6 Companies That Made It to the Top Thanks to a Super App

Rappi launched in 2015 as an express delivery service. Its founders had two goals: to deliver goods as fast as possible and to deliver as many of them as possible. Thus, the app became a “digital pantry” that expanded from beverages to meals, groceries, tech goods, and medicine. Finally, the team reached the point when they could deliver anything and started to look at other verticals.

After having reached the initial goal, Rappi’s team looked at the first non-delivery vertical—finance. In 2018 and 2019, the company introduced Rappi Pay, a digital wallet for in-app money transfers and QR-code payments.

Soon after that, Rappi revealed its ambition to become a super app and launched Rappi Entertainment, with music streaming, live events, and games. The idea was to make people stay in the app for as long as possible.

Now, Rappi’s key services in the super app are:

• Payments and banking.
• Entertainment.
• Delivery of anything, including groceries, food, and medicine.

Rappi’s idea of using entertainment to increase app stickiness seems to be working. According to Rappi’s president in Brazil, the company sells three times more during a live show than restaurants do on regular days.

The company had another reason to reconsider its strategy—Gojek’s main competitor in Southeast Asia was expanding into Indonesia. Thus, Gojek had to give people even more reasons to use their application. That’s why the founders aimed at making it “a platform that fixes things.”

When the new Gojek super app was introduced in 2015, it combined motorbike ridesharing, delivery, and shopping. Later, Gojek added food delivery, on-call beauty services, entertainment booking, and e-payments.

Today, Gojek operates in 6 verticals, but the foundational sectors that helped the company thrive were:

• Transport and logistics—GoRide and GoSend.
• Food delivery and shopping—GoFood and GoMart.
• Payments—GoPay.

Analysts suggest that early diversification ensured Gojek’s long-time growth. In 2016, the company’s value reached $1B and grew to $10B just 3 years later, in 2019, making Gojek Indonesia’s first unicorn and decacorn.

Grab started in Malaysia in 2012. In the beginning, the owners didn’t have any intention to build a super app. Their first application served only one purpose—to connect the drivers with the riders. Soon after that, Grab launched other services like car-sharing and bike-sharing. One vertical was fleshed out—but the super app era was yet to come.

Amid tough competition, Grab realized that they had to offer more than ride-hailing to keep their customers. With GrabExpress—the first non-mobility service in the company’s portfolio—Grab entered the financial industry and introduced a wallet for in-app payments.

In June 2018, Grab made the final step towards becoming an everyday super app for customers. The company announced GrabPlatform—a suite of APIs for partners to build their services on. This allowed Grab to open up its platform to other businesses and expand its range of services even further.

One of the first services developed in partnership was GrabFresh, an on-demand grocery delivery service. It was a GrabPlatform partner integration with HappyFresh, Southeast Asia’s leading grocery delivery provider.

At the time, the super app combined the following services:

• Mobility—GrabTaxi, GrabCar, GrabBike, and GrabShare.
• Deliveries—GrabExpress and GrabFood.
• Finance—GrabPay.

The strategic decision paid off. In December 2020, the company reported that thanks to the super app strategy, the percentage of users buying more than one service grew 4.5 times—from 12% to 54%. That, in turn, helped increase the one-year customer retention rate from 47% to 79%.

High-frequency and low-margin businesses, like food delivery, were supposed to boost high-margin business—air travel. The decision came with perfect timing, as in 2020 airlines couldn’t rely on existing customers, let alone acquire new ones.

In terms of high-frequency services, AirAsia saw the biggest potential in delivery and ride-hailing for two reasons. First, the company could cross-sell services with higher value to the customers ordering food and taxi. Second, the branded vehicles would increase the company’s visibility on the streets.

On top of that, AirAsia Group changed its name to Capital A. The goal was to demonstrate the diversity in the group’s portfolio and its ambition to become a digital ecosystem rather than a regular low-cost carrier.

Following the release of its super app, the company reported a steady increase in the number of new customers acquired. In 2021, more than half of the super app’s delivery users were new to the group. Thanks to acquiring these new customers, Capital A achieved a 236% increase in the average number of monthly active users in a year.

The company recognized this problem and came up with a plan. In 2020, driven by the desire to simplify people’s lives, Careem announced a new super app combining ride-hailing and delivery. Like many businesses in 2020, the company suffered from huge losses, but the CEO was optimistic about the super app’s future. It was designed to help Careem emerge stronger after the crisis.

The first version of the Careem super app, set up in 2020, united three services: food delivery, mobile wallet, and ride-hailing.

There were many effects after the super app’s release, all contributing to recovery across verticals. According to Careem’s 2020 trends report, after the super app was released, the company has seen a 9x increase in the number of customers using multiple services.

Mothers actively shared their parenting experiences on the forum, which was convenient for Orami. The company could analyze the topics to understand how to both help users and grow the customer base. Soon they found that customers focused on four areas: information on parenting, community support, shopping, and entertainment. This would become the foundation for the new super app in 2020.

Something unique to Orami’s case is that since December 2020, Orami’s website has been an exact duplicate of the app. It means that users can try all the tools on the web before downloading the app. For example, a name finder suggests baby names based on a particular topic.

The launch of the super app made Orami the only parenting platform in Indonesia with everything that parents need in one place:

• Commerce: mother and baby products.
• Content: educational articles, guides, and tools.
• Community: chats for different groups of parents.

Orami provides content and community free of charge, but they play an important role in retaining customers and driving sales. The content provides parents with educational articles and guides that help them learn more about their babies. The community allows parents to connect and share advice.

Together, content and community keep customers in the app for longer and help them in their purchasing decisions, which in the end translates into more revenue for Orami.

Since Orami launched the platform, the number of visitors has increased from 5.6 to 16.1 million in two years. Such a success helped the company partner with a leading e-commerce enabler Sirclo and become the most popular e-commerce site for fashion in Indonesia.