A new Indonesia-based start-up, Bistip, is aiming to be the social marketplace for peer-to-peer courier service. In other place, if you want something from somewhere, just call a Bistiper. Co-founder Willy Ekasalim shares the Bistip idea and model.
Q: Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph
Bistip is a peer-to-peer courier service, a marketplace for travelers and item lookers (we call them “bistiper”) to meet each other and do t-commerce. We are trying to revolutionize the way people do online logistics by bringing it into a micro level, which is peer-to-peer.
Q: Who are your key customers?
People in need of items or goods from other cities or overseas. For example: Dad looking for overseas supplements for his family. He usually waits for their friends or families to make a trip then request the supplements from them. By connecting them to freelance travelers through Bistip platform, they do not need to wait anymore.
Q: Who are your key partners?
Travelers who want to earn extra income for their trips by sharing extra spaces in their luggages (we call them “freelance travelers). For example: a frequent business traveler who come back and forth between countries for short business trips probably will not carry lots of stuffs in his/her luggage. Thus, s/he could bring extra goods for bistipers.
Also any travel industry related websites, entity or organization are our channels to reach our partners. Hence they are also considered as our partners.
Q: What business are you most likely to be compared to?
In short, we are AirBnb for peer-to-peer online logistics service. Bistip is similar to AirBnb because it falls in the social marketplace category. In terms of function, Bistip is comparable to a service that helps shoppers have virtual address in another country so they can purchase goods online from the country. Examples of such services are: http://www.flutterscape.com andhttp://www.hopshopgo.com.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?
To provide them a faster way to obtain items that they need from other city or country. For some, it is also a cheaper way compared to the shipping option.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your partners?
To help budget travelers earn extra income to cover some cost on their travel. Also, as our bistiper stories have told us, our platform has helped them to meet new friends in other cities or countries.
Q: What financial support did you have to launch the business?
Bistip launched March 2011 from founder’s capital. Investidea became our incubator in April 2011 and provided additional financial support.
Q: Who validated the idea first – investors or customers?
Customers. We conducted a survey of travelers and item lookers with 150 participants each to get early concept feedback. Results were the following:
Travelers: 72% will use the platform.
Item lookers: 65% in need of such platform.
Q: What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?
Our main revenue model is based on number of transactions. We support escrow account (Bistip SafePay) for money transaction protection. We are currently taking 4% cut from the SafePay item value.
Other business models that we are working are the following: transaction insurance, e-commerce shipping through Bistip travelers and premium service with Bistip-employed travelers.
Q: What is the market opportunity? How scalable is this business?
We will explain this using TAM, SAM and SOM terms.
Our TAM (total available market) is the worldwide airline passenger with total of 4.796 billion passengers in 2009.
SAM (serviceable available market): we are targeting budget airline passenger, which are more likely want to earn ‘Tip for their Trip’.
We are going to use 30% SAM based on our findings (see appendix below). 30% of total TAM means our potential SAM is 1.41 billion passengers.
SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) that we aiming for is 1% from SAM so it’s 14.1 million users.
Q: Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
Strengths:
• New concept
• Solve the problems
• Broad implementation methodologies
• Could “merge” with various industries and business models
Weaknesses:
• Learning curve to new concept
• Need to get trust first from communities
• Requires a lot of engagement from members
• Depends a lot on crowd sourced content
Opportunities:
• Fast growing travel industry
• Huge demand for logistics services
• Economic boom in Asia
• Limitless engagement with various online businesses through partnerships
Threats:
• Government regulation
• Professional logistics service providers
Q: Who are the team members and advisors?
Founders:
Willy Ekasalim
Master of Technology Management from UNSW (Sydney, Australia). Has 4 years of professional experience in software development, including 2 years with IBM Australia Development Laboratory.
Doddy Lukito
Master of Science from Carnegie Mellon. Has 3 years experience as Software Consultant for TenFold. Founded his own consulting company InfinITechnology in 2003.
Advisor:
Charles Gandha
Partner at InvestIdea, Bistip incubator since April 2011. Charles has Master of Software Engineering from Brandels University and has spent years as a software engineer for EMC Corporation.
Q: Why do you think you are the best people to make this vision happen?
The idea came from our founders’ own experience. Both Willy and Doddy spent sometime living overseas. Every time they came back to Indonesia, they had so many requests from their friends and families for goods from overseas.
Their years of experience from doing this have helped them to create the necessary functionality to shape the platform. For example: ‘Email-to-app’ messaging was created to facilitate on-site communication when travelers try to fulfill requester’s item.
Q: What’s the motivation behind doing this?
As our personal experience has shown, peer-to-peer courier service activity already exists between families and friends. We thought with the help of growing access to Internet, we could expand such activity into an open social marketplace where any traveler is welcome to post their trips. Also from our experience, while some requests can be a fun, entertainment or hobby type items, we have also seen items of urgent need such as medicine, supplement or documents. It is our hope that such important goods’ requests can be fulfilled through Bistip platform.
Note: The WIT Start-Up Pitch will be held as part of the WIT Bootcamp on Oct 15 in Singapore. If you have a business idea to pitch, here’s how to enter.
