Didi Nugrahadi’s Journey As a Founder: From Detik.com to Inmark, Teladan, and now SalingSilang

Great entrepreneurs are everywhere in Asia. I recently met one who I would say is addicted to entrepreneurship. He is Didi Nugrahadi, an Indonesian serial entrepreneur who founded Detik.com (acquired by Para Group in 2011), Inmark communications, Teladan primary school, and now SalingSilang.com

Didi started out as a corporate man in the 90s. Back then in Indonesia, he said that times were tough. People mostly became entrepreneurs because there were limited jobs. Rather than seeking job positions, Didi and three other friends in the media circle decided to start Detik.com, an online media focusing on Indonesian news.

Founded in 1997, Detik, which means seconds in English, had the vision that news should be broken at a real-time speed. You might laugh at that now because it’s so common nowadays. But note that this vision was in the 90s when Facebook and Twitter didn’t even exist. The real-time concept was harder to grasp back then too.

Business was tough but Detik’s quick growth and online ad sales kept them surviving. To illustrate the difficulty of building an internet business in the 90s, Didi recalled an American who came to Indonesia with several millions of dollars to create an internet portal. A big budget was splashed on TV and online ads but unfortunately it didn’t turn out as expected. That portal was history after just 18 months.

Meanwhile, Detik’s fresh approach to online news picked up steam. It broke even in 1999. In February of 2000, Detik received investment from a couple of Hong Kong businessmen. The investment allowed Detik to scale much quicker than what was originally planned. Didi’s stay at Detik lasted for seven years. He was tired and needed a break. But his entrepreneurial characteristics didn’t allow him to go on a holiday for too long.

After just one month, Didi had an idea to build a primary school. He explains that in Indonesia, National Primary Plus for students at elementary level would cost ten times more than the average school. A typical National Primary Plus school will provide two languages in the curriculum with English as the primary language. The size of the class is also smaller, about 24, which allows the teachers to give each student more attention. An average elementary school would have an average class size of 40. Although the curriculum from National Primary Plus is good, Didi thought it was too costly and couldn’t be afforded by many. So he founded Teladan Primary school which brings the cost down by half. Teladan is now still in operation but not directly under Didi’s management. Didi spent two years at Teladan before jumping to his next venture, Inmark communications.

Inmark was founded when one of the Detik veteran employees contacted him with a new idea. The idea was to provide intranet to corporations for internal online collaboration. Didi described it as a consultation business. One person can serve up to three clients.

During his stint at Inmark, Didi said that doing business in Indonesia has gotten much easier, thanks to his track record. Being the co-founder of Detik helps a lot in building trust and business connections. Inmark also started a blog service which today hosts more than 400,000 blogs in Indonesia. Although business is good, Didi explained that Inmark isn’t really a scalable business. If there were 100 clients, he would have to hire over 30 consultants. In his mind, Didi knew that doing a platform business is much more scalable. Nonetheless, Inmark’s growth caught his close friend’s attention. Didi explained:

My friend was interested to “invest.” But just to put in the money to help the company scale. We didn’t even talk anything about giving equity or the company’s valuation.

With the new funding, Didi started to provide a blog service, Dagdigdug.com and web solutions for communities. So a bicycle community — for example: b2w-indonesia.or.id, akademiberbagi.org — can now have a website to communicate and upload information for members. Through helping others build communities and also providing blog hosting, Didi sensed opportunity as he realized that no one is actually analyzing digital conversations in the Indonesian language. It was also between 2008 and today that Facebook and Twitter got really popular in Indonesia.