Sometimes, conventional content marketing techniques are not good enough

In the 2018 Content Marketing Institute survey, 91 per cent of B2B brands and 86 per cent of B2C brands reported using content marketing.

However, most businesses struggle to get their desired business results. Merely 20 per cent of the surveyed B2B businesses rated their content marketing approach as extremely/very successful.

The reason most businesses can’t make content marketing work is because they get caught up in established best practices and tactics.

See, if you’re failing at content marketing, you need to shake up your strategy from the ground up. You need to go back to the drawing board.

What is the foundation of content marketing?

It is addressing the pain points of your target audience by publishing value-adding content. Then, building awareness for your brand by distributing it using appropriate distribution channels where your prospects hang out.

Based on the above foundation, here are three counterintuitive content marketing strategies small businesses have used to get terrific results.

1. Publish seldom, but only The BEST content in your industry

Traditional content marketing wisdom calls for publishing content regularly on your blog. It results in more indexed pages, traffic, and leads.

HubSpot found that companies that publish 16+ posts every month get more than 3.5 times traffic than companies that between 0 to 4 monthly posts.

However, as a small business owner, you know a high publishing frequency could compromising your content quality. Also, spending time on the distribution of your content is critical to ensure it reaches your target audience.

A counterintuitive approach to regular publishing is posting only once or twice per month and promoting it extensively. For the strategy to work, you need to ensure that:

• Every content piece you create has a proven demand,
• You create the highest-quality content on the subject,
• You have an extensive promotion strategy in place for distributing the content.

Suppose, you sell peanut butter. You researched and found that your audience is interested in cake recipes. Buzzsumo returns the most shared articles on the subject.

As you can observe, all the articles talk about different kinds of cakes. They contain text, high-quality visuals, and a video. Formatting-wise, the article on the second website has a good breakdown of Chocolate Peanut Butter Molten Cake. It neatly lays down the recipe in a succinct table.

When you create a piece of content on “peanut butter cake recipes,” then you can top the existing content quality by:

• Including more than one cake recipes,
• Doing a video breakdown of the recipe,
• Using multiple high-quality photos.

Pinterest and Facebook have fared well for the existing content pieces. The articles got over 10,000 shares on these platforms. Hence, you can target distributing the content on these two platforms.

Brian Dean religiously follows a schedule of publishing one article every 4 to 6 weeks at Backlinko.

Also Read: How to acquire your first 1,000 loyal users and get them to actively use your product

With merely 53 live blog posts, Backlinko had driven 4 million visitors. The reason it worked was that Brian created the best piece of content on every subject he wrote. Then, he extensively outreached to build links and get shares for every piece.

He even sends 100 emails as a part of his pre-outreach for an article. Here is a break down of his promoting strategy by the man himself.

2. Go beyond researching your audience’s pain points

It’s copywriting 101.

You need to get inside your audience’s minds and find out their pain points, dreams, and fears. Next, borrow the “exact” phrases they use in your marketing.

In essence, you are trying to connect with your audience while showing them how your products fit into their lives.

The traditional way most businesses employ for researching their target customers is through online forums and audience research tools. Few take the pain of conducting online surveys to understand their audience.

How about you go beyond passively stalking your audience online? You do the scary offline bit of talking to your customers.

Pinterest user experience researcher Gabriel Trionfi used to gather with Pinterest designers and make house calls. He found that these visits help them understand how their customers use Pinterest. Sojourning the users also proved fruitful in gaining inspiration and building new things.

Wonder how the strategy falls under content marketing?

By talking to your customers about their problems and offering help, you earn their trust. You can find burning customer questions that you can answer on your blog. If you plan to launch a new product, you can understand your audience requirements and validate your ideas.

When Ryan Robinson wanted to launch a course on validating a business idea, he met a few of his most engaged subscribers. Besides helping him in planning the content of his course, 75 per cent of his early feedback group also bought the course during its pre-sale.

Even when he launched a new project, he validated his idea through text messages. And he even got pre-orders while building his product.

