Gojek killed GoLife, but on-demand lifestyle services may live on

In late 2019, GoLife – Gojek’s on-demand lifestyle services unit – culled several offerings from its platform. Gone were laundry and makeup assistance as well as air conditioner repair, leaving the app with just two services: GoMassage (spa and massage) and GoClean (house cleaning).

Also gone was GoLife’s head, Dayu Dara Permata, who left the company to build a new startup called Pinhome.

Image credit: Siddharth Bishnu

But by July 2020, those two remaining services were also cut as GoLife shut down. Gojek described the move as a “long-term response” to the Covid-19 pandemic. It would allow the company to focus on its three core services: ride-hailing, payments, and food delivery.

GoLife’s demise raises a question about Indonesia’s on-demand lifestyle services market. Is it over and done with?

The answer is not so straightforward. The country still has a large amount of informal workers who provide the same services offline. At its peak, GoLife had over 1 million monthly active users, according to third-party estimates.

“GoLife consisted of multiple unit economic-positive businesses supporting over 100,000 service providers,” says a former employee who declined to be named. The decision to scale down GoLife “was purely an exercise in re-focusing,” the source adds, noting that each service “showed a potential for good growth.”

But GoLife’s user numbers were still small compared to Gojek’s core services. Meanwhile, other startups in the space struggled to scale services that can be operationally challenging. Funding also started drying up as investors looked elsewhere.

Cutting down to carry on

Globally, there aren’t that many examples of thriving, independent startups that supply on-demand lifestyle services.

But compared to markets like the US, Indonesia in theory has a few advantages up its sleeve: a growing middle class coupled with a sizable workforce and affordable labor costs.

For instance, the country’s informal sector – which includes ride-hailing drivers and delivery workers, along with cleaners and massage therapists – is said to number over 70 million people in 2020.

That has led to the rise of multiple startups in the space. However, just like GoLife, many began by offering a wide range of services before whittling them down to a few.

Ahlijasa, a startup that launched in 2015, started out with the likes of house cleaning and air conditioning repair. But by the time the company raised its seed funding two years later, it focused on just one service: on-demand laundry.

Now, Ahlijasa has pivoted further into a business-to-business brand called Cleanlab, which helps traditional laundry businesses go online.

Easier than it seems

Have investors turned away?