This Indonesian edtech startup tried to pivot, but it wasn’t enough

Joice Gumala had big dreams of entrepreneurship. After leaving her corporate job at US chemical titan DuPont in 2017, she launched her startup MBA Mentor while she was taking her master’s in business administration at London Business School.

While she found some early success with her mentor-matching platform, Gumala soon realized that the business couldn’t scale enough to convince venture capitalists to invest in it. In pursuit of VC money, she rebranded the startup to Menduca and adopted an on-demand mentorship model. But a lack of traction and dwindling resources led Gumala to close the company in early 2020.

On this episode of Startup Snapshot, we dive into Gumala’s founder journey, from the moment she started up to the point when she decided to shut Menduca down.

Timecodes:

00:00 – A tough year for startups, but starting up has always been hard
00:51 – Why we don’t always hear about the smaller startups that fail
01:23 – This is the story of Joice Gumala
02:36 – Who is Joice Gumala?
04:34 – Leaving the corporate life
05:28 – Why she chose the education sector
06:25 – Enrolling into an MBA program and finding her startup idea
08:36 – The early successes of MBA Mentor
09:36 – Going home and expanding the business
10:23 – The startup conference where everything changed
11:36 – The problem with MBA Mentor
12:22 – Meeting Coffee Ventures managing partner Kevin Darmawan
13:36 – Not VC-investible, but not a lost cause either
15:50 – Pivoting into a more scalable business model and rebranding to Menduca
16:51 – Running into a problem with traction
18:07 – Making the difficult decision to fold up Menduca
19:27 – Preview of the next episode

Download the full transcript here.

Featured people:

• Joice Gumala, founder of on-demand mentorship platform Menduca
• Kevin Darmawan, managing partner of venture capital firm Coffee Ventures

Background reading:

• Why I stopped my startup during Covid-19 by Joice Gumala