3. Try to achieve your business goals natively on other platforms

Brands practice content marketing to build an audience and in the long-run derive a profitable customer action.

A few years ago, here’s how marketing content on social media might have helped your business bottom line:

1. Publish content on your website.
2. Send link updates to your piece on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the like.
3. Thousands of visitors land on your site.
4. A minor percentage of these visitors convert into your email subscribers.

Once you have your tribe of email subscribers that are interested in your brand, you can build a relationship with them. You can send them value-adding content and interact with them. Then, occasionally when you send an email to buy your products, a percentage of your subscribers will oblige.

Currently, there’s a large quantity of high quality content published every day. Also, social media networks are becoming increasingly selfish and want users to stay on their platform.

Also Read: What Tokopedia does to ensure high quality customer relations management

You can’t abandon social media because of the huge pool of prospective customers. However, building your audience solely on these platforms is also not intelligent because their algorithms will then dictate your brand’s reach.

The way out is trying to achieve your business goals on other platforms itself.

For example, on Facebook, you can retarget visitors that interacted once with your brand to make them familiar with your brand. Then, invite them to try your product.

You can even do without creating content for your our blog.

Author Benjamin P. Hardy hasn’t posted a single article on his site and built a personal brand entirely through Medium. Each of his articles gets multiple thousands of claps and hundreds of comments.

At the end of his articles, he offers a cheat sheet as a way into his email list. His Medium popularity has resulted in a list size of 300,000 subscribers.

When he launched his online course to the email list, not publishing content on his website didn’t hurt. He generated US$90,000 in seven days.

Final thoughts

The above three strategies want a little extra effort. However, as I showed you with data they work when implemented correctly.

As the landscape of content marketing evolves, we should not forget the intent of content marketing: adding value and helping your customers wherever they hang out. If it requires disobeying conventional wisdom, then so be it.

Which of the three strategies do you plan to experiment with in your marketing? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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There is an underlying science to listening that may just catapult your digital marketing initiatives to success

Nobody can deny the importance of Social Media Listening as a marketing tool. As a refresher, listening is a way of collecting and analysing the chatter surrounding your brand through tracking mentions about you or your peripherals. As businesses get right into social media in large, escalating quantities, latest tools and the number of experts in the field have also increased considerably. However, not everyone has managed to utilise listening to the best of its ability; when not dealing with the strategy with reproach, some become totally dependent on tools.

We don’t want you to be like them.

Simple as it may seem because of the gamut of tools available to you, it is actually really easy to butcher this otherwise effective strategy. However, there is an underlying science to listening that may just catapult your digital marketing initiatives to success.

We’ve gone through establishing the strategic benefits of listening for your brand, but let’s now discover five effective tips that can lead your listening endeavour to success.

1. Clarify Reasons for Listening

Social media listening concerns itself more about the analysis of data to complement strategy instead of providing immediate responses. Businesses should then remember to collect not just for the sake of collecting. You wouldn’t want data dump or to fill your data centers with information that doesn’t really give you anything. Our advice is to set a clear goal in mind for your social media listening endeavour. This could be a few or a combination of the following: monitoring reputation, generating leads, increasing brand awareness, leveraging on competitor data, etc.

It might help to ask yourself these questions when you brainstorm with your team:

• “How will listening influence the way we strategise for our brand?”
• “How will data from listening eventually influence our customers?”

2. Use Social Media Monitoring Tools

We mentioned that brands often butcher social listening, and this is because of their failure to initially set their values and goals right (for the audience and the brand).

Now, the internet is teeming with social listening tools that can answer most of the goals you defined for your brand. Just like any other digital tools, they conveniently sweep the internet to help you make informed decisions. They generate real-time information and even provide historical data to help you spot previous trends. Some even include sophisticated features that allow you to view activity in certain areas around the world.

You will never be short of tools to employ for your convenience as there’s one for every social media platform. You can check this list to see some of the best tools in the market today.

Some tools give leeway so you don’t feel forced into making premature commitments. They can offer free trials and demos so you can see what best fits the objective you set for your brand.

