Shopping search engine Telunjuk is making online shopping economical for Indonesian customers
When you are buying something online, you always have a tendency of go to other sites and search for a similar product at a cheaper price. Who does not want to get the best deal? When a seller is offering customers a lower price than a competitor, they want customers to know it. No rocket science here.
Telunjuk, a shopping search engine from Indonesia, is addressing both these points and trying to give the best deals to the Indonesian online shoppers (similar players in India). We got to learn about Telunjuk when we caught up with the co-founder, Hanindia Narendrata Rahiesa
Excerpts:
YS: What is your story behind Telunjuk? How did it all start?
It all started when Redya, my co-founder and CEO, wanted to replace his laptop with a new one. He found it difficult to find a laptop according to his needs and at an acceptable price. From this experience, Redya made prototype of Telunjuk to find laptops from online shops in Indonesia easily and quickly.
In early 2011, Redya showed the prototype to me. We had some discussions back then about the market and the opportunities about shopping search engine business in Indonesia. And after that we strongly believed that Telunjuk will be very useful for Indonesian users.
We joined an incubator program by Project Eden in November 2012 and that’s the time when we started Telunjuk as a business.
YS: Why did you choose to become an entrepreneur?
Our main reason to be entrepreneurs is just because we believe that we have a product that can surely help Indonesian people to shop online and it will change their behavior in online shopping.
I hold a bachelors degree from Institut Teknologi Bandung (Bandung Institute of Technology), Indonesia, with a majors in Electrical Engineering and Redya with a majors in Informatics Engineering.
We started our career in one of the big Telco companies in Indonesia working for business development for 3 years. But then we decided to quit our comfort jobs and focus on running Telunjuk as a business.
We were, and surely are, very excited seeing the online trends in Indonesia. Especially, the rise of online users and the rise of ecommerce in particular. So there are a lot of opportunities doing online business in Indonesia. My biggest motivation as entrepreneur is delivering happiness to the world through our services. The inspiration for us is simple - how to deliver more value to our users and our merchants.
YS: What were the initial day challenges in starting up Telunjuk?
The major difficulty was to introduce Telunjuk to users and merchants with limited budget. Telunjuk is a new concept of online advertising for e-commerce. To explain that concept to the right person in ecommerce industry is very challenging.To hire a good person and build a great team is quite challenging for startups and also for Telunjul till date.
YS: What does Telunjuk offer to users and what is the value addition for them? What is the market you are targeting?
For users, we offer time and money saving when they want to shop online. They can find multiple products from quality and trusted merchants specifically by specifications, price, etc. Currently, we are focus on targeting online savvy users, 20-35 years old majorly with mid sized incomes.
Telunjuk users mostly come to find gadgets, electronics and fashion or apparel products. And is still dominated by men, although the numbers of women users is increasing since the launch of beauty products category.
For merchants, we offer better sales conversion rates compared to other online advertising avenues because Telunjuk delivers high quality traffic for them. The users that come to Telunjuk already have intention to buy and they find their needs addressed right away and then we deliver them to merchants. Currently, our focus is on targeting trusted merchants who sell consumer products and products in the lifestyle category.
YS: Who are your competitors in the market and how is Telunjuk different from them?
There are some competitors like Pricearea (Indonesia), Pricepanda (Rocket Internet), Priceprice (Japan), Priceza (Thailand). I think we have the same business model, but while others are positioned as ‘price comparison sites’, we are positioned as ‘shopping search engine’. This effects the quality of content we get from websites.
YS: How does the revenue model of Telunjuk work? What marketing efforts help in that?
We collect products information from merchants, process the data and then deliver it to users. We create a ‘Robot’ for collecting and processing this data and deliver high quality traffic to merchants. We get revenues from merchants based on either the quantity or quality of the traffic that we deliver to them which is basically based on Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per Sales (CPS) model.
Currently we are doing well with SEO and some content partnership with local media in Indonesia. We achieved 500,000 monthly unique visitor in almost 1 year with just 2 the two of us in the team.
YS: What are your future plans with Telunjuk?
Our vision is to be the best and most trusted shopping reference in Indonesia, SEA, Asia and in the world. The future plans are to improve the quality of content, to be accessible in all major devices with excellent experience, and to deliver the services to more and more Indonesian users.
YS: What are the pros and cons of starting up in Indonesia?
I see a lot of advantages of starting up in Indonesia, such as the huge market size, less competitors, the government still doesn’t have a clear positioning about the online businesses and I consider this as one of the advantages. There are some inherent challenges like the not mature enough internet infrastructure with slow connections and not covering all the regions. But I am sure it will solve in the near future.
Check out Telunjuk
