Status update, midyear 2012

How fast time flies. My last post was on the 1st of January this year, and that's more than a half year ago!

I was dormant here, but I kept on writing (at least for a couple of weeks) in #anakkos, a blog inside Neytap.com, a classifieds for room rentals, for SEO purpose. So far, the website receives almost 100 page views daily. Not bad for a $0 marketing effort.

It could be better, though. I use Ajax heavily to make Neytap speedier (speed is a feature of Neytap), but it's not SEO-friendly. I also design Neytap home page to be clean and simple, just like Google's; Apparently it's not SEO-friendly as well :( Search engines would think my other pages are not really important, since they're not referenced directly from the home page. That's assuming the engines can find the pages in the first place, since in order to open those, you must perform (Ajax) search. Dooh!

TL;DR: Neytap is designed to be speedy, with the (unforeseen) expense of search engine discoverability. Lucky that blogging helps, although not by much. This explains why engineers suck at selling consumer products :D

Next, I co-founded Cabara.co.id, a curated marketplace for domestic workers. At the moment we're focusing on maid service in Jakarta. We pitched in Startup Asia Jakarta 2012, you can watch my pitch there in YouTube (you might want to skip the first few minutes).

We didn't win (we'd be surprised if we did), but it's a great opportunity to pitch there. We were covered in Tech In Asia and some other publications, and approached by a number of VCs. Everything is new to me (and to my co-founders as well, apparently), so it was quite an experience.

Last but not least, I recently created temanmudik.com, a (social network?) website to connect Indonesians who are going homecoming this year. It's a tradition in Indonesia—and probably other Muslim countries, I know they have it in Malaysia—for people to go back to their hometown to celebrate Eid ul-Fitr (in Indonesia it's called Idul Fitri or Lebaran).

Following Minimum Viable Product concept, at the moment Teman Mudik is just a landing page and to be developed progressively depending on feasibility. Teman Mudik is a mini-site for Neytap and they share the same user base. I will give report on how it goes after Eid ul-Fitr.

Neytap released!

I've been spending my free time developing a website to facilitate room rentals. The website is an attempt to scratch my own itch. Today, nine months after I registered the domain, I'm releasing Neytap to general public.

Neytap is a classifieds for room rentals inside Facebook. It's simple, because I lack design skills. It's fast, because my internet is crappy. And it's easy, because I'm too lazy to explain how it works :)

For the curious, the word neytap originates from an Indonesian word "menetap", which means "to stay" or "to settle".

me·ne·tap v bertempat tinggal tetap (di); bermukim di: banyak orang asing ~ di kota dagang itu; ada yg pulang ke kampung halamannya, ada pula yg ~ di kota-kota; — Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia

"menetap" is a mouthful word so I trimmed it to "netap". To make the pronunciation similar for Indonesian-speaking and English-speaking tongues, I added "y" in the middle.

"If you are not embarrassed by your first release, you've launched too late" — Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn.

I'm embrarred indeed. The website is so simple, too simple in fact. There are some features that I decide to exclude from this release, including multi-language support and a mobile version, mainly because they're still crappy.

This is the first public release of Neytap, but certainly not the last. I'm going to update the website iteratively. Meanwhile, please take a look at Neytap and tell me what you think!

If it isn't for the pretty date (20-11-2011—Indonesian format), I would certainly delay the release. But then again, "waiting for the perfect time" is just an excuse and it may never come. Soli Deo gloria.