Entering Second Year, Bistip.com Focuses on Adding Content

Bistip.com, a peer to peer courier service, celebrated its first anniversary on March 11, 2012 and is entering its second year. Welcoming this anniversary, it will take no service fee for SafePay (one of the facilities for payment at Bistip a joint account).

They will not take the 2% charge for the use of SafePay facility by users for a month starting from March 9 to April 9, 2012. In addition to holding this program, Willy Ekasalim, founder of Bistip.com, also explained the focus of this startup that already has received an investment from InvestIdea. If last year its focus was on completing the marketplace facility by improving transaction support feature such as messaging via email reply, then SafePay, etc., then this second year Bistip will try to focus on adding content – still with crowdsource method – of their site.

Willy described about some examples of this content addition including Item Suggestion feature which allows user to make suggestion about interesting goods from particular location and can be used as an idea for surrogacy from other people. Examples of the application of this feature can be found here. It will also feature a display of travelers who traveled from the area where the goods are suggested. Willy said that such goods and content system that will be developed further.

In the second year, Bistip will focus on adding transaction (surrogacy) and conversation that shows its service member activity, Willy explains that the more surrogacy transaction happens, then there will be more users coming because of the successful surrogacy transactions.

For statistical data, Willy said via email, that Bistip.com is currently has had 5000 users, there are more than 2500 travel routes and more than 13.000 conversations are happening on its site. Goods transactions through its SafePay facility are also exceeding IDR 100 millions.

Bistip currently has a team of three people. DailySocial first wrote about this startup which won the Most Promising Startup 2011 at SparxUp Awards 2011 on March 22, 2011, exactly 11 days after its ‘birth’. When asked about promotion, Willy told us about some of the activities they have carried out. Among them, last year it approached user group that considered potential to be Bistip user, for example, backpackers or students studying abroad, it also engaged with female communities and soccer fan clubs, as well as other communities.

Bistip also has Bistipes – official ambassador of Bistip who travels certain routes and available for goods surrogacy for free. It also organized Bistip Budget Travel Challenge event. Community approach is a right strategy, because trust and user addition are some important issues for services such as Bistip. By inviting more people to travel and surrogacy process as well as keeping the process well-managed then its services will surely gain more members, this also can be directed to the monetization of the SafePay service.

Willy also said the promotion they do is important to improve the variety of travelers coming to Bistip’s community. “We think that the more diverse trips happen, the higher possibilities of negotiation will occur. And inviting user to surrogate goods is to hear their stories and reviews about Bistip and we will use their feedback to improve our website.”

The first year is over, I myself am quite curious and would like to see further development of Bistip in its second year, digital industry – specifically the internet world continues to evolve and grow, Bistip itself seems to continue developing their services to attract more user and surrogacy transaction available on its site, a focus that for me is quite relevant, because for a ‘new’ service, addition of user focus is one of the main things that must be correctly considered. Let us look forward to future developments and what kind of development will be done by Bistip.