Help! I couldn’t secure a partnership in Indonesia. Is my business done for?

Irwin See
Dec 18, 2025
2 min read

True story. We had a software company work the Indonesian market with us for 1 year and 3 months….And we couldn’t secure a single deal. It was rather depressive for the client and our team. The software was a program that bridged the interaction between clients and companies… a huge financial savings for companies as they could replace sales staff.

Out of ideas, we suggested to check out the Philippines market. The very first business matching meeting we did, we secured 4 clients for the software company and now the company has recently signed an exclusive deal with one of the largest software companies in Philippines.

This is quite a nice story with a nice ending to tell, but we wouldn’t want to wish that 1 year 3 months even on our competitors.

So here are 2 key takeaways we learned so you don’t have to go through it ;

1. Localisation of Product and Pricing

Price was too high and the product was not translatable to Bahasa Indonesia. Thus potential clients and partners had issues navigating the software. We spent many a meeting trying to convince our client to lower his pricing, which would still have been profitable and consider the volume game instead.

Think high quality pricing vs volume (Apple vs Dell).

2. Market acceptance

In Indonesia where population is huge, people are still looking to be served and do not want to deal with a software that takes their orders.

In that particular market, the customer service staff work 24 hours and staff salaries are very affordable. Rather than rock the boat, these companies would prefer to hire staff than implement a software which would still help them save money.

However once we were in the Philippines, having adjusted the pricing and product, the market acceptance was instantaneous. We were as thankful our client had the financial and emotional stamina to keep going.

The most important lesson from this case study was very simple. In a sentence ?

You just have to keep trying.

About Us

Curt & Co. Pte. Ltd. is a consulting company started amongst a group of business owners who were looking for a consulting company themselves for advice !

Our offices and our focus markets are in Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia. With clients ranging from 1 man operating SMEs to listed companies, we are proud to have helped our clients across different industries gain market entry into the South East Asian region.