Go-Jek’s tips to build and scale a successful on-demand startup

Photo credit: tookapic.

Indonesia’s bike taxi-hailing app Go-Jek is one of the country’s hottest startups. In February, the company acquired some tech muscle in the form of two Indian startups: C42 Engineering and CodeIgnition. With that the company opened a technology center in Bangalore, its first overseas office.

Tech in Asia met Nadiem Makarim, founder and CEO of Go-Jek, as he made his first trip to the India office, overseeing the integration of his new hires. Since its launch in 2010 as a bike-taxi company, the startup has successfully added couriers, food delivery, online tickets, grocery shopping, and even payments on its platform. Go-food, the app’s food delivery unit, makes more deliveries than all India’s food delivery apps combined, Nadiem said, but did not give out Go-food numbers.

India’s Zomato recently said it hit 33,000 online orders and that its overall online ordering business would hit profitability when it hits an average of 40,000 orders a day.

Go-Jek co-founder and CEO Nadiem Makarim.

But irrespective of exact numbers, it is not a small feat to be able to manage various products on one platform. In India, bigger rival Ola tried its hands in groceries and food, but failed and shut shop.

Here are Nadiem’s tips on how to build a successful on-demand startup and scale it.

Scale the tech team

Photo credit: Lauren Mancke.

“Scale up your tech team beyond your business,” Nadiem said. This means, don’t build up the tech team for today. Go over capacity to even have a shot at doing it well.

“We didn’t do it well, so we almost imploded some months back. We recovered through it, but always over hire, be over capacity in your senior tech leadership,” he said.

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