Karpul and Its Mission Reducing Congestion Through "Carpooling"

One of the scourges of living in a large, densely populated city is the high level of congestion. Various solutions are tried to be presented, either from the government or the private sector, to reduce the level of congestion that exists. Most recently, it came from an Indonesian startup called Carpul who want to help reduce the level of congestion through carpooling.

Karpul is an application that brings together vehicle owners with prospective passengers who have one-way routes. Simply put, Karpul users can share a ride with each other.

Karpul itself was founded in 2015, but the application was only available for download in the beta stage on May 23, 2016 at Google Play.

There are two people who have played a major role in the birth of the Karpul service, they are Arief Witjaksono and Gretel Griselda. Arief is now the CEO of Karpul while Gretel is now the CMO of Karpul. The two decided to establish Karpul from a passion to reduce the level of congestion in Jakarta that never ends.

Gretel said, “Karpul was founded as a concern for traffic jams, especially in the city of Jakarta. At the time we designed this application we also had concerns about the implementation of the 3 in 1 policy with the number of jockeys circulating so that the policy carpooling this cannot be implemented optimally.”

“Through Karpul, we would like to reintroduce the true meaning of carpooling to the Indonesian people. We believe that carpooling is one of the best solutions to reduce the number of vehicles on the road,” he continued.

Approach to the user a la Karpul

If the Karpul service mechanism reminds you of Nebengers, you are not wrong. Gretel also acknowledged this. But Gretel emphasized that there is a different concept of approach between her service and Nebengers, especially in terms of features such as Profile Page, Rating, Female Only Option, and Message Board.

Gretel says, “We designed the Karpul app as a marketplace [and] to minimize security risks, Karpul prepares features such as Profile Page, Female Only Option, Rating System, Message Board, and many more."

"Every driver nor passenger can see each other's profile pages before deciding to share a vehicle. At the end of the trip, driver and passenger [can] give each other a Rating [which] is used as one of the information listed on each profile page user, explained Gretel further.

Gretel also confirms that Karpul is not a service on-demand, so there is no such thing as a driver partner. Well driver or passenger will be considered the same position, namely as a user.

Gretel explained, “Before user To register, Karpul has terms and conditions that must be approved in advance. The document outlines the rights and responsibilities of both Karpul and its users.”

"In this application, driver is the owner of the vehicle and not to make a living […] because driver who do post trip [do not take order of passengers]. Its nature is more to give a ride to the person in the same direction. […] For tariffs, it is entirely determined by driver because we realize that every vehicle owner has different considerations in sharing trips,” added Gretel.

Karpul's business and future plans

Karpul's vision is to be a service ridesharing the largest community-based and make carpooling as the main alternative method of transportation in Indonesia. To make it happen, Karpul will start introducing culture carpooling and position yourself as marketplace to society.

However, at this early stage they will focus on marketing in the Jakarta area first and continue to develop their active user base. Regarding monetization, Gretel revealed that there are plans for each passenger given a ride, Karpul will pull one Karpul coin to the party driver. However, this is not final yet.

“We are still focused on building user who are active, especially in the Jakarta office area, while continuing to listen feedback. At this time we still haven't set a specific target regarding the amount user itself. From feedback what we get, we will continue to do improvement to the Karpul application to ensure the level of satisfaction user, said Gretel.

For your information, apart from Karpul and Nebenger, there is one more startup playing in the same pool. Her name is Omprengan.