Acquisition during Covid, What to Expect?

Hi guys, sorry I don’t write much recently. I guess Covid really takes its toll because it’s still showing increasing trend in Indonesia while some other countries also see what we called a second wave. As you all may know, my current company Moka was acquired by Gojek around April 2020. Without Covid, I guess the acquisition itself already impact in many aspects. Now that we are doing it during Covid, I think this provides me with the unique experience which worth to share to many of you. Read on to know more about both opportunities and challenges I face nowadays.

Opportunity

I think Moka’s biggest strength is how we manage to build our product around POS (Point of Sales) and added supporting features to provide more values for our customers. Not only from product, but I personally think the collaborative effort across the team never failed to amaze me. Starting from how we can build the brand so Moka can be trusted by more potential merchants, Sales who did tailored presentation to really understand what merchants need, Operations team who handles merchant life cycle from the on-boarding, engagement and business education during their subscription until renewal process to ensure they stay with us. This reflects on the numbers itself. I remember when I first joined back in October 2017, we have less than 5K paid subscribers. By early 2020, that number skyrocketed to almost 30K. For some people, that growth maybe not as impressive as some startups where they can grow maybe 10 times within a year. But what I see from the founders’ vision is that they want to build sustainable company so we also care a lot about our burning rate. In fact, we decided to increase our subscription price and shorten the trial period from 30 days to 14 days back in Q1 2018. How many startups brave enough to do that in the middle of cashback and free items wave in the past 5 years?

I learned so much from many people in this company especially my direct report and peers about how data is really important to support many aspects in decision making. It’s really different with classes where we usually got the data is already clean and the business objective is also clear. The most important is we can provide value to our stakeholders. Do you really need to build a model where having various threshold after data exploration can solve 90% of specific business problem? Maybe not. But do you need to care a lot about your model latency if it’s used to detect fraud transaction? Most likely yes. Don’t forget that business objective or requirements for data team is pretty abstract and we need to translate them in a way so we can help them understand the insights. For example, the business team can go to us and say “We’re just having a discussion with company X. What is the best way to decide on whether we should integrate our app with them or not to add more values to our customers?” That kind of requirements is our daily conversation and we must help them to decide based on the data we have at that moment.

While Moka is pretty good at building B2B as our core, we are still lacking on how we can connect to consumer directly. I think that’s why Gojek was interested and eventually decide to acquire us. Looking from the inside, it is a win-win for both parties. Gojek needs Moka’s experience in building great B2B while Moka needs Gojek so our customers (read: merchants) can have larger exposure to arguably the largest consumer app at the moment. Actually, having this process without Covid will most likely impact many things already. For example, we need to know which other stakeholders we need to know, what’s their style of handling projects, the frequency and what kind of progress to update them, etc. Now that we are doing it during Covid, it comes with the unique set of challenges.

Challenges

The most obvious challenge is we never meet physically with all of our new friends there. While we are really grateful we have Zoom app now, nothing beats direct human interaction. That’s how you build rapport and great relationships at work. I guess it’s also part of human nature where we are social creature. Do you miss having lunch with your mates where you can chat anything outside work like hobbies, movies, finance even politics? I do. In fact, those kind of discussions actually help us to understand our peers more than their professional side. But I guess, for the greater good we still need to face this until early next year since Gojek has announced that the work from office will be optional until early next year.

Another challenge we have is to understand new product which we are asked to manage. So not only we handle Moka app, we also need to help to grow Gojek’s merchant app called GoBiz. While Moka started with POS then we add other features on top of it, in GoBiz, POS is actually one of the feature. Merchants who use GoBiz can start with [GoPay] or [GoPay + GoFood] merchants then they can activate the POS as needed. This different product nature is basically something Moka team needs to learn together and from my experience in the past 5 months, it was not easy at all haha. What I see right now is apart from engineering team, the rest of us including Finance and HR are having tough time to integrate and understand both sides. Hopefully we can manage this, be a good fit and most importantly continue to help our SME merchants survive in this hardship.

Closing

And that is how I view this acquisition process during pandemic. This is purely my own opinion and doesn’t reflect the company’s view. While I am actually excited to help more merchants and indirectly contribute to nation’s economy, it comes with not-so-easy challenges which I still need to face until Allah knows when we can get that vaccine for all population in the world. I have my utmost respect for all of the doctors and front-liners who faced this battle everyday in the field. You truly are unsung heroes and may Allah always protect you and your families until we can come up stronger after this hard period.

This post was written in Jakarta, 22 August 2020 where total Covid case in this country reached 149K with 6K deaths and 102K recovered.