How The On Demand Economy Transforms Society – The Gojek Story

Gojek is South East  Asia’s leading on demand multi service and payment platform. It was founded in Indonesia in 2010 by Nadiem Makarim, Kevin Aluwi and Michaelangelo Moran, to fix the friction in the supply of ojek (motorcycle taxis) by their operators and demand (consumers), after noticing that riders would wait endlessly in Jakarta to get customers who would need their services. The founders leveraged aggregation construct  to connect drivers and riders in a convenient manner, and later used the double play strategy to add courier delivery services which later scaled to currently offer more than ten services, meeting the daily needs of Indonesians.

With over 3,000 employees running its operations in Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, it is Indonesia’s first unicorn and startup company worth $10 billion. Gojek is the only company from South East Asia included in Fortune’s 50 Companies that Changed The World in 2017 and 2019.

As a homegrown startup it was able to be a category king by navigating local regulations and designed features into its app to suit local service providers and their consumers.

Gojek’s product line includes:

• Go Pay: The fourth biggest ewallet service ranked behind Indonesia’s top lenders Bank Mandiri’s E-Money, Bank Central Asia’s Flazz and Telkomsel’s T-Cash. It controls about 30 percent of all electronic money transactions in Indonesia, leveraging innovation to deepen the National Cashless Policy by Indonesia’s Central Bank.
• Go Ride: The pioneer motorcycle hailing service in Indonesia with more than 1 million drivers.
• Go Car: Car hailing service.
• Go BlueBird which enables its customers to hail BlueBird taxis in the Gojek app without fixed charges.
• Go Food: Instant food delivery service with over 250,000 vendors across Indonesia
• Go Food Festival: Go Food’s double play offline food court chain which sells food and beverages from its merchants and has opened in major cities in Indonesia, becoming the most networked food court chain concept in the country.
• Go Mart which offers grocery shopping from supermarkets available on the Gojek app.
• Go Shop allows customers to purchase goods from shops not listed in GoMart.
• Go Send: On demand courier service to deliver items and documents with no distance limits within one delivery zone.
• Go Box: On demand service for haulage of large items with pickup trucks, single axle trucks and single axle box trucks.
• Go Tix: Offers entertainment ticket vending on the Gojek app.
• Go Med: App based medical delivery service in partnership with Halo Doc.
• Go Massage: On demand massage services
• Go Glam: On demand personal hairstylist, nail care, waxing and facial services.
• Go Auto: On demand autocare services
• Go Pulsa: Phone airtime top up service which uses sister service provider Go Pay as only means of payment.
• Go Bills: Allows its customers to pay PLN electricity bills, purchase PLN electricity tokens and pay B PJS insurance premium
• Go Points offers  token for each transaction to Gojek users which they can redeem with rewards from the app.
• Go Pertamina: An on demand fuel delivery in partnership with state owned oil company Pertamina to provide last mile delivery of fuel to consumers.
• Go Play and Go Studio: This is it’s latest venture into provision of online video content and a streaming platform to its subscribers.

Gojek has over 3,000 employees including 210 engineers in its three headquarters in Jakarta, a data science lab in Singapore and an engineering team in India. It has begun an expansion programme across South East Asia which will increase its partnership network of over 1,000,000 riders, 125,000 Go food merchants and 30,000 Go Massage, Go Glam, Go Clean and Go Auto service professionals.

According to a recent research by Survei Angkatan Kerja Nasional 2016 Semester 1 Gambaran, the average income of full time driver partners on Gojek (3.48 million rupiah monthly) which is 1.25 times higher than the average minimum wage in Indonesia (2.8 million rupiah per month) while the average income of driver partners (3.31 million rupiah) is higher than the professional employees in general (3.10 million rupiah for those in the transportation sector, 2.34 million rupiah for employees in the industrial sector and 2.66 million rupiah for staff employees). Temasek Digital’s Youtube channel states that Gojek contributes (9.9 trillion rupiah $732million) annually to the Indonesian economy.

Due to the impact of Gojek on the daily livelihood of millions of Indonesians, it’s founding CEO Nadiem Makarim was recently appointed as Minister of Education and Culture by President Joko Widodo to help transform Indonesia to a knowledge economy by redesigning the learning process to inspire its young ones to evolve as critical thinkers with on demand skills to create similar success stories.

Considering the fact that Indonesia is an archipelago of about 17,000 islands, Gojek should introduce on demand ferry services to deepen access to transportation across the country. It should also collaborate with Lion Air for air ticketing services on its platform  and integrate diaspora remittance features into GoPay for Indonesians and citizens of other countries within its operations to send money for their loved ones and launch in Malaysia which has a tech savvy population, Brunei, Cambodia, Myanmar and Bangladesh within the next one year to serve the ASEAN and South Asian markets.