Empowering the Indonesian F&B Industry with Next-Generation Digital Technologies
Published on November 26, 2021
In Episode 3 of Indonesia Digital Deconstructed by AC Ventures, we continue to explore the players digitizing Indonesia’s 63 million MSMEs which form the backbone of the country’s economy. This episode features Adrian Li, Founder & Managing Partner of AC Ventures, in conversation with Gunawan Woen, Co-founder and CEO of ESB.
ESB is a leading end-to-end restaurant management SaaS used by many of Indonesia’s most well-known F&B establishments, including Ismaya, Boga Group, and Starbucks. This year, ESB provided a complete solution from POS to ERP and introduced incredible features that enabled restaurants to easily launch delivery direct to customers and contactless in-restaurant dining.
In this episode, we cover:
- The origin story of how Gunawan found his way into the F&B industry despite a 10+ year professional career as an accountant?
- How he was able to introduce ESB as a bootstrapped startup into Indonesia’s most prestigious F&B chains where other well funded F&B ventures had failed
- What are the most significant pain points that restaurants face and the ways that customer-focused product-led innovation led him to the solutions ESB provides?
- What his strategies are around customer retention that has helped ESB maintain a hyper loyal user base.
- What disruptive changes in the F&B space is he seeing post-pandemic and how technology can help restaurants evolve.
- What are some of the developments you foresee will come about in the next 3-5 years?
- Where does he see ESB in the future and his advice to entrepreneurs building for the long game?
About Gunawan Woen
Gunawan is the Co-Founder & CEO of ESB, a vertical SaaS specializing in the F&B industry. ESB initiates and bolsters digitalization for restaurant businesses, which allows them to gain increased profit through improved efficiency and boosts in sales.
Gunawan has more than 2 decades of experience as a financial consultant, during which he assisted numerous leading players in the F&B industry to achieve increased profit through improving efficiency and solving operational pain points. Implementing these vast experiences into a SaaS, ESB has been a trusted technology provider for industry leaders such as Boga Group, Ismaya Group, MAP Boga group, Marugame Udon, Sour Sally Group, and many more.
Gunawan aspires to further assist the growth of Indonesia’s F&B industry, with a particular focus on SMEs, where Gunawan seeks to bolster their business scalability and survivability.
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