Wishkoo Lets Friends Pitch In to Make Your Wish Come True

It is very common in Indonesia for friends to pitch in to buy one big gift for a buddy on special occasions, such as birthdays. Traditionally, one person would volunteer to either use his or her own money or to spend some time collecting before buying the gift. Wishkoo.com aims to ease the process for the gift-buying friends as now people can not only pitch in online to buy gifts, but they can also create their own wish list in the hope that other people would make their wish come true.

Co-founder Chaya Kusuma explained that Wishkoo is a social commerce platform that adopts this unique Indonesian custom. Benhard Subiakto, also a co-founder, says they are targeting students and employees between the age of 13 to 24-years old. He added that this segment dominates 68 percent of the whole social media population in Indonesia. At the moment they have about 11,000 users on Wishkoo, with 4,000 of them being active users.

Getting Started

After registering for Wishkoo, users can immediately add their wishes to the “wish list.” From there on, users’ friends can grant the wish list or pitch in using the donation system. To make things more interesting, users can make promises in the wish list should their wish be granted. This is similar to what Prandelli did when his wish of guiding Italy to qualify from the group stage did come true – only this time, you’ll be making your promise online and not necessarily to the monastery monks. At the moment, most of the wish lists on the site are filled with gadgets, such as an iPod Touch, a Blackberry, and even a new television.

A new honorary team member at Wishkoo is the local celebrity Daniel Mananta (pictured right), who is also a former MTV VJ and the current MC for Indonesian Idol. He also actively promotes Wishkoo using his Twitter account, where already he has close to 1.4 million followers.

Daniel told media that most of the items on Wishkoo are already curated to the demands of users. Sadly, for the moment users can only choose from the existing choices of wish lists and can’t add their own unique gifts or wish ideas to the lists. DailySocial recently reported that Wishkoo is developing an API Wishkoo button that could be adopted by other e-commerce services that would like to let its members use the pitch-in feature.

The Browsing Experience

Seeing that a national celebrity is one of the persons behind Wishkoo, I thought that this might be a decent website. And decently simple it was, although there was one registration procedure worth noticing when I was signing up. After finishing the registration step using my secondary email in the hope of avoiding future spamming, to my surprise Wishkoo didn’t need any email verification whatsoever from us to verify if our email was really legit, or even if it’s our own email [1].

I asked the Wishkoo team about the missing registration process and they said that it was all intentional. They felt that the email verification process would become a barrier to the user acquisition process that they are focusing on. They assured me that because it is a social commerce website, when an item is bought, users would be asked to input the recipient’s delivery address. Wishkoo then will be able to verify the users’ email.

How about the content? Well it’s all mostly good. This website has the similarly good feel of the usual social networking website. You can add friends, post comments on “wish lists”, send messages, and all the normal stuff that, say, Facebook can do.

But still, one can’t help but notice the emptiness when browsing Wishkoo. Indeed, the website is very clean, but I think it’s too clean for my taste. When I browsed the users who had more than 200 friends on Wishkoo for example, the only thing that you can see are their wish lists (which are mostly empty), their biodata (which only consists of a picture, name, location, and gender; not all are filled in), and I guess that’s it. It’s indeed a very clean website. It only lets you choose your wish and communicate with other users. Perhaps it’s because it’s still very much new and the startup just had its grand launch earlier this month.