BisTip: Indonesia’s Clever Peer-to-Peer Courier Service [INTERVIEW]

Like in most countries, Indonesians often ask families and friends to buy some souvenirs from overseas while they are there. BisTip is trying to provide a platform to make this process easier, and now that I’ve learned more about it, I think I might use it from time to time. To better understand the service, I got in touch with  BisTip’s developer Panggi Libersa.

1. Can you explain what Bistip is and how it works? What problem does it solve?

‘Bistip is a peer-to-peer courier service which came from personal experiences of the founders who had helped their friends and families. . . by bringing items from overseas’.

Certainly our daily lives need such services and now Bistip allows us to look for peers outside our personal networks to help. Let’s say you want an iPad2 on your hands faster than anybody, [and] then you find someone who’s going to travel from US to your city and negotiate for a deal. And as for travellers, what we call bistip-ers, they can earn extra income for their trip.

biztip.com

2. Who are the founders of Bistip and how big are your team currently?

The BisTip founders are Willy Ekasalim and Doddy who launched it on March 11, 2011. So we’re nearly 3 months old now. We currently having a core team of four people working full time, and occasionally we kind of ‘outsource’ jobs to other teams in our venture group or to third party service providers for the sake of accelerating our development progress.

3. BisTip have received investment from InvestIdea. Has the company changed at all since then?

More energy of course! 🙂  Well, to be honest nothing changed much in terms of of how we operate.

InvestIdea had just been like a new member in our team, and we work closely together mainly on making decisions. Their insights into the business and the marketing side have been very valuable so far. It really completes and balances out the skill sets and experiences in our team.

4. How many members do you currently have?  And how many are actively contributing to the site?

We have just reached 1000+ members few weeks ago and we have 500+ combined trips and asks posted. We have a good balance between travelers and lookers in the site that has kept conversations and negotiations flowing between them.