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'Jomblo.com': Start up your love life
Behind the website: Looking to pair off the jomblo (single) in Indonesia are (from right to left) Darrick Rochili, Aditya Eka Paramasatya, Philipius Wahyu Sugiharto, Helga, Angelo Firman and Mulia Gotama
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span class="caption">Behind the website: Looking to pair off the jomblo (single) in Indonesia are (from right to left) Darrick Rochili, Aditya Eka Paramasatya, Philipius Wahyu Sugiharto, Helga, Angelo Firman and Mulia Gotama. Karlina Octaviany
An online platform ' jomblo.com ' helps singles out there stay positive and passionate about life, despite their status.
Intended for Indonesians between 16 and 25 years old, the social network website targets the online dating site's market, yet focuses on profile-matching people, as well as communities and activities.
Founded by Darrick Rochili and his partner, who prefers to stay anonymous, the platform is inspired by time limitations caused by hectic schedules and traffic jams ' stressful factors for singles in big cities as they try to meet new people and do refreshing activities.
Darrick claims using the online platform will help people make the most of their time being single.
'Sometimes, Indonesians tend to be galau [melancholic] when they don't have a partner. As such, jomblo.com wants to promote an anti-galau mentality, for people to be passionate in life, adventurous, seek new friends, join communities, participate in positive activities and enjoy life, even though they don't have a partner at the moment,' he says.
The name 'jomblo' was selected due to the word's familiarity among Indonesian youths. The jomblo.com team are trying to shift the perception of 'jomblo' as a negative term associated with mellow singles to being associated with fun, free, adventurous and proud singles.
The site is managed by Darrick with Aditya Eka Paramasatya (technical team leader), Philipius Wahyu Sugiharto (marketing communication executive), Helga (marketing intern), Angelo Firman (programmer analyst) and Mulia Gotama (programmer analyst). Only two of them are spoken for, the others are still jomblo.
The idea for jomblo.com started at the end of 2012. Darrick and his partner self funded the company early 2013. The development process took place around April that year.
During the pre-launch period in September, they took part in various events at campuses around Jakarta. The students responded with shyness, yet the number of members grew by the day. Last month membership reached 19,000 users and 2,900 followers on Twitter.
'A lot of registrations were done after hours. It seems that some people are still afraid of the word jomblo and yet are curious to see what's going on with jomblo.com. I thought this was quite amusing,' Darrick says.
Despite the name, he emphasized that the platform was not just about dating, but encourages its members to cross paths with new people that have similar interests.
Users will be asked to fill in data like interests, types of activity and prefered groups. The site also provides social media features, such as status updates, timelines, profiles, photos and albums, messaging, activities, community pages, search based mutual interests and suggested friends based on interests. The system will continuously be improved to help people find more matches easily.
'We also believe in encouraging people to meet new communities and participate in new activities to grow their network, and that's why we don't only match individuals to individuals,' Darrick says.
However, the online world can harbor threats for personal safety.
Darrick gave tips on how to overcome the dangers of new relationships by researching online credibility to check fake identity. If the person has a profile picture that looks like a famous person or celebrity in another country, check the picture on a search engine.
He also encouraged people to never send money to strangers or even give money to people you have just met a few times.
For meetings offline, Darrick suggested public places and to bring friends if possible.
'Don't be afraid to just call it quits and leave if the other person acts weirdly, strangely or is threatening in any way,' he says.
To improve the jomblo.com experience, the team uses crowdsourcing features for user feedback. They try to implement the best ideas. Although jomblo.com remained an online platform, their strategy includes greeting communities and builds relations through offline gatherings and events.
As a start-up company, building a solid team was a challange. With a small team, they faced difficulties in managing an effective workflow for developing features, design, mobile applications and fixing bugs.
Their next homework will be building mobile applications for Android and iOS gadgets. They wanted to create a feature to preview the matches liked by users. Developing popular social media features is also on their to-do list, like live chats, stickers, premium membership and e-commerce.
'There were and still are so many ideas we want to implement, but we have to pick and choose what we think our users will like first,' said Darrick.
