It all started in July 2013 when I invited Suwandi over to my place to talk about the startup idea that I had. The idea was a website for city directory in my hometown, Medan. The website was halfway done. He was listening as I told him everything about this idea, sometime asking some questions.
After we had some discussions about this idea, he said that he had an interesting idea. It was a social networking website with ads as the main content. We discussed and polished the idea quite a bit and resulted in this cool idea that made us really passionate about it. "This is going to be a big success", We thought to ourselves.
Then I, Suwandi and Erwin started working on the idea. I was responsible for the backend things such as the php code, web server and other server related things. Suwandi was in charge of business, marketing and management stuffs. And lastly, Erwin was responsible for the experience and design for the website.
The first thing we decided was where should we worked. I suggested we worked in a living room in my dorm. I rarely saw people there, so I thought it was a good idea. For a week or two, we were working there hacking our prototype before we started working at Suwandi's house because of some reason.
After polishing ideas, designing the interface and putting some server code, it was almost ready. The end result was something pinterest-like with ads as the main content and some terms difference.
Then we had to decide on the name. We had a lot of names but we narrowed it down to 3. Adstacy, Promotious, and Promotify. We couldn't decide the name ourselves so we started interviewing our friends (thanks everyone). The winner was of course Adstacy with Promotify came second with only a small differences.
We bought adstacy.com and I started working on bringing the code live. After 2-3 days, with some help from Mr. Desdulianto, the website was successfully brought to live. Obviously, We were very happy. We started promoting it to our friends for beta testing.
We got some feedbacks, some bad but mostly good. The happy thing is the traffic is increasing steadily in the first 5 days and the sad thing is it went down really hard the next days.
We had problems we never thought of. A user spammed a lot of ads polluting the interface really bad. We got some nasty bugs. The server was attacked and brought down (The attacker was someone I knew. He admitted the attack himself. Yes. You. :p). But the worst problem is the idea itself. We had a hard time explaining the idea to people. And worse, we even had a hard time explaining to ourselves.
We were not in a good shape. Looking at the traffic got us mentally wore out. But we got some good feedbacks from our users, decided to brought down the web and redesigned the whole web. The passion inside us was burning once again. We had the determination. We wanted to make a better Adstacy.
Suwandi's house once again was used as our base. We worked day and night redesigning the interface and improving the ideas for about 1 month and launched it. This time the design is more facebook + instagram like with a lot of improvements. There were mention autocomplete, search autocomplete, text and video ad, also the favourite tags.
Few days after the launch, there was a shocking news that we were invited to Jakarta as the finalist of IdeaBox incubator program. It was a frustating and mind opening trip. We lost and had to return to Medan. After returning, I had been thinking a lot about what we should do to make Adstacy a better startup, a startup that is profitable. But I couldn't think of anything that doesn't require a lot of money. I lose faith.
So sadfully, I decided to leave the Adstacy team as of 21 December 2013. It was a really great time at Adstacy. There were a lot of things I learned while building Adstacy with Suwandi and Erwin. Even though we didn't succeed, not even a bit I regretted my decision to build Adstacy together. So thank you very much Suwandi. Thank you very much Erwin. And thank you everyone.
But this is not where it all ends.There are a lot of passion left in me. There are a lot of things I want and need to do. I am already planning for the next startup. So, calm down and stay tune :)
And lastly, don't forget to follow my twitter @WilHn to receive any new updates.
Adstacy dan Bagaimana Adstacy akan Mengubah Dunia (Periklanan)
Seperti bagaimana twitter mengubah media atau bagaimana facebook mengubah kita berinteraksi dengan teman dan keluarga, Adstacy ingin mengubah dunia periklanan.
Mengapa? Apakah ada yang salah dengan iklan pada saat ini? Tidak. Tetapi kami ingin membuatnya menjadi jauh lebih baik. Saat ini, iklan selalu saja merupakan konten sampingan. Iklan di koran, Google, Facebook atau Kaskus hanyalah konten sampingan untuk menggenerate revenue.
Adstacy ingin mengubah itu. Manusia pada dasarnya membutuhkan iklan. Produk baru, lowongan kerja, diskon disekitar, makanan enak dan banyak lagi. Manusia membutuhkan iklan sehingga bisa mendapatkan hal-hal tersebut secara cepat dan mudah. Untuk itulah, Adstacy dengan moto Ads have never been so fun akan membuat iklan menarik untuk dilihat dan dibagi.
Bayangkan setiap login ke Adstacy Anda dapat melihat iklan-iklan yang Anda sukai. Apakah itu diskon, lowongan kerja, game-game terbaru bahkan orang-orang yang sedang mencari jodoh. Apapun itu. Tentu saja Anda hanya akan melihat iklan-iklan dari user yang Anda follow sehingga iklan yang muncul tidak sembarangan. Tetapi Anda juga dapat melakukan pencarian berdasarkan kata kunci. Tidak hanya itu, Anda juga dapat melihat iklan apa saja yang sedang trend.
Adstacy juga menyediakan fitur promote untuk berbagi iklan yang Anda sukai dengan follower Anda. Iklan yang anda Sukai dapat tersebar jauh lebih cepat jika Iklan tersebut dipromote secara agresif oleh banyak user. Apalagi iklan tersebut dapat mencapai trending.
Itulah visi Adstacy. Kami ingin membuat iklan menarik untuk dikonsumsi. Berikan komentar Anda mengenai visi Adstacy dan pendapat Anda tentang apa yang Anda harapkan dari Adstacy. Terima kasih :)
