Make Bukalapak "Profitable" and "Sustainable", the Commitment of Bukalapak COO Willix Halim

Strategy growth hacking has been widely used by foreign startups to technology companies globally. In addition to helping business growth, growth hacking is one powerful way to reduce marketing costs in large quantities. One of the experts growth hacking The Indonesian who previously had experience working abroad was Willix Halim. He has now served as Chief Operation Officer (COO) of Bukalapak for a month.

The recruitment of Willix by Bukalapak is a strategic step taken to grow the business through growth hacking. In Indonesia, Bukalapak is a marketplace that has the potential to be dominant among other competitors, said Willix to DailySocial.

"I see that there are currently many e-commerce [services] and marketplaces in Indonesia, but in the end only one or two can survive and experience growth stable, and I see Bukalapak has potential in that direction," he said.

Not much different from his experience working as VP of Growth at Freelancers, role Willix in Bukalapak is to grow mindset growth hacking in all Bukalapak divisions. Starting from the product, customer service, management and other departments, all must focus on being able to increase growth through growth hacking.

"It's a bit radical when almost 90% of my team at Freelancers focused on creating growth hacking This method is good and this method is quite successful, because within 5 years Freelancers have been able to be superior to other competitors and even have an IPO and have a fantastic valuation value," said Willix.

Experiment and try channel new

The approach taken by Willix for Bukalapak is to do a lot of experiments and experimentation on products based on the data they have. These activities will naturally see the products that work well and those that fail.

"In general, all similar companies have the same problem, namely unlimited ideas but not enough" resources. My goal is to prioritize products that will be immediately visible later impact what it was like long before the product was made," says Willix.

Another priority for Willix's homework within one month of working as the COO of Bukalapak is to focus on features that have a small effect but have the potential to generate revenue. impact the big one.

"Currently there are still many prospects low-hanging fruit that can be worked on is by doing quick wins and smaller A/B Testing. For that I regularly have a dialogue with product manager and operation manager so that all focus must prioritize on growth, said Willix.

His skills as master growthhacking will be proven in Bukalapak by finding new opportunities to carry out activities growth hacking that is to take advantage of channels something new that other startups haven't done. Not only focus on paid marketing which are mostly used by startups in Indonesia, but also take advantage of channelfree proven to be effective and is still rarely used.

"I see what Facebook Marketing is doing today is much different from Facebook Marketing at the beginning, when prices were still cheap and there were still many opportunities. This led to acquisitions user more difficult and of course not profitable. For that reason I will look for new strategies to carry out activities marketing, said Willix.

Another focus that Willix and the team are working on is reducing time checkout users to be interested in returning to visit the Bukalapak site and application, which means reducing time A kind request (CTA) or Time to Perform.

"It's like shopping at a store by spending about 10 minutes, it would be even better if you were able to reduce the time to 2 minutes, usually users will come back and conversion rate would be even better," said Willix.

Bukalapak's strategy to face competition with Amazon and Alibaba

Mentioned about the plan Amazon and Alibaba are present in Southeast Asia, Willix said he was not too worried about the arrival of the two giant companies. The advantage that Bukalapak has as a local e-commerce service is more knowledge in terms of consumer behavior to very different logistics to companies like Amazon and Alibaba.

"The good thing about local e-commerce [services] is that we have more understanding that other e-commerce companies don't have brand stranger in this case is Amazon. Especially in terms of logistics it will certainly be different between the Amazon in the United States and in Asia, with various congestion problems faced in the country."

Willix also sees that Amazon will not 100% launch its sales in Indonesia, because of the differences that exist and the potential that exists in Indonesia.

"I see that Amazon will not go 100% to Indonesia, maybe only 5% of Amazon's concentration in Indonesia, while Bukalapak is 100% focused on Indonesia and hopefully Bukalapak can be better than them," said Willix.

In 2017, Willix has a commitment to make Bukalapak different from other e-commerce and marketplace services. Starting from services to products, in accordance with the target of making Bukalapak reach the stage profitable and sustainable growth. Bukalapak has recently been in the media spotlight because of the issue of burn rate which is considered too high to bring big company loss.

“I hope that Bukalapak can be different from other e-commerce [services] in a good way, that is, so that the product can be more know more and differentiate Bukalapak products from others. And they visit Bukalapak not because of the discount, but because the products are good," said Willix.