3 important lessons I learned in my first year building a beauty website

It’s tough building a startup. Image credit: Daddy-David, Flickr

A year ago, I took the plunge and started Zalonku, an online platform to connect beauty services in Jakarta. It was a bold move considering I have been in the corporate world for the past 10 years, and I know nothing about building a website, beauty, or running a business in Indonesia. I feel like I’ve been on an accelerated learning curve the past year, navigating the uncertain waters of building a brand, online and offline.

Here are the three important lessons I learned during my first year of building Zalonku.

1) Find the right partners

Starting a company on your own requires making decisions with limited information. People will often give you well-intended suggestions but since you don’t know your business well enough, it’s difficult to predict the potential outcome.  Making decisions quickly is important, but rushing into decisions is a mistake.

I made a mistake rushing to partner with a web developer without doing my homework. I trusted everything they said they can do and will do, and I wanted to start right away. In the end, I waited 5 months only to find out they outsourced the website to India. Then I spent another 2 months of Skype sessions with India to fix all the problems.

Website handover in Feb 2015. Skype sessions with outsourced team in India until May 2015. No reply from web developer regarding this email.

I ended up testing every page on my own, got hassled to pay extra, while they even ​tried to upsell me into developing an app! The web design team fell off the planet and left their responsibilities. I still remember when I asked why are there so many Indian names at the backend, he said me, “They are my sister’s friends, she has a lot of Indian friends.”

Choosing the right partner can make or break you. Looking back, I could have used those 7 months to really grow my brand. As a result of my quick decision and poor judgment, I risked my business as well as wasted time and money seeking for a replacement.

2) Be experimental

Now that Zalonku is up and running, we began to focus on growing our community and experiment with new ideas. Chances are we will stumble on something when we least expect it. If something is working, we devote more time to it. If it doesn’t work, then we have an answer.

Here are a few examples that worked for us:

1. With beauty bloggers having more influence now than ever, we approached them with complimentary treatment so they can share how they discover new beauty places through zalonku. Shortly after, I started receiving messages from vendors, “Agnes, I saw on Zalonku’s Instagram you had this blogger, how can we get her?” That was when I realized there is an opportunity to offer vendors find the right influencer as a service.
2. When we first started working with influencers, we only ask them to share about their experience. Then we implemented giveaways contest so their followers can also get a special treat from Zalonku. It turns out that Indonesians love giveaways. Who doesn’t love freebies after all? We gained significant brand awareness from this engagement.
3. We also started receiving requests from vendors to help promote their salons, find interests in sharing a mall space, discover franchisee opportunities. Real estate owners have contacted us to find beauty services to be placed in their building. So we created a newsletter to share what we receive within the industry. The responses have been great, it generates more ideas and new opportunities for the community, and zalonku is building another value-added service.

3) Be resourceful

Of course, online marketing is important in today’s world, but offline engagement with customers still has unique and distinct value that shouldn’t be forgotten.

The Jakarta community loves attending events. They offer a great way to meet new people, share ideas, or to just hang out with friends. I became the Ambassador Secret {W} Business in Jakarta where we organize speakers and create a platform for like-minded women entrepreneurs to learn and network during the workshops. This is probably one of my favorite things to do.

Final thoughts