Interview with Kevin Aluwi

Lenny's Podcast recently hosted Kevin Aluwi, the visionary co-founder and former CEO of Gojek, to unravel the incredible saga behind Southeast Asia's biggest startup. What unfolded was a gripping narrative of relentless innovation, unparalleled scrappiness, and a fierce commitment to both drivers and customers in a market fraught with unique challenges. Aluwi’s insights offer a masterclass in building a colossal enterprise from the ground up, proving that the most impactful solutions often emerge from the most unexpected places.

The Perilous Path: Battling Mafias and Building Trust

In its nascent stages, Gojek faced not just market competition, but outright physical danger. Kevin Aluwi vividly recounts the early resistance to their services, noting that "the most common form of that resistance in the early days was actually by motorcycle taxi mafias." These were established, often violent, territorial groups that saw Gojek's emergence as a direct threat. Gojek drivers picking up orders and passengers were routinely assaulted, facing everything "from like bricks thrown at our drivers to you know knives and machetes being brandished at them."

It would have been easy, Aluwi admits, to distance the company, to tell their contract drivers to "just sort it out." But Gojek chose a different, much harder path. Recognizing their drivers as the backbone of their operation, they hired private security companies, running "a fairly big Private Security operation for a fairly long time." This move, though costly and operationally complex, was a profound statement of commitment. It ensured driver safety and, in turn, fostered an unbreakable loyalty that became a crucial differentiator against better-funded competitors.

Key Practices:

• Prioritize frontline safety: Directly intervene to protect your most vulnerable stakeholders, even against physical threats.
• Build deep loyalty: Demonstrate tangible commitment beyond contractual obligations.
• Operational innovation: Don't shy away from complex, hands-on solutions if they solve critical problems for your core users.

Beyond the Hype: The Nuances of the Super App

Gojek evolved from a simple motorcycle taxi service into a sprawling on-demand consumer "super app" offering close to 30 different services, from ride-hailing and food delivery to massages and financial services. Its scale is staggering, boasting 2.7 million drivers, 3 billion orders last year, and 15 million merchants across Southeast Asia, with an IPO valuation of $27-28 billion. Yet, Aluwi confesses a degree of frustration with the very concept that Gojek helped define. "I am kind of annoyed at how much it's being mentioned these days," he states, pointing out that the theoretical benefits of super apps—lower CAC, higher retention—often don't materialize in reality.

The core issue, Aluwi explains, is user perception. He shares a striking anecdote about a mobile top-up product, relevant to 95% of users and prominently placed on the home screen, yet only 30-40% knew it existed. The insight? "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." For Gojek, that concept was "the driver." When they launched massage services, customers actually asked, "is the driver gonna come into my house and give me a massage?" This disconnect highlights that simply bundling services doesn't create synergy; a coherent, user-centric narrative is essential.

Key Insights:

• Unifying concept is crucial: Super apps thrive when there's a clear, understandable link between disparate services.
• User education is paramount: Don't assume users will discover or understand new offerings, even if highly relevant.
• Beware of design constraints: Too many unrelated services can lead to an unwieldy and confusing app interface.

The Unseen Moat: Building Brand in a Battleground Market

Against competitors with "more than a hundred times more Capital," Gojek's survival and dominance hinged on an often-underestimated asset: its brand. Aluwi unequivocally states his belief that "the two most important things in a consumer business are product and brand, in that order." He argues that great brands transcend mere transactions, becoming part of a customer's identity and fostering loyalty that goes beyond discounts or features.

Gojek invested heavily in consistent brand touchpoints, from lighthearted, culturally resonant advertising copy that "make fun of ourselves" to app design. A particularly ingenious move was leaning into cultural artifacts. In Indonesia, sending food as a gift to a romantic interest is common, so Gojek allowed users to send "gofood" to locations far from themselves, turning a product feature into a cultural phenomenon. Perhaps the most impactful brand decision was the iconic jackets and helmets worn by drivers. This wasn't just visual recall; as Aluwi explains, seeing "people whiz past me with this imagery on them" while stuck in traffic created an instant, physical connection to the service's value proposition – bypassing congestion or delivering goods. This simple, visible branding reinforced Gojek's utility and identity simultaneously.

Key Learnings:

• Brand as a competitive advantage: Especially for underfunded startups, a strong brand can be a more durable "moat" than capital.
• Cultural integration: Weave your brand into local customs and traditions to foster deeper relatability and connection.
• Visible value proposition: Find ways for your brand to visually and tangibly demonstrate your service's benefit in everyday life.

Operational Ingenuity: Doing the Hard Things to Win

Gojek's journey is punctuated by a willingness to tackle problems head-on, even if it meant building unconventional, labor-intensive solutions. In an environment lacking digital payment infrastructure, Gojek ingeniously set up "cash booths" – physical locations with vaults and cash where drivers could come to withdraw their earnings. Aluwi describes it as "essentially a mini ATM network," a testament to their operational prowess. When faced with widespread fraudulent driver apps that offered auto-accept features (which Gojek initially restricted), instead of building complex security systems with scarce engineering talent, they opted to "actually copy those features" into their own app. This pragmatic approach, born of necessity, significantly reduced fraudulent usage by simply meeting user demand within their legitimate platform.

Aluwi himself embodied this spirit, taking on various roles from amateur performance marketer to being the first car driver on the app. His experience as a driver, lugging laundry for a customer and dealing with multiple stops, directly informed the development of features like waiting fees and multi-stop options, ensuring fair compensation. This firsthand involvement, he states, was crucial for understanding "what Excellence looks like" and building empathy. For founders building outside traditional tech hubs like Silicon Valley, his advice is clear: be "Ops heavy than Tech heavy" early on, embrace remote work for talent access (Gojek built an engineering center in Bangalore in 2015), and crucially, "don't just copy." Focus on unique market dynamics, as Gojek did with motorcycle taxis, to drive genuine, locally relevant innovation.

Key Practices:

• First-principles problem solving: When standard solutions aren't available, invent your own, even if they're operationally heavy.
• Founder immersion: Personally experience the challenges faced by your users and employees to build empathy and inform product decisions.
• Strategic adaptation: Don't be afraid to adopt competitors' successful features if it addresses a critical user need and strengthens your platform.
• Tailored market strategy: Build for your unique local market conditions, rather than blindly cloning foreign models.

"The two most important things in a consumer business are product and brand, in that order." - Kevin Aluwi