- It’s a tragicomedy, really.
For many years, Indonesian entrepreneurs have tried to build software that’s useful to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Like digital bookkeeping apps designed to help these small businesses run more efficiently. Or simple tools to manage a digital storefront. Building for SMEs is an enticing proposition because Indonesia has so many of them—at least by certain estimates. The number that’s always floating around is 60 million. If you could make a chunk of those SMEs use your app regularly, and perhaps even pay for a pro version with more features, that would make for a really good SaaS business.
It just hasn’t really panned out for anyone. Even the mother of all SME-SaaS businesses, Shopify, can’t seem to crack Southeast Asian markets. The US-listed giant had started building a regional team, but now appears to be scaling back Local companies like Lummo, which had started building Shopify-like features, are still searching for product-market fit. One of the OGs in the business, like SIRCLO, could only survive because their main source of revenue comes from B2B e-commerce fulfilment.
