2018 has been an amazing year for DailySocial team. We grew as a team and as a company, we achieve our targets, we give the best, work with the best and will strive to continue to do so next year.

Staying true to our vision

First of all, we’re an innovation company. Lots of people see us as a media company, which we are; technology company, which we are; event and consulting company, which we also are. But above all else, we are an innovation company. Now what does that even mean? It means that everything we do, we aim to become the bridge between society and technology through innovation. We help our readers to understand startup technology better through our media coverage and events such as our weekly #SelasaStartup event. We help corporate clients to embrace technology and innovation through our consulting project, and give them deeper understanding about the ecosystem through our research reports. Every effort stays true to our company’s vision, to become the bridge between society and technology through innovation.

Since we started covering startup news in 2008, it evolves from a group of passionate techies and their weekend project, into an industry, and now it’s an  economy on its own. It touches every layer of our society from farmers, ojek drivers, all the way to politicians and decision makers. As the industry grows, we grew along with it. We doubled our traffic from last year, and reached a whole new audience of tech enthusiasts. We also grow our revenue significantly compared to last year, while proudly maintaining our profitability for four years straight.

New Trends

We also see new trends which impact is not just for players but consumers. Esports has been experiencing exponential growth for the past few years. We see millions of people are playing, participating, and competing. New companies are launching leagues or contributing in the esports system. Based on this phenomenon, our team had the idea to cover this specific topic and launch Hybrid.co.id, a sister site that focuses on esports as an ecosystem. Although it started out as one of our many experiments, it has proven itself as a great resource for anyone who wants to have better understanding of the esports ecosystem in Indonesia. So far, the result has been amazing, and we will continue to invest and participate more in building Indonesian esports ecosystem.

Business Model

One of the most frequent questions we get about the company is, how do we make money? I thought hard and long about the subject and how most of our peers and competitors are using digital advertising to fuel their business and expansion.

Personally, I am a fierce opponent of digital advertising as a business model. It doesn’t scale, it’s filled with vanity metrics and it forces media company to lower its content quality and sacrifice editorial integrity, in exchange for clicks. We decided long ago that digital advertising is not the best method to achieve our and our clients objectives.

We’ve been experimenting a lot with different business models that helps us retain integrity, solves our customers’ problems, and make good money in the process. You may see us do numerous hackathons, demo days, and consulting services for clients this year. This is where we help our clients, mostly corporate, with their digital transformation and corporate innovation program. This is what we do and this is what we do best.

And after doing this for several years, we learned a ton about corporate innovation and digital transformation process, and after doing it over and over again, we believe we can improve it, optimize it and take it to the next level. Which is why, soon, we’ll be launching our new product called DS Innovation Platform. This is a culmination of all our learning, mistakes, and experiments that we think will help anyone from founders, investors, corporate and everyone else in the innovation ecosystem to achieve more. Further information on this, soon.

Onward

2018 wasn’t easy. We did a lot of experiments, most of them failed, but some works better than we expected. The whole philosophy of our operations and our culture is to empower people, become data driven, and take risks. We will continue to scale things that works, to experiment, and take risks with the new initiatives and staying true to our vision and culture.

Our team has grown from 24 to 40+ this year, and we’ll continue to add more amazing talents to the team as we grow the business. Our office in Tebet has been a silent witness of our sweat, blood and tears for the past two years. In order to facilitate our future growth, we will soon write our story in a new office, more on this soon, too.

That said, if you thrive under pressure, experiment and data driven, super passionate about technology and innovation, we’d love to chat with you over coffee and together we can build a better future for Indonesia using technology and innovation.

2019 will be much harder, more challenging, and we will definitely fail more. However, just like 2018, it wouldn’t stop us to fail fast, fail forward, learn and grow as individuals, and as a company.

Here’s to an amazing 2018, onward with better and more incredible 2019!