dindatc

This was previously posted on my Medium story

A few weeks ago, I was discussing about tech startup scene with a friend when the name of two Indonesian edu-tech startups: Ruangguru and Zenius, came into the surface of our discussion. Recently, Ruangguru might have been the more popular one; but it’s quite surprising for me that Zenius (probably the first local entrant into online learning service) have quite a high popularity as well.

It came to no surprise that Ruangguru has gained the spotlight in the past year. With constant advertising efforts, among which was the smartmove of choosing the right brand ambassadors (I bet no school kid in this country doesn’t know who Iqbaal Ramadhan is), they are now hitting >5million installs on playstore, in addition to nearly 6 million web traffic on February 2019(source: similarweb).

Zenius, on the other hand, did not go through the any major advertising campaigns like Ruangguru. As far as I know, they have grown organically since their inception in 2007. At the beginning, they were also a well-known tutor service (or bimbel as we normally call it). This presence could also had played factor in promoting their brand names and their Video CD for tutorial, which eventually transformed into online learning platform. Back then, they were probably the only major player that offer such product. Fast forward to 2017, they have had 80–100k paid subscribers. And in Feb 2019, they hit >4 million web traffic (similarweb), which is quite good for a business that grow mainly through word of mouths.

Now, looking at the breakdown of traffic source in each website (data source: similarweb), I found something interesting.

While Ruangguru got the higher traffic, a big portion (>90%) of their traffic came from Search Engine. Zenius, on the other hand, had only 57% of their traffic coming from Search Engine. Thus, if we look only at the direct traffic, Zenius surprisingly surpassed Ruangguru by >1 million more visits in February. Isn’t that interesting? My hypothesis is those direct traffics to Zenius are probably coming from their subscribers. However, that doesn’t mean Ruangguru have less subscribers since they also offer mobile app to access their services (some users might have gone directly to the apps instead of the website).

Note: I only did this for fun and to share interesting findings.