However, we advise you to be wary. While tools are proven to make monitoring more convenient, base your decision on the parameters you set: objective, budget, and the capability of your team to handle it.

Also read: Social influence is an essential part of doing business today, and you should engage customers whenever you can

3. Monitor Relevant Keywords

Keywords lie at the heart of social media listening. Initially, keywords guide audience by connecting them to their interests and showing options available to them. They work like connectors that the people use to find services and products that appeal to them the most. Brands, however, create and communicate their messages effectively to the audience by visiting frequently used keywords in social media.

Since the majority of the keywords are created by the market, businesses must consistently update their keyword list or the word combinations that they monitor. However, you must remember that these query words vary per platform and that what’s popular on one platform may not automatically capture the essence of customer sentiment on another. This is because there are notable behavioural differences across the platforms. The “one size fits all” framework will not work in this scenario. Effective listening welcomes and works around the idiosyncrasies within platforms.

4. Benchmark for Progress

To improve your process, you must remember to track not only your movement but your competitions’. Some businesses lose out on the benefits of benchmarking simply because they don’t do it. Others fail remarkably at implementing the insights that they do get (more on this later).

Benchmarking for progress means basically doing a sweep of your industry to see how well (or how bad, even) your competitors are doing. Keep track of the essential dimensions of your business and pit it against your competition. This way, you can improve the quality of your services and products.

Benchmarking doesn’t have to be costly; the key to generating great insights is by, again, setting clear objectives. Ask yourself what aspect of your competitor’s business you want to analyse; it could be the process, their campaigns, latest product innovations, etc. The key here is to make sure that you are moving with the trend of your industry and not lagging behind on improvements. This urges you to not be complacent and to always, always ensure that you maintain your market relevance.

5. Tie-In Customer Chatter with Campaign- and Strategy-Building

Most businesses fail because they dismiss the last step to successful social media listening—tying-in the customer chatter to their strategies. Some brands become too obsessed with classifying labels and providing prompt, yet short-term solutions to maintain brand reputation. Now, we are not dismissing the utility of listening to making real-time responses, but social listening can benefit your company in other ways besides reputation management.

Also read: 4 ways to achieve high-converting engagement with your customers

Grand, longer-term strategies are rooted in data acquired from listening. Companies can use social media listening to monitor and predict emerging trends to aid the brand’s overall strategy. Effective listening doesn’t stop at the collection of data but always makes sure that they capture the whole chatter picture.

Conclusion

Businesses expecting social media listening tools to do all the work for them are in for a very rude awakening. Recognise the importance of the human element and why it has to co-exist perfectly with the digital.

Marketing and translating these goals takes a lot of work, but reliable teams can provide you with solutions that use the valuable insights from your listening.

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Mistakes will be made; but learning how to get back on your feet  will be more crucial

While I was reading through most of the success stories that were published on IndieHackers.com, it occurred to me that my project GetData.IO really took longer than most others to gain significant traction, a full 5 years actually.

The beginning

I first stumbled upon this project back in December 2012 when I was trying to solve two other problems of my own.

In my first problem, I was trying to identify the best stocks to buy on the Singapore Stock Exchange. While browsing through the stocks listed on their website, I soon realize that most stock exchanges as well as other financial websites gear their data presentation towards quick buy and sell behaviours.

If you were looking to get data for granular analysis based on historical company performance as opposed to stock price movements, it is like pulling teeth. Even then, important financial data I needed for decision-making purposes were spread across multiple websites. This first problem lead me to write 2 web-scrappers, one for SGX.com and the other for Yahoo Finance, to extract data-sets which I later combined to help me with my investment decision-making process.

Once I happily parked my cash, I went back to working on my side project then. It was a travel portal which aggregates all the travel packages from tour agencies located in Southeast Asia. It was not long before I encountered my second problem… I had to write a bunch of web-scrapers again to pull data from vendor sites which do not have the APIs! Being forced to write my 3rd, 4th and maybe 5th web-scraper within a single week lead me to put on hold all work and step back to look at the bigger picture.

