In this interview, itemku CEO opens up about his struggle with mental health and saving the company

When entering a new market, one of the most common mistakes that startup founders do is making assumptions about that market. Just because one service works well in one market, it does not mean that the same will happen in another market.

It happened to itemku founder Denis Kim, who arrived in Indonesia in 2013, to duplicate a successful overseas business model to Indonesia.

In 2014, he developed itemku as a platform that enables in-game items trading or game currency.

Despite raising external funding, the company faced serious struggles.

“Back then, I failed because I thought I can just copy-paste an overseas business model. It was a depressing time because we lost everything and nearly went bankrupt, things have gotten so bad that I’ve honestly considered suicide. However, a very small number members stayed behind, motivated me and together we rebuild our new product,” he confesses.

Listening to loyal users

Since the beginning, Kim expressed that itemku has always been open to its loyal users’ input.

“We started as a platform for in-game items trading but as our market grows, the demand for related items, such as action figures, toys, and sneakers grow as well,” says Kim when e27 asked the main reason for their recent pivot.

Also Read: Online gaming marketplace itemku raises seed funding from 500 Startups

Now, itemku has fully embraced its “marketplace for games, sneakers, and hobbies” brand.

“We like to aim high. You can say that we expanded into covering this service as well,” Kim adds.

On its platform now, itemku has added a “Hobby & Collection” section that allows users to find collectibles action figures, toys, sneakers, and comics.

Step-by-step

Determined to not repeat the dark period when his business nearly went bankrupt, Kim mentions that the pivot is done step-by-step.

“First, we add vouchers or prepaid cards. Followed by top-up service, then online comics, sneakers, and action figure to complete it consecutively. It’s all done based on our current loyal audiences’ feedback,” Kim says.

Kim shares each part of the business that went through an adjustment throughout the pivot, such as itemku’s team, product feature, and sales channel.

“We’ve always been hiring gaming geeks so we can understand our audience well, but this pivot expands our search for experts with hobbies and know-how in sneakers and toys,” Kim explains his new approach in team hiring.

In the product feature area, the pivot translates into itemku adapting their existing products to answer the real needs of customers.

“We also found that existing general e-commerces, although convenient and well-established, cannot focus on its UX for hobby segment. What itemku does is providing more detail and better explanation and/or filtering, instead of just a good search engine,” Kim points out.

Also Read: What experts are saying about blockchain and gaming

This pivot also adds features such as Bidding, Raffle, and Auction into the picture.

Furthermore, with the pivot, Kim says that the sales channel of itemku also shifted. “This means we need to find a more attractive route to market our products and services while maintain and control the quality of buyers and resellers. Adding to our existing users, resellers are now our end customers too.”

Lastly, Kim also reveals that the pivot means itemku needs to reconsider its competitors.

“We need to adopt an evolving marketing strategy to be able to respond to a different set of competitors. What we discovered is that existing competitor are more focussed on quantity instead of quality, resulting in the lack of features that fandom or geeks mostly use in current social media. We’re here to try to change that.”

Saying hello to hobbyists

“We’d like to call our target market hobbyists or connoisseurs. The internet may name our target market otaku, geek, or even maniac, but we at itemku group them into one big family with similar, but unique characteristics. This will allow us to expand to these new categories with very little friction,” Kim continues.

As for the market segment, the CEO says the company will still use the same service it has, only this time, it will be aimed to provide solutions for a different, and wider customer segment.

Kim further noted that even with the massive adjustment social media has brought into the hobby market, social media is only as good as a platform to showcase trends and encourage consumerism.

“Social media doesn’t solve reseller problems, [at least not] yet,” says Kim, highlighting the pain points of the reseller.

“We are a C2C (customer to customer) open marketplace, and we need to take that into account,” Kim adds.

That being said, itemku categorises its marketing strategy into two types: Hands-on category management to cater to a detail-sensitive audience, and one that focusses on satisfying resellers first.

“The latter one is a very different view of marketing and development, but we would like to give it a go,” Kim elaborates.

Social media is a competitor

Like any other pivot that has happened under the sun, new exploration brings on new challenges. The same also happens to itemku, which now considers social media as its main competitor.

“Unlike other e-commerce, we consider our major competitors to be social media platforms. Many hobbyists still trade premium items on social media,” says Kim.

“However, selling these hobby-related items on social media often leads to a bad experience, especially on customer service. We want to change that,” he continues.

“With the pivot, we focus our product development from the reseller perspective, detaching ourselves from general marketplaces that generally focus on the buyer instead of the resellers,” says Kim.

Also Read: itemku raises US$1.2M investment, wants to fuel Southeast Asia expansion

Since 2014 until now, itemku operates under PT Five Jack, the Korea-headquartered startup company focussing on game-related products and value-added services.

Going from one milestone to another, itemku claims that it has been successful in maintaining services to 2.12 million daily customers with proven track records of fast response and security.

itemku’s track record includes raising US$1.2 million in series A investment from 500 Startups and Korean VC K-Run Ventures in 2017 and witnessing a 17-year-old gamer generated around US$19,500 (IDR260 million) from selling Growtopia items on itemku in March the same year.

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Image Credit: itemku

The post [Exclusive] The story of a pivot: How itemku found its footing after going through dark times appeared first on e27.