7 Business Model from SparxUp Winner

You can check SparxUp site for the complete list of the winner. I like to highlight a few that I am familiar with. The one that I have spent sometime with the founders.

Gantibaju.com won the Most Promising Startup. I know Gantibaju.com while preparing my previous events, FGDexpo2009. I saw something interesting going on, that this site is a T-shirt designers community, in which they share their design and comments, very similar to Threadless. Even though the sales is not there yet, it already gathers a strong community support, a good indication! Their investor insisted on having a physical store that attracts visitors to shop. Online as a channel currently is too small. This site can be scaled by following a clothing business cycle and building relationship with various channels such as tying up with other retail stores which already have many presence.  It will give the benefit to the designers community to have more presence.

Lewatmana.com is a website offering traffic information, a real solution for Jakarta. It is created by Hendry Sulistiyo a close friend of mine from Malang, Very strong on technology integration, this site is yet to find a business model. My take on this site is to have a collaboration with GPS distributor who has the benefit for providing tracking information instead of traffic information. The business will comes from selling the device and subscription services. The traffic information becomes a value added services offer as a branding and mass communication.

eEvent.com, a software solution created by a developer based in Ohio have a good potential to offer services for event organizer to manage their event, from ticketing, payment and invitation. The challenge currently is that the electronic payment is not yet mass adopted. But I believe most event organizer in Indonesia is having a hard time to reach their own customers as they lack of CRM application. By providing simple services as email and invitation management, eEvent will be a solution for any event organizer. Later on, it can be scaled by providing targeted event communication or even become a ticket or sponsor aggregator. One of the founder turns out to be my high school friend from Malang.

Orori.com is a unique ecommerce site that offer one thing, wedding ring! How hard could that be, shouldn’t a wedding ring bought offline instead of online? Apparently George Budi Sumantri succeeded to persuade new couples to buy their wedding ring online. This business is really scalable, a small ring cost you hundreds or thousands of dollar. And the possibility is endless, since everybody will spend on valuable products more than once in lifetime. I truly believe in commerce, especially one with a very high margin like these.

Infokost.net is a real hardwork. Collecting all those boarding house data from around Jakarta is not an easy task, yet this site successfully get this data. The challenge is the business model though. I am not sure that small boarding house is willing to pay that much for a services or advertising. Hopefully so! But I think the same platform can be used for a higher margin such as villa in Bali or apartment, in which most of them are willing to share their customer acquisition to the site.
 
Lintasberita.com is very similar to Digg. It feeds traffic to other site. Currently the traffic is pretty impressive and has generated advertising revenue. But, I believe the business model have to grow one day, as currently it doesn’t really offer depth of information so practically forward any traffic to other site. Simple to monetize, but in the end, have to find something to become really scalable. Another site from Malang ;). I am very proud that my hometown produce such numbers of successful dotcom.

Adadiskon.com have a very impressive Twitter followers. 57 thousands of followers and follow only 1, its founder. Talk about narcissism ;) Turns out Indonesian loves discount. This site have a potential to become the Indonesian Groupon, make a living by negotiating bulk discounted products and services. But currently it’s just too many Groupon copycat out there. So, let’s see who is the final winner in a few years.

I still have a doubt on casual game business model, even though Zynga proved that Indonesia is the biggest poker gamers and Farmville addicts. The problem simply we don't have the micropayment platform. It will survive in short term if they get into mobile gaming services since it's easy to monetize.

As for the rest, I have not spend enough time with each of them to understand the possibility. You judge yourself how this companies will grow one day!