Go-jek Solves Your Motorcycle Taxi Needs in Jakarta

If you have visited Jakarta, chances are you are familiar with the term ‘ojek.’ These are the taxi motorcycles you see on the sideroads. Go-jek, a winner of the Global Entrepreneurship Program Indonesia, wants to connect you to such motorcycle taxis, ensuring the booking, safety, and experience is seamless. The basic idea is to act as a middleman between customers and drivers, and so far they seem to be doing very well. I spoke to Nadiem Makarim, the co-founder of Go-Jek, in an effort to find out more about the service.

1. How was Go-jek founded? Why has it excelled where similar services have failed?

We are actually quite different than [those], as most of them are just out to replicate taxis using motorcycles… With Go-jek the response time is higher, and we are a social enterprise so we don’t really compete with anyone but we are focusing on increasing [driver] income. We see that 70 percent of the time, motorcycle taxis are actually idle, and that is a waste of an economic value.

2. How do you gain drivers’ trust?

I think that at first it was really tough but we really continue to build our brand and gain their trust by using recruiting staff that used to be motorcycle taxi drivers as well. As for the revenue sharing, the drivers take the majority and we only take the minority of it, so they can really feel that their income is increasing after joining us. Actually we never had a driver that quit from our system [yet].

3. How has winning the GEPI awards affect you guys as a startup?

It actually affects us in the biggest way possible. There was so much media hype. Orders increased rapidly, brand awareness increased very, very high. We get to meet a lot of startups and they told us some great scaling advices. So we are really thankful for the awards and the program.

4. With initial investment received, a lot of VCs might be attracted to fund you for the next round. Do you think it would be necessary or do you think it’s best to keep lean and fast?