Asana's Business Plan and Focus in Indonesia

Job management software is currently being adopted in various business segments, from startup to corporate levels. The reason is to make the work of the task more effective and efficient. This is a blessing in itself for platforms like Asana --- a SaaS-based service for managing teams, projects, and assignments.

Despite having to compete with tools which is presented by mainstream by tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and others, but the potential for a work management platform that can coordinate projects in each team appropriately and efficiently is starting to show positive growth.

Asana launched by Dustin Moskovitz along with former Facebook founder Justin Rosenstein in 2008. The company also successfully conducted an IPO last August 2020 on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). As of this writing, Asana's market cap has crossed $5,26 billion.

Regarding equity funding, Asana has completed 5 fundraising rounds; plus fresh funds from angel investors, which in total is more than $200 million.

In order to expand their business in Indonesia, Asana has now launched an Indonesian version into the platform and has also placed a Felicia Gunawan as Enterprise Account Executive.

To DailySocial.id, Head of Southeast Asia Andrew Baisley revealed Asana's plan to reach more target users in Indonesia.

Support employee performance

Asana is not the first platform that wants to make it easier for employees in the company to coordinate work properly. Platforms like Slack to Trello also now it has begun to be widely used by companies in Indonesia.

However, according to Andrew, Asana does not see them as competitors, but replacing the old ways of companies that still use e-mail, spreadsheets, and others to carry out project management.

In addition to providing services to startups and technology companies, Asana is also currently targeting corporations that still run conventional businesses. One way to attract their attention is to present a choice of Indonesian.

"The Indonesian language option has been running for the last 6 months. In general, we have presented 14 language options from various countries including Indonesia. The reason we invested in the Indonesian language option is to ensure that customers in the market including Indonesia have the best experience when using Asana," said Andrew.

Asana wants to launch a local wisdom approach for Indonesia. Although they do not have a representative office in Indonesia and are still based in Singapore, currently they have various technology companies, startups and corporations that have become clients. Two of the companies are Traveloka and Mid Plaza.

"Our reason for placing Felicia as Head of Indonesia is, we see traction in the market and then it becomes an opportunity for us to provide services to our customers. high growth companies, tech company to traditional companies like Mid Plaza who are also our clients. We are quite enthusiastic about the positive response in the Indonesian market," added Andrew.

Expand education and community

Currently Asana has around millions of companies that have used Asana and about 126 thousand paying customers. The monetization strategy launched by Asana is with a subscription model, providing Basic, Premium, Business, and Enterprise options.

"We separate two target markets, namely: self-service movement they do it all themselves, and most of it is done by startups. We also provide special services targeting large companies, such as Traveloka," said Andrew.

Asked what features are used the most by Asana customers, Andrew emphasized that each user has different habits. For an executive, for example, prefers to use the Goals feature to monitor the progress of their performance. Meanwhile, individual users mostly use the Task feature to coordinate their work.

To reach more target users, Asana also launches educational activities by releasing various interesting content on the platform. It's not just about project and work coordination, but also issues for workers such as Burn out and others. In addition, Asana also expands community and partnerships and places representatives who can provide relevant information about Asana to related parties.

Post-pandemic work trends

Although the growth of work management platform users continued to experience growth during the pandemic, during the pandemic there were several new habits that directly changed the work style of employees in the company. Based on the report "Asana Anatomy of Work Index 2022: Global Report"It was revealed that over the past two years the relationship between office workers and remote work has shifted.

As companies and employees react to the pandemic, they have also adapted to hybrid works, which is a combination of working at home, in the office, and traveling. Employees divide their time between work and home, but there is a desire from them to spend more time at home. The conclusion that is then summarized in the report is that remote work will be a concept that will be applied by many companies in the future.

One interesting thing that was later also discussed from the report was the interruption of notifications while working. Constant notifications or notifications are a major distraction, complicating work and clouding the process. More than half of employees feel they have to respond to notifications immediately and more than a third are overwhelmed by persistent pings or notifications.

48% think more efficient meetings can limit notification, while 45% think clearer responsibilities would be better. When each task has clarity on who, what, and when, work gets done faster. The younger generation is among the most people who complain about notifications at work.

An interesting fact also revealed in the report is that more than half of employees multitask while in a meeting, only 43% who fully contribute to virtual meetings.