Indonesia’s Kaskus is 15 years old, and it’s got some exciting new plans

Kaskus, Indonesia’s online forum and classifieds, celebrated its 15th birthday yesterday. The new communications and information minister for Indonesia, Rudiantara, popped by the Kaskus office to not just congratulate them in person, but to also take selfies with the team.

According to Kaskus’ product management VP Ardyanto Alam, Kaskus now has 7.8 million registered members, and this number is growing by 120,000 every month. The company recorded 25 to 27 million monthly visitors, totalling over 800 million pageviews each month, up from May’s 750 million pageviews. Most of Kaskus’ users access the site via mobile devices. According to SimilarWeb and Alexa, Kaskus is Indonesia’s number one local site.

At the moment, there are 140 full-time employees working at Kaskus. Co-founder Andrew Darwis, chairman and former CEO Ken Dean Lawadinata, and GDP Venture’s CEO Martin Hartono were present for yesterday’s celebrations. However new Kaskus CEO Sukan Makmuri was noticeably absent. The team says that he is away for personal reasons.

See: Why now is an exciting time for Kaskus (and everyone)

New plans for 15-year-old Kaskus

But what’s the next step for Kaskus in the year ahead? Alam says that Kaskus’ 14th year can be considered as one for “house-cleaning”, meaning that they are paying a lot of attention to back-end processes. For example, Kaskus’ website used to be notorious for going down whenever the server overloaded; now, that rarely happens. Alam admitted that while the Kaskus website did go down this past year, it was down for only two minutes.

Other back-end changes that happened are less obvious. The team has started to use Scrum software development methodology, which has helped with team bonding and execution. It also started launching new but smaller features on a regular weekly basis.

Kaskus is now gunning for innovation in its 15th year. Alam says that you will see numerous products coming out from Kaskus this time around. It will also make use of its Playground page to launch its own new features there. Since that’s hotbed for beta products, Kaskus will be able to get valuable user feedback.

Kaskus previously gathered user feedback from its Evolution page. While that has been scrapped, Alam says a lot of Kaskus’ new products – which will be revealed in time – have come from ideas posted on Evolution.

There are already five Kaskus features on Playground: Infokost (boarding house directory), Radio, Groupee, Adu Harga (auction feature), and Tebak Harga (price guessing feature). Should any of these get good traction, you will see them being implemented more widely throughout the Kaskus brand.

One of Kaskus’ biggest features is its online classifieds. However, the team has been trying to turn this into a marketplace since two years ago – albeit at a very slow pace. The online classifieds have not changed much. Alam says the transition to a marketplace will still happen, but did not provide an exact timeframe for it. Kaskus is now trying to build an app store within the online classifieds section as well, but revealed no further info.

Right now, Kaskus doesn’t have any true competition. It has separate competitors for online classifieds and forums, in OLX Indonesia and Berniaga, and Indowebster respectively. Kaskus still has a unique grip on the market that doesn’t look like it will be released any time soon.