Carriers wouldn't talk to him, so he started with kids' smartwatches—then landed AT&T, Revolut and Klarna and now wins 90% of deals. | Hermann Frank, Co-Founder & CEO of Gigs

Gigs built Stripe for phone plans and fintechs signed on

Gigs is building a Stripe-like developer layer for telecom, so any company can sell phone plans. It found its fit in kids smartwatches and then in fintechs, where a phone plan suits apps that people already pay before rent. Frank argues that enterprise sales means working several levels of a customer at once.

Takeaways

• Enterprise deals mean winning several organizational layers. Landing a large customer means convincing layers from C-level executives down to developers. A contact who can introduce other people shows the deal is real. Gigs hires ex-Stripe people who know decision makers at 30 to 50 percent of target lists.
• Product-market fit is a gradient, not a switch. Founders think they reached it far earlier than they did. Gigs found it in kids smartwatches, then fintechs, and wins over 90 percent of deals. It is testing fit again with Gixowork, for companies of a few hundred employees or more.
• Fintechs are natural buyers of phone plans. Fintech apps beat traditional banks, and people pay a mobile plan about 12 times a year, before rent. Carriers stopped financing phones decades ago, so banks can bundle devices and subscriptions. Revolut's UK plan is arguably the country's best.
• Telecom was heavily invested but undigitalized. Telecom invested over $3tn in infrastructure in a decade, yet only half the world had high speed wireless. Frank says incumbent vendors overpriced closed systems by about 100 times versus standard hardware, so he built a cellular-grade network from standard hardware.
• Tell a bifocal story when fundraising. Pair detailed near-term horizons of a few months to a year with a larger vision, and show the outcome to make it believable. Frank cites Microsoft's founders and an early SpaceX video. Gigs pitched itself as Stripe for phone plans.
• Founders should keep selling personally. Believe completely in the product, because no one sells as convincingly as the founder, and keep selling as long as it makes sense. Gigs also runs dinner series in several cities, each with ten to fourteen outsiders.

From idea to first AT&T deal

1. Building a Berlin WiFi network, Frank and his cofounder saw that telecom lacked a developer API like Stripe's and decided to build that layer.
2. Carriers would not talk to them, so they built a first product through an aggregator that was behind on its commitments, with poor economics.
3. An adviser introduced a kids smartwatch maker selling on Amazon, which suffered 30 to 40 percent returns from SIM problems.
4. Gigs embedded SIMs at the factory, which fixed the returns and created a subscription revenue stream.