Get to know AYO Indonesia, a "Sparring Platform" Provider for Amateur Soccer and Futsal Teams

For football fans, being able to do these activities regularly will certainly be fun. But it will be boring if you don't find a team sparring to play. This problem was first experienced by Samuel Hadeli Lie, Johannes, and Agustian Hermanto who had difficulty finding opponents sparring in Jakarta.

Then came the idea to build a community for amateur football teams in Indonesia to get to know each other. Both Samuel, Johannes and Agustian from different work backgrounds. Samuel has a background in finance, Johannes in marketing, and Agustian in product development.

Nevertheless, passion top football managed to unite them to join and pioneer Come on Indonesia in 2016.

The initial concept was to collect the logos of amateur teams in Indonesia, as well as brief information about the team's location and contact numbers that could be contacted, then uploaded to the Instagram page.

“After that we started advertising the schedule sparring from the teams member via Instagram account to simplify the process match making sparring. Not long after, we ran a football and futsal competition for our members with the title Liga AYO," explained AYO Indonesia Co-Founder & CEO Samuel Hadeli Lie to DailySocial, Thursday (11/2).

User enthusiasm continued to increase until finally AYO created a site to simplify the team registration automation process member and search for opponents sparring in 2017. He admitted that the AYO League competition continues to grow every year until the fourth year it has run seven divisions of football and futsal competitions.

The platform continues to be matured by adding various features from time to time to answer the needs of users. Samuel said that at first, AYO was used by admins or PIC for amateur teams in Jakarta, then they began to shift their focus from team based users ke player based user.

A number of features for individual players including full profiles with statistics and track record matches, Play Together to gather players individually with soccer games hosted by the host, and News Aggregator to get the latest news in the world of football.

With a flow like this, AYO Indonesia has a deeper knowledge of market demand so that every feature released must answer the needs of users.

“AYO Indonesia started its business by building a community first, before building a community product tech-his. This way we can create a product that fits the needs of the communities we serve and has loyal users.”

Next plan

The company released the AYO app towards the end of last year for both iOS and Android versions. The launch of this application was very well received by the amateur soccer and futsal community, as reflected in the number of registered teams increasing by more than 40% in less than two months. As of the end of last year, more than 3300 amateur teams joined the app.

Samuel continued, AYO has two types of business models, namely B2C and B2B. For B2C, the company charges a competition registration fee which is posted on the platform. In addition, the company is now carrying the theme "Gamifying Real Sports", is developing the concept of "Online League" adapted from the world Esports and applied in the world of football.

Through the AYO Indonesia application, the Online League can be played by any team and on any field in Indonesia. This competition has become veryaccessible", thus embracing a very large number of participating teams.

"As for B2B, since 2016 we have combined online campaigns and offline activities. We actively cooperate with brands doing brand activation and tapping community. "

The rapid development of AYO finally made the founders to take it seriously full time started from last year, previously run regularly part time. At the same time, the company received pre-seed funding from AlphaMomentum with undisclosed value. “I jumped in for work full time on COME and start team building product and internal operations. "

He hopes that this fresh fund can help AYO in realizing its ambition to reach all football players in Indonesia. “We intend to disrupt world of amateur football and realize one of our missions, which is to increase Indonesia's competitive level in world football," he concluded.