Product Development at Ruma: a Prologue
At Ruma, from the very beginning, we never see ourselves as a product based company, nor are we acknowledged by our website or our app. We move forward based on what problems we are trying to solve, one market at a time.
Back in 2012, when I just start growing up Valadoo with seed funding we acquired from Wego, Aldi and his team already started to grow substantially by providing micro-entrepreneurs with access to capital that can help them grow through airtime business. This approach allowed Ruma to touch more than one million users through thousands of its micro-entrepreneurs (or commonly referred to agents) where we eventually added bill payment as additional products.
Under the premise of solving our customers problem while building the communal trust, it did not take long until we eventually found (from the feedback we got from our customers) that the next big thing for us was beyond just airtime, but our customers’ need to acquire the household goods itself through other financial means beyond credit. Thus became the reason of our recent years disproportionate focus towards Arisan Mapan — a financial means for our customers to afford their household needs through group saving.
Back in 2007 I used to work for a multi-national company whose tagline was “Touching Lives. Improving Lives.” It was not until recently that I eventually got the embodiment of that statement as I really went out there and met these local community leaders, who were mostly female, whose intention were mainly to help their community, on top of getting additional income for their family. Bu Wiwin was one of these hustlers I met in Ciwidey earlier this year and this is her story.
This notion became even more interesting after we built the capability to serve the likes of bu Wiwin and hundreds of thousands others through our technology and operational presence in 70+ cities all over Java and Bali.
Kami percaya bahwa; setiap orang berhak untuk mendapatkan akses layanan; yang membantu mereka mencapai hidup mapan
It is the first of our credo that became our reason for being which to some extent changed the way I see things when it comes to tech startup. I used to think when building a startup, I need to have the best products and technology in the market. While it is not entirely wrong, but as Simon Sinek clearly shared in his remarkable 2009 TED talk:
…that people don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it.
This TED talk — and interaction with tons of Ruma members and/or Arisan Mapan customers — is a wake up call for many of us as I, and perhaps many other naive young entrepreneurs out there, was blinded by the opportunity to just be in the bright spotlight that is offered by the startup ecosystem. Regardless of what’s been told by the mainstream media, at the end it is the real value you create to your customers that matters, not what your investors told you to do — or what your ego needs to prove.
Creating meaningful access to financial means — and other impactful matters — through technology is what we currently do at Ruma.
This post serves as a prologue to a bunch of stories and lesson learnt on what we do at Ruma from product development perspective — my POV in particular :)
Hope you enjoy it.
