Shopious shutdown a warning for Indonesia’s bootstrapped startups

Sorry, closed forever. Photo credit: Bryan Mills.

Indonesian social commerce startup Shopious officially shut down today. The startup was an aggregator for Instagram-based fashion stores.

The shutdown is a tough lesson for Shopious co-founders Aditya Herlambang, Billy Halim, and their team. Since they started building Shopious in 2013, they wanted to prove there was a niche for lean, bootstrapped startups in Indonesia’s ecommerce market. But it didn’t go that way.

According to founder Aditya, the startup stopped taking fees from its subscribers in February and began winding down operations.

Shopious’ promise

The idea was simple. Small-scale Instagram sellers registered with Shopious and paid a fee to have their content integrated within the site. Despite having an angel investment that got them through the first months, the startup insisted on monetizing from early on. The promise to sellers was that they would find a larger audience and improve sales by using Shopious as a channel.

We think the market is far from ready.

Any new photo a seller uploaded to Instagram would automatically be posted to Shopious, and the seller no longer had to go through the trouble of keeping a separate website up to date. Shopious did not facilitate transactions – instead, buyers got in touch with shop owners directly to close the deal.

Shopious’ site is no longer accessible.

Over the course of two years of trying to refine this concept, Aditya had to admit the figures didn’t add up.

“We decided to shut it down not because we ran out of money or can’t get future funding. We still have 1 to 1.5 year of runway in our bank,” Aditya tells Tech in Asia.

If they weren’t running out of cash, what was the problem?

Aditya summarized the reasons for Shopious’ closure in a blogpost. Two messages stood out:

Increasing cost for paid acquisitions

By charging sellers to use Shopious, the startup needed to fulfill its promise that they would significantly improve their sales – to an extent where it would justify the subscription fee.

Social commerce is tedious and hard to control

Fundamentally immature