WakuWakuw Helps Local Communities and Groups Get Organized, Raise Funds

As we heard yesterday from some of Indonesia’s startup luminaries, communities are important. WakuWakuw wants to be a platform and useful social website for any kind of group – from a local karate club to a hobbyist meet-up – that can help them organize, promote themselves, and perhaps even raise funds.

In the WakuWakuw demo live onstage here at our Startup Arena Jakarta competition, the startup’s founder puts the emphasis on meet-ups and being social. The website can help any groups who join to promote their events, get free local coverage to attract new members, and to sort of motivate the group members to keep going. The group’s minisite on WakuWakuw.com can be shared to Facebook or with any other of your contacts.

The other factor is organization, as the WakuWakuw sites helps these real-life clubs to visualize who’s the administrator and who are the other managers and leaders. Plus, events and meet-ups can be saved. On top of all that, the communities who are members can make use of the tools in the service to raise money, either from their own members or any other well-wisher who uses the site. In that respect, it could be a bit like Kickstarter to help these creative clubs keep going – though almost certaintly without the element of a return on the investment.

In terms of the site’s own monetization, the site is aiming to have a mix of targeted ads, premium ads, and market data on those clubs and individuals and their interests.

After the five-minute demo deadline is over, the panel of four expert judges get to grill the founder. Andy Zain admits the brand-new site “is interesting, but not compelling enough” to go to the trouble to use, rather than just do all this stuff offline. The judges point out that there is Meetup.com, but the WakuWakuw man says that his freemium model will work well in Indonesia, and that Meetup.com’s subscription model would be useless here. But, even with the ads, other judges feel that the user-ship will be limited and with little chance to get sizable ad revenue, which mainly goes to larger online properties such as Kaskus.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Jakarta 2012, our startup event running on June 7 and 8. You can follow along on Twitter at @startupasia, on our Facebook page, on Google Plus, or via RSS.