A month in Limbo!

Copy & paste from the other blog: Nguberdotcom


Do you know how to start a website? Do you learn it from the "express lessons" books? Nothing is more valuable than the real experience.

After starting a website and folding it up for various reasons a few years ago, starting a website again seemed a bit nerve wrecking moment. Many not good feelings and uncertainties started to come up in our mind. But like Arnold Schwarzenegger said on his movies: "To be or not to be", we chose to start it again and be a winner.


Many millions websites are online and only a few of them are successful. From the few succesful ones, only a handful of websites are the search engines.Now only 3 or 4 search engines that still exist and make money. Why we chose a search engine website if the competition is very very hard? Yeah, it's the worst choice to start a business. OK it's enough! Just cut the sad story short.



Learning curve.

To start a new website is like an elementary student, everything starts from scratch. We were on the bottom of the learning curve. The current market is changing rapidly with the social networks. Need to do a lot of catch-up on the latest trend.

We learned the most important thing from the emerging of the social networks, engaging your users/customers since beginning. Don't expect you'll always get the good responses. Prepare yourself for the worst, so you won't feel that bad.
The users will shape your products and increase your rank when you allow them to get involved. It sounds unorthodox to have something before ironing everything out. Just take a moment, could you imagine how you promote your products before facebook or twitter era? especially in Indonesia, it's really hard if you don't have a big capital to spend in promoting and marketing your websites. Early engagement will promote and market your site freely and quickly. Internet users are the best promoters and marketers (but be careful, don't give a bad impression to them). We were the last rank (26 millions) on the Alexa traffic rank, and now we are rank 716,569 (still fluctuated though). It's organic growth.

Second, starting with a small investment. This was like treading water, not much progress but getting the market experience. It's important to feel the market before investing a step further. After a month in limbo, we've started to get the feeling how to continue the search engine site. No algorithm or preparation or anything else could replace the real world experiences (of course you still need the aformentioned stuff to be successful)

Third, ... to be continued ... :D




Please drop a line on this blog or NguBer.

Indonesia? What country is that?

Sometimes I hear that question from the foreigners, especially the westerners. People knows Bali better than Indonesia.
But after describing Indonesia is a big country with 3 time zones, some of them looked disbelieved. Yeah, it's big and populous country. It's still a developing country with a growing Internet market.
(After Obama was elected as the President of the United States in 2008 election, Indonesia became a well known country)

Why is it growing? The population is more than 230 million people, Internet usage is still low (I'll give the data later), but the mobilephone/cellphone usage is high. (self-explanatory) So the possibility to increase the Internet usage is a lot higher than in the developed countries.  If you are following the Facebook's news, you will notice Indonesians are the fastest growing and third largest Facebook users in the world.

How could that happen? It sounds like a paradox, low Internet usage, but many Facebook users?  You need to understand the culture before analyzing the market in Indonesia. Often we use the market data from the developed countries to predict what will happen in the other countries. But this won't work smoothly in Indonesia.

I'll write some of my thoughts about the Indonesia's Internet Market on the following blogs. Please bear with me :) It'll be more encouraging if there are some feedbacks or comments from the readers.

Be Courageous & Have Fun!!