Mekari Market Validation Process Story, From Sleekr to Consolidation Decisions

In the midst of a competitive and uncertain market, entrepreneurs are required to be very careful with the steps taken to start a business. Before talking about sustainability or status "unicorns", a founder must be able to first validate their startup idea.

Regarding this, Mekari Co-Founder & CEO Suwandi Soh shared a lot in the webinar session DSLaunchpad ULTRA last week.

In the course of his career, he had tried many fields such as quality assurance, consulting productivityand business process improvement. Prior to 2014, he started to see opportunities for business in helping to improve the performance of human resources or human resources (HR) in the company. His initial dream was to digitize all manual and repetitive processes within HR. He wants to develop technological solutions to change the way HR works which are considered very conventional.

Begins from weekend project, Sleekr HR based solution cloud which was initially only used internally by the company, was officially launched to the public in 2015. During its several years of operation, the platform has managed to achieve a number of milestone until finally decided to consolidate with several startups which are now known as Mekari.

Focus on areas of competence

When you first see an opportunity in the HR industry, there are a lot of issues that can be raised, such as performance management, employee training, salaries, and so on. At that time, Kelvin who was still working full-time in previous companies felt they could not cover everything at one time. Therefore, he decided to raise the most frequently encountered problems and according to his team's competence. In this case it is employee database and time-off.

"A bit different from B2B , we can't do bare minimum. There are many problems in the realm of HR, therefore, in developing Here we are looking for the problem that we can the most build, that is employee database, and what is common in all companies is time-off. After that new expand," said Suwandi

Because Sleekr was a weekend project and still is bootstrapping, Kelvin himself admits that there are many things that must be learned in order to arrive at product/market fit. With a network of investors, he learned to compose pitch deck and start to conceptualize the product. After achieving significant traction and being accepted by the market, only then did he begin to focus. In market validation, traction can be feature adoption and willingness to pay or willingness to pay.

In the early days of product development, Kelvin admitted that he wanted to target the global market first. This is based on the tendency of the Indonesian people who are still not willing to spend for technological solutions. However, along the way he discovered the fact that it was only a matter of what segment to target.

Regarding the global target market, Suwandi also revealed, "This is indeed interesting, it is rare for SaaS products from Indonesia to achieve significant results outside. However, what must be considered is that we have to be realistic with our competence. engineering in Indonesia. If you have high confidence and competence, then nothing is impossible," he added.

Actively interact with users

In the process of finding the right market, a strong commitment is needed. Kelvin admitted, in the early days of his product release to the public, he also worked as a Customer Support. It interacts directly with the user and observes every process. From there it learns user habits and what features play a role and which are not significant.

"We are founder can take on the role of Customer Support It's been a while until you have a team you can trust, that's a very vital area."

In some companies, before developing a product, there will be a team assigned to see what the user needs are like. They will meet a number of users and discuss. This is the first validation process. Once a product is developed, there are many tools for obtaining data. From there, you will see what the issue is and the estimated time to be able to find it product / market fit.

The importance of good relations with users was reiterated by Suwandi when answering one of the questions related to the innovation movement in the dynamic startup world, he said that it was difficult to keep innovation from being imitated by other players. But one thing that is important is how much we understand the user. "Features can be imitated but user understanding is hard to imitate." he said.

Back to the vision and mission

In 2019, Sleekr inaugurated the consolidation with three startups, namely Talenta, Jurnal, and Klikpajak. It was then that his team realized that HR is not yet a priority for many businesses. There are more pressing needs such as Accounting or bookkeeping. They started to consider bundle and look for products that are also relevant. At that time their vision was no longer focused on HR but more on business operating systems.

It is not easy to unite more than two companies with their respective visions and missions, but these four companies managed to adjust various aspects to create an agreement with a new brand, namely Mekari. Mekari itself is taken from one verb, to bloom. "We want to have an active role in making SMEs in Indonesia" empowering the progress of business and its people," he added.

In the initial process of doing to merge In this case, there is a change from competition to consolidation. To avoid unwanted things, the company conducts internal meetings to discuss the vision and mission. During the meeting, the expectations and commitments of each were also discussed. So, what can be projected in the future. Likewise with others, everything must be agreed at the beginning. Kelvin emphasized that although it was not a comfortable conversation, it was important to do so from the start.

Regarding the future of Mekari, Suwandi said, "Our vision is to become a business platform that can empower businesses in Indonesia. What we want to achieve is for Mekari to exist in all businesses in Indonesia. Our definition of success is when users can increase business operational productivity use our."