Coffee Chat: The Entrepreneurial Story Behind Kaskus, and its E-Commerce Future

Andrew (left), Ken (right)

Indonesia’s Kaskus was started up way back in 1999 as a BBS and news portal. Its metamorphosis into a local web giant, more recently expanding to e-commerce and online payments, can provide a lot of lessons for entrepreneurs in the country. To get such insights, we’re chatting to Andrew Darwis (pictured above left), the founder and CTO.

#13:57: Andrew starts out by joking he should just change his name to Andrew Kaskus, as that’s how he tends be seen. He says the site has grown a lot in its more than 12 years online, created for a mere $7 for the domain name, and is now “worth more than seven dollars.” Cue audience laughter. “OK, the same as Facebook.” More laughter. “Maybe the same as Indonesia’s Facebook!”

#13:59: Willis asks if Andrew has a girlfriend. This is getting personal pretty quickly. The answer is: no. “My girlfriend now is Kaskus. On Friday and Saturday nights I get programming error calls, especially after changing to the new ‘.com’ domain.”

#14:00: Do you have a boyfriend? “No!”

#14:00: OK, down to business. Now Kaskus has more than four million users, but it gets 28 to 29 million unique visits each month, which is close to pretty much everyone who’s on wired internet in Indonesia.

#14:02: Can you find a girlfriend on Kaskus, asks our Willis? More audience laughter. Turns out that kaskus matches do happen, and then Andrew will get invites from the couple before they marry. So a proper match-making service might be coming on Kaskus. Any beta tester takers?

See the signatures on the background? It is a custom to sign your name on one of the tiles when you visit Kaskus. (Click to enlarge)

#14:04: Going back in time, Kaskus started out doing news, sort of like Detik, but initially there was not much traffic and the founder had trouble finding news. And all they could find was bad news about disasters and demonstrations, so it initially sucked, and being in school at the time, Andrew and his friends nearly shut it down.

#14:06: But being a BBS offered hope. At the time, lots of people were using IRC – an early chat protocol (which we at TiA actually use everyday to organize stuff!) – and so a discussion board was a natural progression from that. Then people started posting photos. But lots of them were pornographic images. That made the site “a bit NSFW,” says Andrew, and so an adult section was made. But by 2008, with a company established to run Kaskus, that porn section had to be shut down if they were to become a legal entity as a business.

#14:08: ANDREW KASKUS PORN, suggests our Willis as a new name for the founder!

#14:08: Now with one billion pageviews and a whole lot of clicks, advertisers are coming in, but can still be tough to persuade them to pay to advertise on such forums. But what kind of fee do these advertisers pay? Andrew admits it can be a lot. Pushed for a revenue figure, Andrew says it can be as much as 5 billion rupiah a month – that’s US$530,000.

#14:12: Kaspay has a self-serve ad platform, so advertisers can easily scale up or down and pinpoint very specific campaigns within the site. It’s also backed up by its KasPay online payments platform.