The insight

Being a web developer, and understanding how other web developers think, it quickly occurred to me the patterns that repeat themselves across webpage listings as well as nested web pages. This is especially true for naming conventions when it came to CSS styling. Developers tend to name their CSS classes the way they would actual physical objects in the world.

I figured if there existed a Semantic Query Language that is program independent, it would provide the benefit of querying web pages as if they were database tables while providing for clean abstraction of schema from the underlying technology. These two insights still prove true today after 6 years into the project.

The trough of sorrow

While the first 5 years depicted in the trend line above seem peaceful due to a lack of activity, it felt anything but peaceful. During this time, I was privately struggling with a bunch of challenges.

Team management mistakes and pre-mature scaling

First and foremost was team management. During the inception of the project, my ex-schoolmate from years ago approached me to ask if there was any project that he could get involved in. Since I was working on this project, it was natural that I would have invited him to join the project. We soon got ourselves into an incubator in Singapore called JFDI.

In hindsight, while the experience provided us with general knowledge and friends, it really felt like going through a whirlwind. The most important piece of knowledge I came across during the incubation period was this book recommendation — The Founder’s dilemma. I wished I read the book before I made all of the mistakes I did.

There was a lot of hype (see the blip in mid-2013), tension and stress during the period between me and my ex-schoolmate. We went our separate ways due to differences in our vision of how the project should proceed shortly after JDFI Demo Day. It was not long before I grew the team to a size of 6 and had it disbanded, realizing it was naive to scale in size before figuring out the monetization model.

Investor management mistakes

During this period of time, I also managed to commit a bunch of grave mistakes which I vow never to repeat again.

Mistake #1 was being too liberal with the stock allocation. When we incorporated the company, I was naive to believe the team would stay intact in its then configuration all the way through to the end. The cliff before vesting were to begin was only 3 months with full vesting occurring in 2 years.

When my ex-schoolmate departed, the cap table was in a total mess with a huge chunk owned by a non-operator and none left for future employees without significant dilution of existing folks. This was the first serious red-flag when it came to fundraising.

Mistake #2 was giving away too much of the company for too little, too early in the project before achieving critical milestones. This was the second serious red-flag that really turned off follow up would-be investors.

Mistake #3 was not realizing the mindset difference of investors in Asia versus Silicon Valley, and thereafter picking the wrong geographical location (a.k.a network) to incubate the project. Incubating the project in the wrong network can be really detrimental to its future growth.

Asian investors are inclined towards investing in applications that have a clear path to monetization while Silicon Valley investors are open towards investing in deep technology of which the path to monetization is yet apparent. During the subsequent period, I saw two similar projects incubated and successfully launched via Ycombinator.

The way I managed to fix the three problems above was to acquire funds I didn’t yet have by taking up a day job while relocating the project back to the Valley’s network. I count my blessings for having friends who lend a helping hand when I was in a crunch.

Self-doubt

I remembered having the conversation with the head of the incubator two years into the project during my visit back to Singapore when he tried to convince me the project was going nowhere and I should just throw in the towel. I managed to convince him and more importantly myself to give it go for another 6 months till the end of the year.

Also Read: Rethinking content marketing: 3 new ways to catapult your startup’s revenue

I remember the evenings and weekends alone in my room while not working on my day job. In between spurts of coding, I would browse through the web or sit staring at the wall trying to envision how product/market fit would look like. As what Steve Jobs mentioned once in his lecture, it felt like pushing against a wall with no signs of progress or movement whatever so. If anything, it was a lot of frustration, self-doubt and dejection.

A few times, I felt like throwing in the towel and just giving up. For a period of 6 months in 2014, I actually stopped touching the code in total exasperation and just left the project running on auto-pilot, swearing to never look at it again.

The hiatus was not to last long though. A calling is just like the siren, even if somewhat faint sometimes, it calls out to you in the depths of the night or when just strolling along on the serene beaches of California. It was not long before I was back on my MacBook ploughing through the project again with renewed vigour.

