Telkom, eBay’s e-commerce arm Blanja.com moves to claim e-commerce throne: Page 2 of 2

Slow but steady, learn from mistakes

Aulia spent 15 years in Telkomsel before he was appointed to build an e-commerce business in 2012. At that time Blanja.com was still called Metraplasa.

“The partnership between Telkom and eBay was established in April 2012. However the realisation of the project only came in November. We finally formed a proper management team inclusive of 14 people in January 2013,” Aulia explains.

He says that at the time, there was no clear vision about how the management would carry the e-commerce platform or monetise the business.

“We realised then that the learning process was a valuable and much-needed one. We tried things, most of it did not work, but we learned faster than we could ever imagine,” he adds.

Aulia decided to spend 2013 and 2014 strengthening the core of the business, what he called the five fundamental foundation; starting from choosing the right talent, the ones who would be able to stand side by side with him to build Metraplasa.

Second was to figure out the business flow and operations. Unlike other players at that time, Aulia says that Metraplasa has much less money in their pocket, so figuring out the business model from the beginning was crucial.

“Only after you have the right people, and know your business flow, can you move towards the technology. We had to choose whether to translate the same international website or develop the platform from scratch, localise, build content, and scale later. We chose the latter,” he says.

After technology comes the seller acquisition. Aulia candidly admits that getting brands and sellers on board was not an easy task.

He tells the story of how he and the team were trying to get one big affluent shoe brand to partner with the platform, and ended up getting a call few months later from the brand that they wanted to withdraw.

“The brands have expectations, one of it was for us to push for marketing. At that time we did not know how to do it the right way, we did not have a special brand page and we did not push it hard. In the end we got very little traction for the particular brand.

“I can laugh about it now, but at that time we were scratching our head trying to figure out how to do the right thing for e-commerce. We learned the hard way, and that was an important lesson,” Aulia adds.

The last fundamental foundation is the marketing itself. Aulia says that Blanja.com.com since its launch in December 2014, has yet to spend big bucks on marketing for itself.

“We were rather conventional in terms of spending in our early days simply because we were not sitting on piles of gold yet, so we held back on marketing efforts until all the four previous foundations were ready and steady,” he adds.

This year, Blanja.com aims to spend 70% of its company budget on advertisements and digital marketing, as well as leveraging on Telkom and Ministry of State Owned Enterprise assets like billboards, promotions in Telkomsel’s customer centres, and videotron.

Building future leaders

The journey has just begun for Blanja.com, says Aulia and what keeps him awake at night is the thought of what’s next.

“This is just the beginning for Blanja.com and I cannot help but always think of what to do next, what lies ahead, what needs to be done. There are endless possibilities,

“One of the most important visions is to be a sustainable and resilient player in the e-commerce space, to be the platform that people trust all across the archipelago. The money and numbers will then follow,” he adds.

He also says that as the CEO of Blanja.com he wants to be able to build the talent pool, so that once they graduate from Blanja.com and move on, they will be able to lead other e-commerce players.

Currently Blanja.com has more than 160 employees, with 80% of them under 30 years-old.

“I like to think that Blanja.com is here to build the people. In order to do that, we need to get Blanja.com to be the best e-commerce platform in Indonesia. Then hopefully soon you will see former Blanja.com employees leading other e-commerce companies. We need to create more C-Suite-ready talents,” he concludes.

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