WayangForce Spreads Word of its Magazine Reader App – With a Café

The startup team behind WayangForce, the digital magazine reader for iPad and Android tablets, made a surprising move late last year when it opened an offline venture – a café (pictured above). This coffee shop has iPads so that customers can read using the WayangForce app while taking a sip of freshly-brewed coffee or munching on your homemade sandwich.

Wanting to know more about this, as well as what the startup plans for this year, I asked Jeffry Anthony (pictured below), the co-founder and CTO of WayangForce (as well as the co-founder of Bouncity), a few questions. Firstly, he gave me some stats for how the cross-platform reader app is performing so far: 110,000 monthly downloads of the free and paid versions, amounting to a total of 673,000 downloads; 73,000 active users; and the paid app accounts for 10 percent of all downloads.

1. What is the reason and strategy behind the offline presence, the café?

There are basically these five main reasons: branding, providing education about tech to people, selling WayangForce vouchers, a service and download centre, and also a proof-of-concept for a high technology café.

2. People might be thinking that WayangForce must have a lot of capital to be able to open an offline space. What is your opinion?

Opening up a coffee shop is a part of our strategy to provide education to people, which is important in introducing new technology to them that they can use as part of their lifestyle. So we never hesitated in putting our marketing budget in this since we know that it is a good investment and will be beneficial for us in the future. Also, we are making profit from the food and the accessories shop.

3. WayangForce has also expanded to Android recently. How is the traction on that OS?