The idea did not start in Jakarta. It started in Melbourne, where two students, Wellson Lo and Johny Susanto, met and got to talking about the stock market back home.
What they noticed was lopsided. Professional investors in Indonesia had terminals, analysts and a stream of private information. Ordinary people had rumour and WhatsApp groups. In 2013, only about 21.8 per cent of Indonesians were financially literate by the national measure. The gap between the two sides was the product.
Sigit Kouwagam joined as the third co-founder and became chief executive, with Lo as chief product officer.
They built a social analytics site first, a place where beginners could see news, data and what other investors were saying, all in one feed. It was not a broker, not an app store hit, not anything an investor could easily value. For roughly three years it ran on the founders' own money. The seed cheque from Ideosource only arrived in 2015, and it was announced as the money that let the team finally hire.
Sigit Kouwagam joined as the third co-founder and became chief executive, with Lo as chief product officer. Their pitch was always education. Kouwagam has put it plainly: there is still a huge gap in how Indonesians understand money, and information should be open to everyone, not a few. The community grew in that direction, one stock thread at a time.
The turn was not a launch day. It was a slow accumulation. By 2019 the forum was big enough to attract East Ventures into a Series A, and in the same year Stockbit bought Bibit, a mutual-fund app with a robo-advisor aimed at first-time investors. Suddenly the company had two doors: one for people who wanted to chat about stocks, another for people who wanted to buy a fund for as little as the cost of a lunch.
The pandemic then did what no marketing budget could. By mid-2021, more than 500,000 investors had joined Stockbit's social network, and with Bibit the group served over a million retail investors in more than 500 cities. Stockbit's users had more than doubled in a year, and Bibit's had grown about fivefold. That year, the company raised US$95m.
The cost of success is regulation. A forum can say anything; a broker cannot. The team moved into securities in late 2021 and had to turn a community culture into a licensed, supervised business.
If there is a lesson for a first-time founder, it is the order of things. Stockbit did not buy its audience and then look for something to sell. It spent years being useful for free, while paying for it from its own pockets, and let the money show up after the trust.