How Kabar Kamu kept quality high when opening three booths in Jogja

The first eight months: building the foundation

The first Ah! Box booth went live in May 2025. Rather than rushing to expand, they spent their first eight months maintaining a steady volume of 500 to 850 sessions a month.

They used that time to dial in their frame designs and user flow, instead of chasing new locations. Along the way, they experimented constantly, eventually creating a total of 185 frames and 47 filters for their guests.

Three new locations in four weeks

Come January 2026, they moved fast. Ah! Box opened Kabar Kamu at Zero Kilometre, Kotabaru, and then Tugu—all wrapped up in four weeks. Tugu quickly became their busiest spot, logging an average of about 85 sessions a day over 202 days of operation.

But running a business means facing the reality on the ground. By June 2026, they closed down the Kotabaru location simply because it didn't draw the same crowd as the other two. In daily operations, closing or relocating a booth is just part of the job.

Adding machines means adding operational work

Opening multiple locations means taking on more operational work. You don't just drop a machine and walk away. Fortunately, you can manage everything from a single dashboard. You can push the same set of frames to all locations and route everything through one QRIS payment gateway with daily disbursement.

The field data shows that 93.5 percent of sessions were paid via QRIS. The busiest hour usually hits at 21:00 WIB, with the 19:00 to 23:00 window making up about 40 percent of total volume. As always, weekends are much busier than weekdays.

Volume goes up, quality stays consistent

The hardest part of scaling your volume by eight is keeping your guests happy. Kabar Kamu managed exactly that, holding an average rating of 4.82 out of 5 based on 2,080 guest reviews. That number stayed stable, with 92.5 percent of guests leaving five stars, even on their busiest day when they hit 339 sessions across the fleet during the Lebaran week in March 2026.

On the operational side, guests ordered a total of 44,506 prints. That breaks down to about 1.32 prints per session. Interestingly, 24 percent of guests chose to buy two or more prints to take home.

Operating without asking for personal data

One thing venue managers often ask before letting a booth in is how visitor data is handled. To address this, Kabar Kamu booths do not collect any personal guest data whatsoever. There are no prompts asking for email addresses or phone numbers across more than 52,000 completed sessions.