Neighborhood Commerce Reimagined: Marshall Silver of DekatKita

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Indonesia boasts 25m neighborhood businesses, which represent an estimated 40% (US$450b) of the country's GDP. As part of our inaugural episode of 2023, Marshall Silver joins the Indo Tekno podcast to describe how his start-up DekatKita (meaning "near us" in Indonesian) is addressing growing discontent amongst local mom & pop stores, predominately in the food & beverage segment, with the high fees (20-30%) and disappearing subsidies of incumbent platforms such as Grab & GoTo. DekatKita has built an online storefront used by over 5,000 neighborhood merchants to promote and operate their businesses. After seeing some businesses boost sales exponentially using DekatKita Store, the company is now launching a marketplace for shoppers, to find and order from the neighborhood merchants offering the best product and customer experience—the “hidden gems” around them. An advocate of the tireless pursuit of product-market fit, Marshall describes how refinement of DekatKita functionality has helped them persuade over 20% of pilot merchants to upgrade from a free Store to a paid service.