Yogyakarta, July 10th 2020—Center for Digital Society (CfDS) UGM came back with its discussion called Digitalk #42: Application of Technology for MSME Acceleration. In this occasion, CfDS collaborated with Paper.id, a software which targeted the business people as their users. Paper.id provided online invoicing service which commonly manually made in the other softwares. Established since 2016, Paper.id already cooperated with more than 10.000 companies, including the big platform such as Tokopedia. Yogia Sugialam as the CTO of Paper.id became the speaker in this discussion, along with Amelinda Pandu as the Project Officer of CfDS as the moderator. The discussion was held on the Google Meet platform on Friday (10/7) from 03.30 p.m. to 05.00 p.m.
Yosia began his explanation by explaining the important skills in building a business. According to Yosia, a business person had to find a good opportunity to strengthen the business. The desire to learn new things also became an important component. Other than that, a business person also required to be able to face new challenges in the business world. Yosia also talked about the importance in team building that could work well together. “In a business, good friends are not the same as good partners,” Yosia said while giving an example of the difficulties in building a team in a business.
The other thing that should be considered was what target that we want to reach, it was important to decide which strategy we were going to use. Yosia gave some target examples such as can compete in the market, have a stable velocity of money, or the effects in the social life. “Different goals also shaped different strategies,” Yosia explained.
MSME itself, according to Yosia, must expand to the digital sphere. In this case, there were difficulties that should be faced, such as resources limitation, unknown brands, also the less-concerned in the digital process. But digitalization gave an opportunity of the bigger market for the business people, also a cheaper marketing. Digitalization also considered as more practical. For the example, the working time of Paper.id itself consumed less time compared to manually organized the invoice. Expand the business to the digital sector must be hastened, because that was the best choice in this pandemic time, also with a proper infrastructure condition. The discussion was ended with the question and answer session from the audience.