[Guest Post] A Snap Shot of Indonesia's Startup Ecosystem

My job is to travel around the region spreading the word about our accelerator program. I really enjoy the opportunity to spend time with entrepreneurs and developers across the region and I thought it would be interesting to share a snapshot of what I saw in Indonesia.

Recently I made my first visit to Indonesia, splitting my time between Bandung and Jakarta. People often talked to me about the strengths and potential for growth they saw in Indonesia's startup ecosystem. I noticed some patterns through my conversations and I wondered if Daily Social readers in Indonesia see them too?

Strengths

Incredible Design and Development Talent

Multinationals and global startups are knocking on the door of Indonesia. Developers and designers mentioned the likes of Google, Nokia, and Amazon. Seems like the world loves Indonesia's technical skills!

Huge market opportunity

Indonesia has the largest smartphone market in the region with a smartphone penetration rate of 62% and sales exceeding US$ 1.4 billion last quarter. Not to mention huge Facebook and Twitter usage. Wow!

Creativity and Innovation

The quantity and quality of game design being done in Indonesia is also huge.

Potential for growth

Client Focused

Many designers and developers who have real talent told me they are working on client projects to pay the bills. They say this kind of work has limited opportunity for profit and doesn't always give them scope to use their full talent. They are asking: how can we spend time with work activities which create more value then we put in?

Little Seed Investment

My exposure to Indonesia's investment scene is limited but the friends I made only mentioned a few VC or incubators, all of which seemed focused on the $150k-1.5m stage of funding. I wondered what happens after that?

Missing Mentors

People told me about a divide in the startup community between business and technical people. I heard time and time again that start-up teams just enetering the scene would really value mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs.

Innovation Process

While in Jakarta I had the chance to do a small workshop on Customer Development and Lean Startup. These tools have become common in successful start-ups world wide and seem very effective in helping entrepreneurs to focus their energy where it can create most value.

The workshop focused on how to discover problems worth solving with targeted customers. The reason is that, if we can be sure customers have the problem that we think they do, we can significantly reduce the time spend in the initial phases of our start-up. This is something like being a detective: discovering clues to build our case. By discovering where our customers really feel pain before we go into product development we can develop something that "early adopters" will buy quickly.

I'll be back

My short visit to Indonesia was amazing and I'm grateful to have the opportunity to spend time with the community. Everyone at JFDI hopes to connect more closely with friends in Indonesia. If we can help in any way, please post in our community forum or apply to our accelerator.

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This is a guest post from Nathan Snyder, an ambassador with JFDI.Asia (Joyfull Frog Digital Incubator). JFDI.Asia leads people to think and act entrepreneurially by helping them to engineer innovative businesses around their ideas. We can do this because innovation is evolving from an art into a science, and because we have built a community who share their expertise and experience turning ideas into reality.