First signs of life

It was mid-2015, the project was still not showing signs of any form of traction. I had by then stockpiled some cash from my day job and was starting to get interested in acquiring a piece of real estate with the hope of generating some cash flow to bootstrap the project while freeing up my own time. It was during this period of time that I got introduced to my friend’s roommate who also happened to be interested in real estate.

We started meeting on weekends and utilizing GetData.IO to gather real estate data for our real estate investment purposes. We were gonna perform machine learning for real estate. The scope of the project was really demanding. It was during this period of dog fooding that I started understanding how users would use GetData.IO.

It was also then when I realized how shitty and unsuited the infrastructure was for the kind and scale of data harvesting required for projects like ours. It catalyzed a full rewrite of the infrastructure over the course of the next two years as well as brought the semantic query language to maturity.

Technical challenges

Similar to what Max Levchin mentioned in the book Founder’s at work, during this period of time there was always this fear in the back of my mind that I would encounter technical challenges which would be unsolvable.

The site would occasionally go down as we started scaling the volume of daily crawls. I would spend hours on the weekends digging through the logs to attempt at reproducing the error so as to understand the root cause. The operations were like a (data) pipeline, scaling one section of the pipeline without addressing further down sections would inevitably cause fissures and breakage. Some form of manual calculus in the head would always need to be performed to figure out the best configuration to balance the volume and the costs.

The number 1 hardest problem I had to tackle during this period of time was the problem of caching and storage. As the volume of data increase, storage cost increase and so did wait time required before data could be downloaded. This problem brought down the central database a few times.

After procrastinating for a while as the problem festered in mid-2016, I decided that it was to be the number 1 priority to be solved. I spend a good 4 months going to big data and artificial intelligence meet-ups in the Bay Area to check out the types of solutions available for the problem faced. While no suitable solutions were found, the 4 months helped elicit corner cases to the problem which I did not previously think of. I ended up building my own in-house solution.

Traction and Growth

An unforeseen side effect of solving the storage and caching problem was its effect on SEO. The effects on SEO would not be visible until mid-2017 when I started seeing an increased volume of organic traffic to the site. As load times got reduced from more than a minute in some cases to less than 400 milliseconds seconds, the volume of pages indexed by bots would increase, accompanied by an increase in the volume of visitors and reduction in bounce rates.

Continued education

It was in early-2016 that I came across an article expounding the benefits of reading widely and deeply by Paul Graham which prompted me to pick up my hobby of reading again. A self-hack demonstrated to me by the same friend, who helped relocated me here to the Bay Area, which I pursued vehemently got me reading up to 1.5 books a week.

These are books which I summarized on my personal blog for later reference. All the learnings developed my mental model of the world and greatly aided in the way I tackled the project.

Also Read: 5 strategies for effective social media listening

Edmodo’s VP of engineering hammered in the importance of not boiling the ocean when attempting to solve a technical problem, of always being judicious with the use of resource during my time working as a tech-lead under his wing. Another key lesson learned from him is that in some circumstances being liked and being effective do not go hand in hand. As the key decision maker, it is important to steadfastly practice the discipline of being effective.

Head of Design, Tim and Lukas helped me appreciate the significance of UX during my time working with them and how it ties to user psychology.

Edmodo’s CEO introduced us to mindfulness meditation late-2016 to help us weather through the turbulent times that was happening within the company then. It was rough. The practice which I have adopted till to date has helped keep my mind balanced while navigating the uncertainties of the path I am treading.

Edmodo’s VP of product sent me for a course late-2017 which helped consolidate all the knowledge I have acquired till then into a coherent whole. The knowledge gained has helped greatly accelerated the progress of GetData.IO. During the same period, I was also introduced by him the Vipasanna meditation practice which coincidentally a large percentage of the management team practices.

One very significant paradigm shift I observed in myself during this period of continued education is the observed relationship between myself and the project. It has changed from an attitude of urgently needing to succeed at all cost to an attitude of open curiosity and fascination as one would an open-ended science project.

Moving forward

To date, I have started working full time on the project again. GetData.IO has the support of more than 1,500 community members worldwide. Our mission is to turn the Web into the fully functional Giant Graph Database of Human Knowledge. Financially, with the help of our community members, the project is now self-sustaining. I feel grateful for all the support and lessons gained during this 6-year journey. I look forward to the journey ahead as I continue along my path.

