Taxi mafias, cash vaults, and 100% MoM growth: The story behind Southeast Asia’s biggest startup

Kevin Aluwi, co-founder and former CEO of Gojek, the Indonesian super app that grew from motorcycle taxi rides into a multi-service platform with millions of drivers across Southeast Asia, discusses the company's origins. The conversation covers why he is skeptical of super apps, how brand and culture drove early growth, the scrappy operational tactics used in an underfunded market, and advice for founders building outside Silicon Valley.

01Key learnings

• Super apps often fail to deliver promised lower acquisition costs and higher retention unless the services share a unifying concept that customers easily grasp, such as a common driver.
• Treat brand as the second most important priority after product, and build it through consistent tone across copy, ads, product design and customer touchpoints.
• Embed your brand in physical reality: branded jackets and helmets worked because they visibly signaled the service to people stuck in traffic.
• Lean into local cultural behaviors, such as sending food as gifts, and build product features around them to create relatable, word-of-mouth-driven growth.
• When fraudulent third-party apps threaten the platform and engineering talent is scarce, copying their most valuable features can be faster than building defenses.
• Be willing to do operationally heavy, unscalable work early, such as running cash booths, private security patrols and manual support, to earn driver loyalty and keep the business running.
• Founders should personally perform key functions long enough to understand what excellence looks like, which makes it easier to hire far better people later.
• Outside major tech hubs, get good at remote work early by building engineering centers in deep talent markets, and avoid copying competitors; build around local market dynamics.

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.