Cacoo Goes to Indonesia, Strengthens its Community Outreach

The online diagram collaboration tool, Japan-based Cacoo, is now setting its eye on Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia.

Recently, I talked to Tabata Shinsuke (the CMO of NuLab) about the startup’s plan in Indonesia. He says he has been around the country, and traveled here quite a few times – the company even joined our Startup Asia Bandung Hackathon last month. And it looks like the team is digging into the local market. As it expands, the plan is to focus on these three things: users, developers, and designers.

Why is the charts site interested to explore the Indonesian market? Tabata explains:

Cacoo and Backlog are software for teams including designers and programmers. We believe it is necessary to approach users (including users-to-be) physically, so we are very interested to reach the Indonesian market and meet users in Indonesia.

With 600,000 users already onboard (after hitting half a million this summer), it will be interesting to see how it plans to maintain (and increase) its user-base around the world. At the moment, Tabata says, Cacoo’s users are mostly from Japan, the US, France, Brazil, and Columbia. In Asia, they are pretty strong in China and Taiwan.

As a part of this outreach in the region, the team held a ‘Cacooup’ in Taipei this year. They also interviewed some loyal users to hear their opinions, and featured them on the company’s blog.

And it has spread the love to Indonesia too. Users in Indonesia have already helped them to do the translation of the Cacoo site into Bahasa Indonesia. To have a Bahasa Indonesia version should help bring in new users. Tabata also says they are hoping to have Cacoo integrated with Indonesian services using Cacoo’s API.

Aside from getting more social with Indonesians on Facebook and Twitter, Cacoo team members joined our Six Cities Tour last month (pictured above) to meet users in the flesh. I think it’s a good thing, since Indonesian geeks tend to be fond of meetups, events, and Cacoo’s presence at such meetups is pretty important. Tabata noted that in Indonesia, it’s important to connect both virtually and in real life.

And Cacoo is hiring too. So if you’re a local developer or designer, and this service excites you, be sure to get in touch!