While I was reading through most of the success stories that were published on IndieHackers.com, it occurred to me that my project GetData.IO really took longer than most others to gain significant traction, a full 5 years actually.

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This post first appeared on Medium.

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Many leading organizations from different parts of the world are already doing their bit towards social reform

If you’re running a business with the sole aim of selling stuff and making huge profits, then you are missing the bigger picture. While profitability is essential to sustain business operations and pay your bills comfortably, it shouldn’t be the only thing you seek. You also ought to aim to give back to society in any way you can and help it grow further.

Many leading organizations from different parts of the world are already doing their bit towards social reform. Perhaps now it’s your turn to stand up and do something that can change the lives of others for the better.

If you are looking for some motivation to pump your spirits, here are some few examples of businesses that have gone out of their way to make a change in society. Have a look at their social reform initiatives and learn from them.

CrushXO

This is an excellent example of how a business works to maintain profitability and have a positive impact on society through philanthropy. Crushxo is a beauty startup that designs vegan-friendly makeup products infused with various gemstones, such as Sapphire, Rose Quartz, Amethyst, Jade, and Tourmaline for women.

What sets it apart from most other companies exploiting the same niche is that CrushXO donates 5% of its total sales to various charitable causes dedicated to increasing education and awareness on breast cancer, female education, women empowerment, and spreading awareness about female reproductive health.

Over the years, many fashion models and digital influencers have come on-board to support their mission and spread it across the globe so that more women can achieve their true potential and live a healthy life. Going forward, the company seeks to take many new initiatives that could shape up the world into a better place for everyone, especially women.

Also read: 10 social impact startups in Southeast Asia that caught our attention in 2018

I-Drop

The second name on this list is I-Drop, a for-profit organization that helps people drink clean water. Instead of selling plastic water containers and bottles, it installs state-of-the-art water purification and dispensing machines at local grocery shops. People can visit these shops, refill their multi-use water containers with purified drinking water and make the payment. The payment then splits between the store owner and I-Drop.

Most people in African countries are deprived of clean water. An initiative like I-Drop is their best chance to have purified water at a reasonable price. There is no denying that I-Drop is doing business, but the model is purpose-driven and providing hundreds of thousands of people access to safe drinking water.

Many aspiring entrepreneurs can learn from this business model. For instance, Soarer Industries from Malaysia has already set up a similar business model in Southeast Asia. The company’s primary objective is to provide clean water to people who cannot access it. In the coming years, several other startups are expected to come forward and implement unique ideas to permanently fix this problem and build a profitable business along the way.

Bookshare

Millions of people across the world don’t get an opportunity to read their favorite books due to health issues like blindness, dyslexia, cerebral palsy, etc. Bookshare has come up with a unique solution to fix this problem. It provides customized reading experience using ebooks, audiobooks, highlighted texts, and braille to those who want to read but aren’t able to do so because of their physical and health condition.

There are more than 6.7 lakh titles in their online library of bestsellers, textbooks, career resources, children’s books, and other reading material. Many schools and students get free access to their online library of books, while adults can subscribe for the service for less than $1 per week.

It’s a fantastic way to nurture a reading habit among people and make sure that nothing can stop them from achieving their true potential.

Chapter W

Chapter W is a non-profit organization that operates in Indonesia and Singapore. The organization aims to increase access to non-toxic sources of lighting. Most rural women in Indonesia are forced to use kerosene lamps to provide lighting in their homes due to lack of electrical power in the country. The use of kerosene lamps has been linked to one death every 20 seconds in the country.

Chapter W uses the latest technology to build solar lamps that can replace kerosene lamps and ensure that no one dies due to indoor air pollution. The best part about the initiative is that they train rural women to design solar lamps, solving two problems simultaneously — poverty and indoor air pollution.

Also read: Can social impact be growth hacked?

Currently, the organization has created 186 women entrepreneurs, cut down 159,548 tons of CO2, helped over 28364 individuals, and saved about $226,912 in energy costs. The numbers are incredible and projected to increase in the coming years.

