By late 2014 Female Daily Network said it drew several million visits a month and expected to pass 100 million pageviews that year. For a beauty site that started five years earlier, those numbers were hard to ignore.
The network grew out of a community of women trading opinions on skincare, make-up and hair products in Indonesia. Reviews written by users, not by editors, became its main asset. Brands wanted access to that audience, and readers wanted honesty.
In November 2014, e27 and DailySocial reported that Female Daily Network raised US$1 million in a Series A round led by Ideosource. The money was meant to widen its reach as the audience scaled.
Online beauty then became a crowded field. Sociolla, a separate company, appeared in 2015 as a beauty e-commerce player and the term beauty tech in Indonesia is now closely tied to it.
What a founder can take from this record is simple. Hanifa built a following first and raised money later, when the traffic was already there. A first round of US$1 million, about five years into the life of the company, is a reminder that community can precede capital.