback) amount, not by the restaurant brand or the food type”. And on the other side, we saw that restaurants were trying to promote those discounts, cashbacks on physical banners in front of their stores. So we assume, that by putting those promotions into an app, customers will open the app more often and restaurants will want to promote their promotions through our app.
- To note: Restaurants can put any promotions to our platform: E-Money, Credit Cards, and even their own promotions.
The Business Model
For this kind of mobile app, our business model will rely on restaurant’s “promotions” advertising. So if a restaurant, want their promotion to be in front of our app pages, they will have to pay.
The Business Power
Using Prawira’s 5 Business Power, I am going to explain what menuu.id’s business power are.
I tweaked this framework for menuu.id’s case: the paying one is from Supply (restaurants) while the Demand stays free.
- Product: A Mobile App for searching restaurant’s promotions (E-Money, Credit Card, Mall Membership Card, Restaurant’s own promotion)
- Supply: Currently, menuu.id’s team still need to input all of the promotions ourselves. Until we eventually get massive amount of users (> 100.000 weekly active users), then we will ask restaurants to update themselves. In our case, the restaurants are the ones who will pay for our product.
- Demand/Customer/User: Promotion seekers for restaurants in malls in Jakarta (Indonesia). Typical user uses the app once, maximum twice a week.
- Team: Co-Founders 2 people, 2 developers (Rauf & Noval), and several interns.
- Capital: Bootstrap (self-funded). Mentoring from family & friends and community in BLOCK71 Jakarta. Partnership with malls.
From February to April
The main activity through 2.5 months were primarily executing a go to market strategy, introducing the app to real users.
- Partnering with malls. About 7 malls were interested with the product, and 1 was serious (fX Sudirman Jakarta). We partnered with fX Sudirman by opening a booth in whole month of May 2019.
- Building a more proper mobile app. Outsourced the UI/UX design, hiring 2 developers: front end & back end.
- Preparing for the booth: booth design & build, hiring interns, purchase some stuffs for booth properties.
I was actually sick for about 3 weeks at the end of February until mid March. I started to get my hands dirty and build the app with the developers since then until the end of April.
Then came that moment, after I finished building the app, I started to get my head back up to the surface, thinking about the strategy of the business, and where this business is going. This was when I realized, in my opinion, the business aren’t going to take off. I think, the future of the business is unclear, and the competition in the market is just too tough. But I still kept it for myself at that moment. Okay, so why do I think that the business is failing?
If we look at the image above, this is a typical “marketplace” problem: merchant and user dependency. Each of them depend to the other. And in my opinion, the bigger problem is whether or not the restaurants are going to pay for our service. To be honest, I doubt they would pay if our service is simply like this.
Nevertheless, the show must go on. May 1st, we have to open the booth atfX Sudirman.
Month of May: The Booth, Peak Discussion, The End
So we opened the booth at fX Sudirman level 2. It was actually an empty space for a merchant, about 3m x 6m.
I was there at the booth from 1st to 5th May. The booth itself has major challenge: people around the mall were not interested to come to our booth. We do have a strategy, by having a lucky draw entry to win Samsung Galaxy S10 for people who purchased Rp 150.000 at fX Sudirman. This strategy however, turns out failed, almost nobody even care about this lucky draw.
For the whole week on the 6th to 10th May, Geoffrey, Rauf, Noval, and I held meetings every day trying to see if we can pivot this startup some way. We’ve tried to change our perspective: that the paying customer is the E-Wallet & Credit Card companies, tried to look at the future of the company is it possible to include transaction, tried to somehow think about subscription model, and several other attempts… However it ended up no where. I couldn’t find anyway to pivot this startup. I have thought if I should admit my failure and just go to find a job again. On the other side, my partner Geoffrey and the team were still confident that the startup could take off and fly high (of course with other arguments), but for me I didn’t think I could go any further. I hope I’m wrong!
In short, the next week, I talked to Geoffrey, and we agreed that we should split up, I’ll go find a job again, and he will take the company ownership completely. We both agreed on this deal, and I then sign off from menuu.id gradually while transferring knowledge to Rauf & Noval, the tech guys.
So this is the end of my startup journey for this chapter. I’ve learned so much from this journey, and I believe this is a valuable experience that would help me to continue and grow my career. I am still deeply passionate in solving problems, but for this time, I’m going to build products for existing companies help them grow by solving problems and make people’s live easier.
If you’re interested in knowing me more, just shoot me a message on LinkedIn.
