This Indonesia-based startup wants to replicate China’s social commerce success

This article is from an episode on Asia VC Cast, a podcast hosted by Daniel Song. This is heavily revised from the original show transcript. For the full interview, go here.

Sonat Yalcinkaya is the founder and CEO of Soyaka AI, creator of Shox, a social commerce app powered by artificial intelligence – similar to China’s Xiaohongshu and Mogujie.

Prior to starting Soyaka AI, Yalcinkaya was head of global ecommerce for Midea Group between 2015 and 2018. He was also an Amazon key account manager for Philips. Leveraging on his extensive experience in ecommerce, he wrote a book called 3-Months Online Store: Build Enterprise Level Online Store Under 3-Months.

In this interview, he walks us through his ecommerce journey, the Indonesian social commerce market, and Shox’s mission.

How did you lead the ecommerce initiatives at Philips and Midea, and how did you establish Soyaka AI?

I’m originally from the Netherlands, and my background is in industrial engineering. I became a marketer after taking up my double master’s degree.

Most of my professional career is made up of more than eight years in ecommerce, working at Fortune 500 companies. I was pretty much getting my hands dirty on anything imaginable in ecommerce, from Alibaba and Lazada to Amazon.

I am a data-heavy guy, and Philips was actually the first company to purchase Amazon retail analytics data, which was crazy expensive. And Amazon was a game changer. Before the platform launched, businesses had to sell first to clients like Walmart, Target, and Kmart before their products end up in the consumers’ hands. This is called sell in/sell out.

Amazon’s birth also led to more opportunities for data-centric employees. Previously, the guys who were running the show were pretty much on the retail domain.

So my job at Philips revolved around optimizations and performance marketing on Amazon, Google, and Facebook. And then, I got a phone call from China out of nowhere. It was someone I knew from Philips who just became head of marketing at Midea. The company asked me to be its head of global ecommerce, so I moved to China.

It had crazy ambitions to launch the Midea brand everywhere in the world. So I was in 52 countries – one per week – in 2017, literally launching the brand on Amazon, Flipkart, Lazada, JD, etc. And now, I’ve jumped to AI to start my company.

I always wanted to apply AI in ecommerce. So in 2018, we started Soyaka AI in Shenzhen. We built our Android app and determined that the best market for it was by far Indonesia. So I moved to Jakarta, and now our company is 20-people strong.

Tell us about the Indonesian market. How do the millennials there shop online?