Pembantu means “maid” in the Indonesian language, so it’s clear to see what line of business the Pembantu site is in. As with a number of online marketplaces, it brings together information from third-party agencies into one place – in this case for people to find domestic helpers for cleaning, babysitting, or as a live-in nanny.
The site’s founder, Nas Zakaria, was inspired by the chore of actually finding a domestic helper and realizing how disorganized most agencies are. “Then I thought, why doesn’t someone just create a simple website where the agencies would upload the maids’ photos and biodata for easy review by employers like us,” says Zakaria. “In Indonesia, around 10 million households are middle class and most of them employ maids.”
That’s the target audience for the site – Indonesia’s growing middle class. But that’s just the first step. Having first launched in Indonesia, the startup is now plotting overseas expansion to other countries with sizable demand for domestic staff, such as across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It’ll use the name MaidMarket. Young Indonesian staff are in demand in those countries, so Pembantu will follow the market to wherever maids might be needed.
But that’s for later. First, the marketplace needs to gain visibility and traction in its home nation. “We need around US$200,000 to US$500,000 for Pembantu to roll out televised national campaigns,” says Zakaria. That’s part of the reason why he’s today a contestant at our Startup Arena pitching battle in Jakarta.
The site is adding more maid agencies as it goes along and currently has 75 on board. Zakaria, who’s currently a senior consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, says that this business is all about relationships:
Pembantu / MaidMarket founder Nas Zakaria pitching today at Startup Asia jakarta 2014.
At first, we went door to door from one agency to another, to introduce our business and to invite them to join the marketplace. As you may be aware, building a marketplace is not about deploying a website only, but a lot more about relationship building and negotiations with the agencies. Once we convinced them and about five of them had joined, the wheel started turning. We advertised on Google and Yahoo to attract initial customers. Getting customers proved easier than getting the agencies due to the general lack of exposure of the agency owners to the internet. Note that in Indonesia – maybe in Asia as well – most agencies are run by old people who are not familiar with the internet. We tacked this challenge by showing them how easy our process was.
There are 52.6 million domestic workers worldwide, 21.9 million of whom are in Asia-Pacific, according to 2013 data from the International Labour Organisation. That leaves plenty of scope for a marketplace like this to grow as a new middle class forms in emerging markets like Indonesia.
During our pitching contest at Startup Arena, one of the four judges, Stefan Jung, said that he was concerned about the newly chosen English name for the site, MaidMarket, because the platform also has gardeners and other service people. But Zakaria insists that name “is sexy” and catchy.
Jung then asked if the founder had considered cutting out the middlemen and building a platform, not a direct service. Zakaria responds to that by name-checking Alibaba, which is a marketplace and doesn’t sell a single thing directly. With that model, he wants to create the world’s biggest marketplace.
See: This startup wants to be Indonesia’s answer to Google Play
This is part of the coverage of Startup Asia Jakarta 2014, our event running on November 26 and 27. Check out all the Startup Arena pitches here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia and on our Facebook page.
This post Indonesian startup for domestic helpers looks to a growing middle class market appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Indonesian startup for domestic helpers looks to a growing middle class market
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