Kevin Aluwi on Gojek, Super Apps, and Building in Southeast Asia
Key ideas
- Super apps produce far less cross-product synergy than their strategy decks promise. Gojek’s mobile top-up feature — relevant to 95% of Indonesian users, all of whom are on prepaid plans — was unknown to 60–70% of Gojek’s own user base despite appearing in the same app. Users come for one thing and leave; they do not explore.
- Platform beats super app as a long-run strategy. Making others successful on your infrastructure is more durable than adding more services yourself. Post-IPO, Gojek has been focusing down rather than expanding horizontally — the super app era taught them that less is more.
- Operational grit in the early years created durable competitive advantage. Motorcycle taxi mafias physically assaulted Gojek drivers, using bricks and machetes. Gojek hired private security companies to extract drivers from dangerous situations and built its own cash distribution centres to pay drivers when no banking infrastructure existed. Doing the hard things competitors won’t is itself a moat.
- Brand investment early is unusual for an ops-heavy startup — and it paid off. Most logistics companies defer brand spend; Gojek invested early, building driver loyalty and consumer trust that became difficult for rivals to replicate.
- Scale at peak: 2.7 million drivers across SE Asia, 3 billion orders per year, 15 million merchants, ~30 services from rides to massage to movie tickets to loans. Indonesia’s largest-ever IPO at ~$28bn valuation after merger with Tokopedia.
Super apps: the sceptical case
The theoretical super app pitch — lower customer acquisition costs, higher retention, cross-sell revenue — rarely materialises as predicted. Aluwi’s evidence is blunt: mobile top-up, a feature relevant to virtually every Indonesian user (the country runs almost entirely on prepaid mobile), was invisible to 60–70% of Gojek’s own users. The app opened; they tapped the service they came for; they left.
Cross-sell requires users to explore. Users don’t explore. They have a job to do and they do it. This means the synergy benefits that justify the complexity of running 30 services in one app are largely theoretical. Each additional service adds operational overhead, management complexity, and brand dilution — and the customers who might theoretically benefit from the bundle rarely discover it.
Aluwi’s heuristic: a super app makes sense when the founder can no longer list all their own services from memory. At that point the portfolio has grown beyond the coherence needed to deliver any of it well.
Post-IPO, Gojek has reversed course. The conglomerate strategy has given way to focus. The lesson Aluwi draws is that companies should double down on what is working rather than expand horizontally in pursuit of theoretical synergy.
Operational grit and early lessons
Gojek’s early operations in Jakarta were not a standard startup story. The incumbent motorcycle taxi (ojek) industry operated through territorial networks with genuine enforcement capacity. When Gojek began formalising and paying drivers, those networks responded: drivers were physically assaulted, bricks and machetes were used. Gojek’s response was operational rather than legal — they contracted private security firms to monitor driver pickups in dangerous areas and extract drivers when needed.
Payment infrastructure presented a parallel problem. Indonesia’s banking penetration was too low to pay drivers by transfer at scale. Gojek built its own cash distribution centres — physical locations where drivers could collect earnings. Neither of these solutions was in any product roadmap. Both were necessary to operate. Aluwi’s view is that competitors who would not stomach this kind of operational cost could not follow, which made the grit itself a competitive moat.
The brand investment runs against standard startup logic. Ops-heavy businesses typically defer marketing spend until the operation is stable. Gojek invested early, creating emotional connection with drivers and riders before scale forced them to. Driver loyalty built during that period proved resistant to later competitive offers from better-funded rivals.
Speaker
Related
- Crystal Widjaja on Growth at Gojek, Analytics Failure, and Scrappy Experimentation — Crystal Widjaja was head of growth at Gojek and appeared separately on Lenny’s Podcast; direct operational companion to this episode.