Going against Gojek, Grab: lessons from a defunct startup

About 10 years ago, before the dawn of the online ojek (motorcycle ride-hailing) frontrunners we know today, there was a startup that’s relatively unknown now, Antar ID.

Photo credit: Akhmad Dody Firmansyah / Shutterstock

Much unlike its unicorn-status peers such as Gojek or Grab, the firm shut down after less than three years of operations.

“Back then, it was called Ojek Plus, not Antar,” the firm’s founder Edy Wihardja reminisces to Tech in Asia Indonesia.

“We were looking for a name. [The name] Gojek was already in use, but there weren’t many [Gojek drivers] on the streets – it was still a call center. I knew that because we had done our research.”

Antar ID was founded by Wihardja and three of his friends at the end of 2013.

Shortly after establishing the firm, Wihardja realized competition in the app-based courier and transport sector would be tough, especially after Gojek started expanding massively in Indonesia in 2015.

He says there were only three other ride-hailing players in the country at the time: Gojek, Grab, and Uber.

By the time Antar ID joined an accelerator, the startup’s competitors were already up and running and had received “quite a large amount of funding.” The firm knew it’d be challenging to go up against them.

Wihardja eventually sold and left the startup in 2017.

Pursuing opportunities amid limited capital

Since its inception, Antar ID didn’t have a significant capital cushion to fall back on. Wihardja also says that he had been left to take care of the company alone because his co-founders were focusing on other ventures.

In fact, Wihardja had to recruit additional staff to help him when he wanted to apply to the Ideabox accelerator program. He hired at least three people to fill the positions of CTO, marketing staff, and operational team.

While the startup was part of the program for six months, it was able to survive for a total of nine months from the time it joined the accelerator.

But it failed to raise further funding. Wihardja attributes this to the intense competition in the sector.

Lessons from Antar ID