Kevin Aluwi: evaluation

Transcript context

…It might be actually a good time just to jump into it. I know that I was actually saving that for later, but this might be a good time. And part of the reason I think this is really interesting is if you open up Uber these days, it's like 40 things that they're offering now. Elon at Twitter is talking about turning Twitter into a super app like payments, communication, messaging, all these things. So I think it's a really interesting trend that continues to pop up here in the US and I would absolutely love to hear your perspective on super apps. Okay, I'm going to come off a little strong on this, but I am kind of annoyed at how much it's being mentioned these days. It's really popular in VC-consultant-analyst circles because it sounds really great on a strategy deck because all of the things that are really appealing, we'll talk about lower customer acquisition costs, higher attach rates to different products, talk about higher retention across different services, the ease of cross-selling and upselling. All of these things sound great, but in reality, a lot of those benefits don't pan out. And one probably really good example that I like to reference is that I remember one of our products was mobile phone top up and recharge. In Southeast Asia, a majority of people are on prepaid plans instead of postpaid plans. So everyone basically buys their minutes and their data plans upfront in the beginning of the week or the beginning of the month. So we had a product which was a mobile top-up product. And so the reason I mentioned this specific product as a really illustrative point on super apps is that it's a product that 95% plus of our customers need because they're all on prepaid plans. So it's a very relevant product. And we had our UX research research team actually look into why the engagement in the product wasn't as high as we thought it should be. So one of the questions that our URX team asked our customers was like, "Hey, do you know that you could top up your mobile minutes and by data on the Gojek app?" And only about 40% of our customers, like 30 or 40% of our customers knew that this product existed. And that completely blew our minds because one, it's a product that is relevant for all of our customers. Two, it was literally there on one of the six buttons on the homepage. And I think the insight that we got here was that there kind of needs to be a unifying concept across all of your services within the app for your users to be able to think about your product in a sensible way. And for us, the way that our customers thought about us was that they thought about the driver. And so when we went from ride hailing to package delivery to food delivery, to grocery delivery, customers really understood that. And we didn't have to sell this idea to our customers that you had all of these services under one app because they thought about the Gojek driver. That made sense. You can easily cross sell somebody from a ride hailing customer to a grocery customer or a food delivery customer because they understood the unifying factor there being the driver. But then when you start doing other things that don't have that unifying factor in terms of the concept that a customer has when they think about your service, it starts breaking down. So one other fun UXR insight here was when we launched massage services. So we had at one point though we've shut it down a few years after, we had massage services where you can order a masseuse to come to your place. XR insight here was when we launched massage services. So we had at one point though we've shut it down a few years after, we had massage services where you can order a masseuse to come to your place. And a question that many of our customers asked was that, "oh, is the driver going to come into my house and give me a massage?" And for us, that was insane. Of course not, our drivers are not trained masseuses, but that was the question that people asked because they thought like, "oh, this app is an app for these driver related services, so if there was a massage service, I'm assuming it's that same man who's going to give me a massage." And so I think this kind of illustrates the importance of having these unifying concepts that are easy for customers to think about the multiple different services. It's not as simple as just saying, oh, we have a lot of engagement, we have a lot of eyeballs at a service. And then you have a super app that makes sense for customers. And so that whole nirvana of lower CAC, higher retention that are all on these great strategy decks often don't pan out because you kind of have to then resell this idea of like, oh, this is another service and that you can use. And that's a bit of investment that you have to actually put in terms of advertising and customer education that increases those customer acquisition costs. And it also leads to design constraints because there's only so many ways you can display a whole bunch of different services that actually have little to do with each other, which is why when you see super apps today, it's kind of like this giant menu or this giant grid which does limit the design decisions that you can make, which is unfortunate because if you actually, I think it's an unsolved problem at this point.…

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