Localio's Ambition to Build a Marketplace Platform for Home Culinary Business

It is not new knowledge that household activities during the pandemic are busier than normal days. Cooking is one of the most dominant activities. The benchmark is from the number of home-based culinary businesses that has increased significantly during the pandemic. Localio tries to take advantage of the trend.

Localio is a digital startup that was founded last July. This startup was founded by Andry Suhaili, Sebastian Wijaya, Donald D. Kusumo, and Handoko Kusumo as marketplace home culinary business. Although at first glance it is no different from the GoFood platform and GrabFood, they insist Localio's business is different. One of them is the locality of their products.

"Basically Localio is a marketplace homemade local community, helping MSMEs meet their communities," said Andry, who plays the role of CEO.

The initial idea for Localio came from Andry's family who wanted to sell their home-cooked food but had a hard time finding a large niche market. To log in to platforms like GoFood or GrabFood even according to Andry is quite difficult because it takes a long time to queue.

Departing from that problem, he and his friends conducted research on the difficulties experienced by a home-based culinary business. After that they found a number of similar problems including the difficulty of the home business in marketing and there was no single platform that accommodated them.

Product segmentation

Andry admits that there are already other platforms such as GoFood, GrabFood, as well E-commerce others that can be used by a home culinary business. However, according to him, the platform above is not very suitable for home business needs. With Localio, Andry said that his party can help home businesses start from promotions, attracting customers, business training online, to the courier selection.

Because their target users are micro and even ultra micro businesses, Localio does not charge any fees to merchants who join. They also do not seek profit by applying a commission.

"We do not take commissions, but we see opportunities in infrastructure, for example by beg," added Andy.

What Andry means by infrastructure is the ecosystem that Localio is building. Andry explained that there are three main pillars that will become the Localio ecosystem, namely: fulfillment, finance, consulting and advertising services. Advertising is part of their current business model.

Fulfillment This includes supply chains that connect sellers to food vendors, delivery, and the provision of satellite kitchens. This supply chain, they call it LocaSupply, is still a work in progress. Andry said that his party plans to cooperate with Wahyoo for the product.

Interesting enough in the delivery options. Andry said that they prepared a choice of couriers using bicycles, scooters and pedestrians. The pedestrian option appeared because the food delivery distance at Localio was only 3 kilometers. In addition to the courier's choice, they also cooperated Gojek and Help as additional options.

"Our business models that are already running are Live Streaming, LocaAds, and delivered."

Business targets and plans

Localio started its business in a relatively small scope. They started their business by attracting sellers in the Tanjung Duren area, West Jakarta. Then he hooked up with other home-based businesses in the Kelapa Gading, Pluit, PIK, Sunter, to Pasar Minggu areas.

CTO Sebastian Wijaya said that his party now has a number of sellers spread outside the city, such as Sidoarjo and Medan. But for now they will still focus on expanding their reach in the Greater Jakarta area. Meanwhile, until December they at least target to expand to Bandung, Surabaya, Bali, and Singapore. They chose Singapore because according to them the condition of the home-based culinary business there was also improving, plus Sebastian who was living there.

In addition to the expansion, Localio also plans to attract professional chefs who were laid off from their jobs during the pandemic to join their platform. Later the chefs will be accommodated into a separate channel.

Until mid-October, Localio has managed to reach 1000 sellers. They are targeting to reach 4000 sellers by the end of the year with the expansion they have planned. The growth target will also be used to attract investors. Currently, the capital in Localio is still in phase bootstrap with additional capital from Win Ventures.

"In the future we want to form a home-based business ecosystem. Overall, we want to be a platform that connects local MSMEs, promoting them from an unknown food business to being a global player to exporting abroad," concluded Andry.