Bukalapak CEO: Start early, fail more

Achmad Zaky, founder and former CEO of Bukalapak / Photo credit: Bukalapak

Achmad Zaky grew up wanting to have a good job with a large salary. He lived as a child in the small Sragen regency in the eastern part of Central Java province in Indonesia, where his parents worked as middle school teachers. Both parents hoped their son would work in a government office or at a stable vocation. “I never got in touch with any entrepreneurship world in my childhood,” says Zaky. But he is now running Bukalapak, one of Indonesia’s biggest marketplace sites.

Zaky was introduced to the tech world in elementary school. His father bought him computer and programming-related books like Basic and Fortran, and Zaky grew up reading them. He loved playing with his computer and this love turned into a hobby which later led him to participate in computer competitions. One of those was for the national computer Olympics during high school.

Still thinking he wanted a stable job, he continued his studies at Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB). During that time, Zaky developed a curiosity to create and run his own business. “Because a lot of my friends at ITB were talking about entrepreneurship, I kinda wanted to become one too.”

(See: 18 popular online shopping sites in Indonesia – 2014 edition)

A simple noodle shop

Zaky’s first stab at entrepreneurship was his noodle shop in the second year of university with the money he saved from winning computing competitions. He wanted to sell noodles at a good price for fellow students. He ended up closing it. “We failed because of [our] lack of experience. We wanted to open a tasty noodle shop that is cheap, but that caused us to have low margins, and that resulted in a below-par service. It just didn’t match up.”

He didn’t give up, though. The following year, Zaky utilized his computing skills to set up a software house called Deft Technology. The team won the Indosat Wireless Innovation Contest in 2007 and picked up a merit award at the Indonesia ICT Awards a year later. Zaky ran the company for two years and then rebranded it as Suitmedia, offering creative and consulting services in the tech sector.

That same team built Bukalapak as a side project. It was originally meant to become a portfolio product to showcase to clients.

Bukalapak gained traction and attracted an investment opportunity from Batavia Incubator. Realizing that there’s space in the ecommerce market to fill up, Zaky took on the project full-time.

Bukalapak now oversees more than IDR 500 million (US$43,000) in transactions in its online shopping marketplace on a daily basis. The team is optimistic that they can encourage more shoppers this year to conduct their transactions inside Bukalapak’s payment platform, BukaDompet. Bukalapak recently raised funds from a group of Japanese investors to help scale faster.

(See: Indonesian online marketplace startup Bukalapak surged in 2013, looks forward to 2014)

Start now

Zaky encourages all youngsters to start building their startups as soon as possible: