Connecting The World’s Kindness
“Our little contribution is: transmitting these germs called ‘kindness’ and ‘compassion’ “
— Vikra Ijas, Co-Founder of Kitabisa
People define happiness in many ways. But some great people I know define happiness as an act of contribution. They feel content for they know they’re relevant and that this journey called life has a meaning.
The journey to success is nothing close to a smooth path. The journey to success in giving solution is even more challenging, but even more worthwhile. It takes courage to admit mistakes and wisdom to get the essentials.
Kitabisa (means ‘we can’), Indonesia’s leading crowdfunding site, has been making difference in thousands of lives since 2013 through connecting people’s kindness. In our interview, Vikra Ijas, one of the Co-Founders of Kitabisa , told me about the journey — the purpose, the rough patch, and his best lesson.
How would you explain what you do in one sentence?
Me and the team at Kitabisa created a platform to help to connect the world’s kindness — particularly in the Indonesian market.
Why do you want to do what you do? What’s the purpose behind it?
My partner, Timmy, started this project through accepting a challenge from his mentor, Prof. Rhenald Kasali. Our goals were aligned. We both wanted to utilize this tool called ‘the internet’ for a greater good — to combine a business model that is both sustainable, as well as creating real impact to people. We looked for something specific. We concluded that donation is something tangible and also is needed in a lot of social aspects.
We believe that in Indonesia — and much more in the rest of the world — there are a lot of #OrangBaik (re: good/kind people). However, there was no platform for them to connect and to celebrate their small achievement together. We saw how these conditions can be glued together by the crowdfunding model. Therefore, Kitabisa is the network where #OrangBaik can connect . They will know that there are lot of like-minded people who want to support positive causes in their communities. And they can celebrate the achievement they’ve made together through, for example, looking at the updates on the platform.
In addition to that, we also believe that ideas are contagious, just like any germs. Today’s internet has the risk of making it easy for people to transmit ideas that cause fear and anger. Our little contribution is: we want to transmit these germs called ‘kindness’ and ‘compassion’ to society.
We know that a purposeful journey is always dynamic and far from an easy path. How was the journey of Kitabisa in the beginning?
Kitabisa was managed as a side project in the beginning. Then started from 2014, we explored the project further as a potential real business. When we just started, we didn’t know what to do. We just kept promoting it to many people. We failed to realize that the product is everything — a product that serves someone else’s needs.
At that time, we focused on promoting how it had been working great in other countries. When we approached some NGOs here in Indonesia, they had some valid doubts. They believed that their system had been working fine, so why should they use Kitabisa? (especially since users need to pay certain fee to use the platform). We also tried to engage some social enterprises. They were happy to use the platform but at the same time, donors did not understand why they should donate to social enterprises’ projects.
So most of the challenges existed between finding how the product actually serves a need and solves a problem and secondly, since it’s an area of ‘giving’ and ‘donating’, it’s also all about how to ‘build the trust’ for the people to use the platform to donate. Therefore, we needed to do tons of unscalable things, met people face to face, convinced them to use, did some extra hassle to help them to become a success story, amplified it online so it could convince other people, until it achieved the critical mass and gain people’s trust.
When was the time you told yourself: ‘This is it, it works!’ and knew that there’s no other way but moving forward?
Since we were so idealistic in managing the project, at first we only wanted to deal with cases within the positive themes. When we got applications in the theme of sickness and medical support, we turned it down. At that time, we thought that the content was too personal and represented sadness. But then, we saw how huge amount of applications came onto us from this particular segmentation. We realized that there was an underlying need that was underserved, which is ‘medical bills’ segmentation.
Since then, we did a experimentation. We allowed the “medical bills” category. Apparently that was one of the first categories that successfully took off. Slowly but sure, it enabled a spillover effect from the funnel to other categories, which got way more expanded at the moment — education, environment, religious giving, etc. We hope to keep on enriching and expanding the categories we offer in the platform.
How would you describe your whole journey so far with Kitabisa with an analogy?
“Exploring one’s identity, just like a teenager”. As teenagers, we want to look cool, just like our idols or role models. Timmy and I were lack of experience in leadership and building a company. We couldn’t do anything else but benchmarking others and wanting to be another successful platform. However, as the time goes by, we became more mature and found out that we are each unique and special in our own ways and we should capitalize on our strengths and showcase it for the benefit of the world.
In the beginning we’re ‘copy-pasting’ here and there until finally we discovered our own identity. We then strengthened where Kitabisa can give the biggest added value as the area where we can put our focus and maximum effort. The more mature we are, the more comfortable we would be with who we are and the more able we are to have the right focus.
What was the most difficult challenge you’ve ever encountered?
Uniquely, both me and Timmy got married quite young. The company was still in a very early stage at that time, it was even not yet a ‘company’. We were both still uncertain about the future, let alone if Kitabisa would be around in the next three months. We are very grateful that our wives respectively had faith in us. While we just started each of our families, Kitabisa was really unstable. For once, we hadn’t found the finest business model, our power users were not yet there to be found (re: medical bills category).
We ran out of our business capital completely at the time when we already hired 3–4 employees, who obviously needed to get their monthly salary. We then borrowed people’s money as a solution and sacrificed our own salaries for few months so that we could pay our employees. That was one of the toughest times. However, that was exactly the time where we could be more laser focus and cut out the irrelevance. Fortunately things worked out our way. We secured additional funding, then 2015 was the year when the platform started to take off to the mass.
What is the best learning from the journey so far?
While there are a lot of lessons along the way, one of the best learning for me personally is understanding how limited the time you have. It is crucial to know what to prioritize and focus on. This comes to various aspects in life: work, family, even personal quality time. If you can’t — I won’t say ‘balance’, it puts unnecessary pressure — harmonize all these aspects together, something will feel off. Try to live in harmony, set priorities and eliminate noises from your life.
Imagine the future when your kid is your current age, what kind of world do you want for him to live in?
My idealistic thought is that I hope there’ll be a mass awakening in people to become more conscious with their life so they do what truly matters, that has more positive externalities to their surroundings. I hope people would start worrying less about materials and start caring more about qualities of interpersonal relationships. That way, technology can still develop to our benefit, while we don’t put ‘things’ in front of human. ‘Things’ should be utilized to increase the quality of relationships between humans, not the opposite.
We also need to realize that currently we still have the earth to live it so we should take care of it more seriously. We should create technology not to destroy the environment — to act more responsibly and use things more sustainably.
So that when my son is my age, he can still enjoy nice clean weather, access to clean water and all basic necessities that we truly take for granted. It comes back to appreciating the basic necessities and understanding the importance of human that is now has been distorted through all distractions we have today.
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