Verst Origin, from Nationwide to International
Tags: Startup, Marketing, Expansion, Verst, Journey

Hello, everyone! I’m Edward, the founder of the software studio Verst, Inc. I want to share you our origin story, from a bored CS undergrad in his dorm room, becoming a nationwide agency, and going into the international path.

Devspace

I didn’t start my first initiative at Verst (🥁 Ba dum tsss), but in a small freelance I started, Devspace. Devspace itself is a software development freelance established in 2020, I built all sort of things, from company profile, to e-commerce, and also a mobile app.

Building The E-commerce.

This is undeniably one of the reason Devspace reached its success, is simply because we built the right E-commerce. One of our client is a known entrepreneur in Indonesia, with almost 1 million followers in his online store. We built them the E-commerce, the platform in which they have sold more than 10.000 items in their first 8 months of operation, with more than 9000 people signing into the web. We set-up the E-commerce with all the features, even more than our client expected, and we got featured as the freelancer who built this E-commerce.

This is how people trust Devspace, and the brand. We build you things that work. We solve all your problems. We put 100% efforts in doing so. After this project, we keep getting new clients, and we’re not putting any ads so far, the growth was purely organic. Mouth to mouth clients keep coming in, and we do the same, we built them things they want.

Expanding our service

Since we got famous because of our skills to build an e-commerce, no one had ever contacted us to build a mobile app, until we had a corporate client, looking to build an internal End to End app. Our client had won multiple awards, such as The Most Excellent Brand in 2017, and also the trusted suppliers of certain consumables in The ASEAN Games 2018 Jakarta. They had a big problems which we solved seamlessly. Imagine if this is your company operation:

Sales go to the store everyday to supply items, check all the items condition, and more They manually Whatsapp the admin, and the admin manually type all their data from Whatsapp to Microsoft Excel. (FYI: The app is still only operated in Jakarta, but we have 4000 submissions per month, and 140 average per day).

That isn’t effective at all, so they wanted us to build an integrated system, from mobile app to analytics web where they can collect the data. We built the whole thing in a month, using Flutter & Firebase, and ReactJS for the web. Imagine the new operation:

Sales go to the store everyday, fill in their app, and submit it. Admin practically do nothing, and wait until all the sales job are done. They clicked 1 button (Download data as Excel) and then they go home.

The best thing about this is that once a certain trust is built, we are trusted for more, and we won’t disappoint their trust.

So, why build Verst?

I’m in the progress of a nationwide domination from my bedroom. Verst is built differently. We want Verst to be the first step for international market. We’ve built apps for many clients, but we haven’t produces our own software yet. I built Verst so I can have the best environment to build my software. However, this does not mean that Verst doesn’t accept clients, we will also build software for clients. We believe that building software for clients will make Verst financially sustainable without the needs of looking for investors, and can make us focus on our goals.

The Challenge

I think one of the biggest challenge I have isn’t gonna be finding clients, but building trust. In nationwide, there are chances you’ve seen our clients somewhere. However, this is our first step for global market, hence the name Verst. This is where personal branding will have an impact, which is why I plan to build more contents in the future.

Contact me

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