Founding Opaper: What a Difference a Year Makes!

Since founding Opaper last May, we have come a long way toward achieving our goal of providing a digital platform for Indonesian small business owners to uplift themselves and their communities. 

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Built by Indonesians for Indonesians, I couldn’t be more proud of or grateful for what our fully-remote team has achieved since 2021: 

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• We raised an oversubscribed $1M pre-seed round last year with participation from Precursor Ventures, Ratio Ventures, OnDeck, and angel investors Jay Eum (Managing Partner of GFT Ventures), Bora Chung (Chief Experience Officer at Bill.com), Frank Nawabi (Executive at Google and founder of Google-acquired Tenor) .
• Our talented team of world-class engineers, technologists, and business operations grew to 27 people spanning 11 cities.
• Four months post-launch, we onboarded over 19,000 sellers across more than 100 cities to our platform.
• We are experiencing a whopping 60% growth month-over-month.

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With all we’ve accomplished, it’s hard to believe that just a year ago during my time as a Founder Fellow at Eric Torenberg’s On Deck, the vision for Opaper was born. There, I quickly spotted how the booming trend of social commerce – selling through WhatsApp, Instagram – and the need to reshape Indonesia’s broken, manual and inefficient business processes. Spurred on by the pandemic, this trend is clearly becoming a way of life for Indonesians whose e-commerce industry was valued at $52 billion USD in 2021. 

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Using my career’s worth of experience as a data and machine learning product manager solving transportation, and logistic problems in Silicon Valley, I set out to build Opaper to give Indonesian business owners like me a digital platform that meets the moment we’re living in now. 

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A mobile commerce, small, medium-sized businesses (SMBs) enablement platform, Opaper exists to uplift the 63 million Indonesian small business owners by modernizing their business processes. Our easy-to-set-up online storefronts give merchants who use digital communication and social media platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok the ability to more efficiently and easily market and sell their products.

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Powered by Opaper, these small business owners get instant access to a full-stack, automated, and integrated application to build an online storefront, to manage back-office tasks (sales, inventory, shipping, and payments), customer engagement, and to generate analytics, too – all in one app. 

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In such turbulent times for our global community, I am grateful to have a fantastic team with deep and diverse experience in e-commerce, transportation, and logistics. Together we are changing lives, and in the process, I’m committed to ensuring our fully-remote team has all the support needed to continue Opaper’s rapid growth. Thanks to this incredible crew, I couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds.

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There is still so much that we can and will do for Indonesian small business owners. I hope you’ll consider following our journey here and even joining us to be part of what’s to come in 2022 and beyond. 

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With much anticipation and excitement ☺️🙌💙

Joanathan McIntosh

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