I’ve never really talked about Jipaban on my blog and that’s something that’s gonna change today because just last week Jipaban opened up in Malaysia. I have once or twice mentioned it here, referring to it as JPB though but today I’m going to tell you the whole story. 4 years ago when I first met Ming, we exchanged business ideas. I brought up the idea of a blog ad network that we now today know as Nuffnang and he came up with this ambitious idea for a shopping mall an online shopping mall. That mall was supposed to be called Jipaban.com so he actually bought the domain for it back then when we were still students.
We mutually decided though that we should work on Nuffnang first since Jipaban looked like a monumental project to undertake… maybe too big for us to chew on back then when we were just coming out of university. So 3-4 years later, Nuffnang (under the Netccentric Group) has grown to represent over 170,000 bloggers and social media users in 4 different countries with the whole Netccentric Group having over 60 full-time staff.
The company has grown a lot in terms of stability and Netccentric has also grown to have a few other startups, namely ChurpChurp and Ripplewerkz.Ming decided then that it was time to work on Jipaban so about a year ago we brought in Pierre as a partner and started Jipaban together.
Jipaban is an online shopping mall with social networking aspects that is meant to allow online shoppers to emulate the offline shopping experience. So there are features where someone who’s thinking of buying a product can share it with all her friends to see whether they think she should buy it or not. Or you’ll be able to see what your friends buy and decide if you want to have one too.
We launched it in Singapore some 6 months ago and on the week it launched it was the top search in Google Singapore.
It’s also the reason why I was with Japan with the Jipaban team for a trade show just a few months ago.
Some of our friends here have been bugging us for a long time, asking us when we’re going to bring it to Malaysia and so now we finally have!
We’ve been working really hard on it. Unlike any of the other companies we’ve started, Jipaban is one of those startups that we know is going to be really hard to make a success. We’ve prepared ourselves that the venture probably isn’t going to make any money for the next 2-3 years. Then why do it? Because we believe that SouthEast Asia more than ever before is ready for e-commerce and our mission has always been to set up the infrastructure for our growing internet market. Besides, we think social e-commerce is going to be a big thing.
There are a lot of other things to Jipaban but I’m going to leave it to you guys to explore it rather than spoil everything for you. If you want to know more about what it can do, check out this video here.
And if you’ve always wanted to start an online store, this video gives you an idea on what Jipaban does.
Check out Jipaban here.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space