After securing seed funding in the first quarter of 2021, audio content platform Noice has officially welcomed two new executives to its board of directors. They are Rado Ardian as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Niken Sasmaya as Chief Business Officer (CBO).

Both of the Google veterans’ involvement is in line with Noice’s efforts to become the best local audio platform in Indonesia. Moreover, public has been lingering to the growth of audio content, such as podcasts.

In an interview with DailySocial, Mahaka Radio’s President Director, Adrian Syarkawie, who at that time was in charge with Noice, said that his team had difficulty developing this platform business. The thing is, Mahaka Radio’s parent company was not a technology company since the very beginning, therefore, there are such limitations in its development.

“We are aware that we cannot solely develop content in the future, we have to use technology. Therefore, we are trying to find investors who can provide support on the technology side,” Ardian said to DailySocial.id.

In his recent official statement, Ardian admitted that he would continue to play an active role in supporting the future development of Noice under Rado and Niken.

To begin with, Noice was developed as a streaming radio platform. However, he said, this service is considered insufficient to meet the needs of a growing market. Meanwhile on-demand content is rapidly growing in some countries, including Indonesia.

Originally designed as a streaming radio platform, Noice began to expand its service segment by venturing into on-demand audio content. Noice was established under PT Mahaka Radio Digital in 2018 which is a joint venture company owned by PT Mahaka Radio Integra Tbk (IDX: MARI) and PT Quatro Kreasi Indonesia. Quatro is the consortium of some record companies in Indonesia, including Musica, Aquarius, My Music, and Trinity.

Based on the latest data, Noice has secured as many as 800 thousand registered listeners throughout Indonesia with more than 3,100 podcast episodes, and 200 podcast catalogs, both original and exclusive content. Noice has also worked with more than 100 podcasters.

The ex-Google influence

Prior to the appointment of Rado and Niken, Noice had actually started to address the current limitations. First, Noice started looking for investors who Eventually, Noice found investors from a number of well-known VCs with strong portfolios in technology. Those are Kenangan Kapital, Alpha JWC Ventures, and Kinesys Group.

Furthermore, the company is starting to add new talents from India specifically placed for the development of the Noice technology and platform in the future. This is enough to explain the company’s roadmap in the first half of 2021, Noice launched a beta version with UI/UX followed by version 2.X with excellent features of personalized content.

In the official statement, it is said that Rado and Niken have worked for almost ten years at Google and YouTube for the Asia Pacific region. Rado has various experiences at Google from developing the Google Ads business in the FMCG industry to handle customer experience strategies for Google Maps and the Google Store with product and engineering teams in India, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, and Australia.

While Niken has held a number of important positions on Google and YouTube. It includes working with sales, partnerships, and program development team in Singapore and Japan, she also used to be a Global Program Manager at YouTube which focuses on developing its global creator ecosystem. Niken became the first person to run this position in Southeast Asia/Australia and New Zealand.

“Learning from our experience at Google and YouTube, we want to build Noice to be able to support audio content creators in Indonesia and build their own community through the technology and features we launch. We also facilitate creators to produce original and exclusive content in recording studio facilities by Noice’s production team,” Niken said.

Noice Roadmap

Rado said, his team will continue the first development plan in order to realize its vision as the best local audio platform and build an audio content ecosystem in Indonesia. Apart from platform development and content localization, Rado and Niken also focus on three main areas.

First, Noice will focus on prioritizing features that can allow creators/podcasters to interact two-way with their listeners. Niken said, Noice has built a recording studio and production team to facilitate the production of original and exclusive content on Noice. Currently, Noice presents a number of audio content, ranging from podcasts, live audio, streaming radio, audiobooks, and music.

Second, Noice will strengthen the audio content creators ecosystem in Indonesia. Rado said, although there are many successful content creators in Indonesia, most of them are still running on video platforms. Meanwhile, the audio-based platforms options that focus on the local market is quite limited.

“Therefore, we want to create an ecosystem of audio content creators in Indonesia for them to be successful, to perform, and connect with their listeners. We also want to provide variety of content and acquire big creators by opening the Noice platform for non-original content. In addition, we want to facilitate brands to be able to build and find their community on our platform,” he explained.

Also, Noice continues searching to fill the required positions. Currently, Noice’s product and engineering teams are based in India. Meanwhile, the Indonesian team is dedicated to business development, such as content, production, marketing, partnership & sales, and PR.

“We will start focusing on monetization when our user base, Monthly Active Users (MAU), and time spend on our platform increase significantly. We have prepared several monetization schemes to test for selected creators before fully rolling out to other creators,” he added.

Audio content market growth

Currently, Indonesia is harvesting the growth of increasing audio-based digital content. Based on Spotify’s data, Indonesia dominates the most podcast consumption in Southeast Asia in 2020. As many as 20% of the total Spotify users in Indonesia listen to podcasts every month, and this number is higher than the global average percentage.

It is undeniable that the Covid-19 pandemic is one of the big factors behind the consumption of podcast content. Digital consumers are getting attached to this specific content, especially in the season of working and studying from home.

In Indonesia, the average user spends 8 hours online. However, as many as 56% dominated by Gen Z and millennials complain of screen fatigue due to being exposed to too much visual content. Therefore, audio content is considered the right escape for Indonesian internet users.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian