This guy’s story of failing in Indonesia is refreshingly honest. Now he’s getting up and trying again

Danny Taniwan started his first ecommerce venture Alikolo in Medan, North Sumatra, in early 2014. It nosedived after just one year, but the process Taniwan went through turned out to be life changing.

When he speaks about his bumpy one-year ride, he seems more amused than disappointed. And he’s already working on the next idea – a better, different ecommerce startup.

Attracted by the bright lights

Taniwan is a software engineer by training, he studied at Berlin’s Technical University. But when he returned to Medan, he first worked at an insurance company and then started his own car modification business. He couldn’t identify with either of those professions. Taniwan wanted to work with software, but the environment he grew up in simply didn’t overlap with the world of startups and digital enterprises.

“I had never heard of startups, but I had heard about Alibaba’s success in China. So I just set out alone, and began building an ecommerce marketplace. I didn’t do any research,” Taniwan laughs, “I didn’t even know Tokopedia existed!”

He named his site Alikolo, in a reference to Alibaba. He built the site based on a simple WooCommerce modification, and hosted it locally. Despite this very humble setup, he was able to convince two angel investors – “actually friends, or rather acquaintances,” explains Taniwan – to back him with financial support. Neither of them had any previous experience with ecommerce. The two angels are businessmen dealing in commodity products. “Like timber, and such,” Taniwan says.

Moving to Jakarta

Taniwan decided to move to Jakarta to be closer to potential vendors. With the angel money, he rented an office space. “I had no idea things such as co-working spaces exist, so we went the official route: register a company, rent an office,” Taniwan says.

Taniwan outsourced part of the software development to third party service providers, which cost him a lot of money and turned out to be frustrating and difficult to coordinate. He also hired people, mostly for sourcing vendors. There were a total of seven employees.

Somehow, they were able to launch Alikolo as a working product, albeit with little traction.

By now, Taniwan started discovering Jakarta’s startup scene and went to events regularly. It dawned on him that he should have done things differently. He even got some appointments with VCs, who were interested in finding out who this new ecommerce player was.

“In my conversation with the VC, he asked me: ‘Why should people buy at Alikolo instead of, for example, at Lazada?’ I couldn’t even answer that,” Taniwan says, laughing at his own ignorance.

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He also realized that the funds he had were by far not enough to actually build a significant platform that could keep up with the existing players.