There are many other startups which have made social development an integral part of their business models. We will keep sharing their stories with you in upcoming posts. Meanwhile, don’t forget to tell us in the comments section what you think about such social entrepreneurship initiatives and their relevance in today’s business world.

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Investors are IVP, sXiomatic Gaming, Battery Ventures, Causeway Media Partners, CRV, and Samsung Ventures

Niantic raises US$245M investment [The Star]

Niantic, the developer behind Pokémon Go, finished its Series C financing with US$245 million on Jan 16, according to a press release.

The latest round of funding brings Niantic’s valuation to nearly US$4 billion.

The Series C funding was led by IVP, and additional investments came from aXiomatic Gaming, Battery Ventures, Causeway Media Partners, CRV, and Samsung Ventures.

The funding round comes just under two weeks after Niantic closed a US$190 million equity sale.

With latest e-commerce tax, Indonesia wants to cash in on its unicorns [DealStreetAsia]

Indonesia’s booming e-commerce industry is churning out unicorns such as Tokopedia and Bukalapak.com. It’s also creating a headache for the government and the rupiah. Authorities are trying to capitalize on this fast-growing cash cow by taxing e-commerce transactions.

Starting April, online retailers will need to collect, deposit and report income and value-added taxes. Small and medium-size businesses must pay income tax of 0.5 per cent of revenue, while large enterprises will be subject to a 25 percent levy on profits.

The government of Joko Widodo may feel it’s entitled to reap some benefit from an internet economy that CLSA Ltd. estimates will surpass India in market size as soon as 2020. As retail business shifts online from bricks-and-mortar outlets, the government may also get to improve its tax collection.

Roughly 65 per cent of all offline retail sales are conducted by unregistered businesses that don’t file or pay taxes, according to CLSA. Indonesia has one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios in the region.

Indian edtech firm Byju’s acquires US-based Osmo for $120M [press release]

Indian K12 edtech company Byju’s has acquired US-based Osmo, a playful learning system for creating healthy screen time experiences, for US$120 million.

This is Byju’s first ever purchase of a US company. This will see Osmo continue to scale as a standalone brand even as Byju’s taps the company’s physical-to-digital technology and content to expand and enhance its current offering.

With the integration of Osmo, Byju’s will also look to offer a unique, customised, engaging and fun learning solution for younger kids. This new acquisition will bolster team Byju’s international plans to innovate, explore and set new benchmarks for tech-enabled personalised learning solutions.

Osmo CEO and Co-founder Pramod Sharma will continue to remain at Osmo’s helm.

Instamojo raises funding from Japan’s Gunosy, Kalaari, others [The Mint]

Online payments company Instamojo Technologies has raised ₹50 crore (US$7M) in a Series B funding round from Japan’s Gunosy Capital and other investors. Existing investors including Japanese payments firm AnyPay, Kalaari Capital, Beenext Pte Ltd, and Rashmi Kwatra — founder of Singapore-based Sixteenth Street Capital –also participated in the round.

This is Gunosy’s first investment in India.

“We believe that digital and cashless economy has grown rapidly in India, and its e-commerce market is also expanding. From that background, Instamojo has been doing great business in the market and is expected to continue expanding,” said Yuki Maniwa, Director of Gunosy Capital.

CometChat selected for Techstars Boulder accelerator programme [press release]

Mumbai-based CometChat, a communication-platform-as-a-service startup, has been selected for the Techstars Boulder accelerator programme. CometChat claims it is the first Indian startup to be selected for the three-month long programme.

As part of the program, Techstars will seed fund CometChat US$120,000 and incubate the company in its US location. Under the programme, CometChat will have access to Techstars resources such as mentors, financial, legal and infra resources for life. This would include access to Techstars network of more than 10,000 entrepreneurs, 2,700 investors and 1,200 alumni companies.

At the end of the programme, selected companies will be showcasing their progress and refined product to investors as part of demo day, which is likely to result in further growth stage funding and visibility.

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