A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:12:35 · Pablo Srugo, Hermann Frank
[00:12:35] S0: Right. They're the ones paying, like you're piggybacking off of their plan. [00:12:38] S1: Exactly. So we got gigabits upon gigabits of like free backhaul capacity out of it. And then about a year in, we're like, hey, this is clearly working, like, what are we gonna do with it? Like, we had plans to scale this like 10 other markets, and we like tried to figure out how to monetize the best. And the idea was we're only in two neighborhoods, we don't have a desire to like cover the entire city, that that's where like tourists are mostly here. And what we wanted to achieve is that you could buy an eSIM, and when you're within reach of our network, you would roam on our on our network, and we would not pay anything for the traffic. But when you're not, you could roam on a national LTE network. And we were very much expecting to find an API to allow us to provision a device on the network, and then tie in ourselves. So basically, like a Stripe like experience in telecoms, if you will. And it didn't exist. And we were very surprised as to why that doesn't exist. So like that kind of led us down a rabbit hole, and we understood that the industry just like was not able to produce this like developer experience, like this horizontal developer experience that we've kind of came to be used in in pretty much every other industry, like hosting payments. Right? Like, you you just have an API for pretty much everything. And once we understood why, and like, what would happen if we would solve it, we understood, okay, this is the biggest problem we've ever seen.
00:14:11 · Pablo Srugo, Hermann Frank
[00:14:11] S0: But to be clear then, in order for you to get what you wanted, you needed to go to the telcos and work out an agreement, MSA partnership, whatever that looks like, one on one. [00:14:20] S1: Exactly. We would have to do a lot of hard work to produce that outcome, but we understood if we can produce that outcome, the same thing that happened with AWS and hosting and Stripe and payments will happen in telecom. Basically, everything that's net new is gonna be built on top of that infrastructure. And then you kind of capture capture all of net new demand in the... In in one of the world's largest industries, and pretty much all of net new innovation in one of the world's largest industries. And like that prospect for us is like, hey, like, you can build a globally dominant horizontal player, like a global network, if you start at at the API layer, and you eat your way down from there. So that's how the idea for Geeks came about. [00:15:11] S0: So the stripe for telco was kind of the original idea? [00:15:15] S1: Well, the stripe for telco was what we discovered while building hardware and building building WiFi networks. [00:15:23] S0: Yeah. Sorry. I mean, that point. Right? So not the original idea, but like the the first version of what Giggs is today. [00:15:28] S1: That that was the first version of Giggs, and that was like what we then started out to do. And we completely put aside the WiFi business and like the cellular network business, and focused exclusively on on building building the API.
00:15:28 · Hermann Frank, Pablo Srugo
[00:15:28] S1: That that was the first version of Giggs, and that was like what we then started out to do. And we completely put aside the WiFi business and like the cellular network business, and focused exclusively on on building building the API. [00:15:42] S0: This is what I always find especially challenging when an idea depends on you bringing large enterprises into play. As a tiny, you know, little startup with no credibility, no name, you know, relatively no funding. What you need to do is clear. The opportunity is relatively clear. What's the first step? Like, how are you gonna go and knock on, you know, I don't know who you need to to get AT and T, whatever the the big, you know, telcos that you need to get to play with you? How do you even approach them, or is there a step before that step?
00:15:42 · Pablo Srugo, Hermann Frank
[00:15:42] S0: This is what I always find especially challenging when an idea depends on you bringing large enterprises into play. As a tiny, you know, little startup with no credibility, no name, you know, relatively no funding. What you need to do is clear. The opportunity is relatively clear. What's the first step? Like, how are you gonna go and knock on, you know, I don't know who you need to to get AT and T, whatever the the big, you know, telcos that you need to get to play with you? How do you even approach them, or is there a step before that step? [00:16:10] S1: So when we started telling people that that's what we wanna do, like, and we started talking to first investors, we got noes left and right, because they didn't talk to their buddy at like AT and T, or to telecom, and Vodafone, they said, yeah. No carrier will ever let them do this, right? Like this is this is not possible, people have tried, and yada yada. So we kind of had to chew our way through it. It's like the way we actually got our first deal done was not even with a carrier, because they wouldn't talk to us. So that part was actually true initially. We found an aggregator that was behind on their commitments with the network. And we integrated there, and we built the first version of a product on that aggregator with terrible economics, frankly. It didn't make any money on the... [00:16:55] S0: That'd probably not sure what what that means. Who is... Like, what what's the aggregator?
00:16:55 · Pablo Srugo, Hermann Frank
[00:16:55] S0: That'd probably not sure what what that means. Who is... Like, what what's the aggregator? [00:16:59] S1: Aggregators are these actors in the marketplace that they get a deal with a carrier, and then they find smaller customers to basically split this pool because their customers are too small to get served by the carriers themselves. Or in our case, too small and slightly undesirable. [00:17:20] S0: So they had pre negotiated, let's say, MSAs with with several of these telcos already, and you kinda just absorbed that? [00:17:26] S1: Exactly. We were just able to plug into the same integration that they had. And for the first use case we had, it worked fine. Like, it would never work for, like, what we're doing today, but, like, it worked fine for that kids smartwatch use case. And then we started onboarding customers there, and we we went to the network and said like, hey, we build a product like on your network, and like here's what it does, and here's like where we are. And they saw the growth. Like they were wondering where is the growth coming from. It's aggregated, like it was like relatively flat. So that got us into the door to get our very first deal with the carrier. And lucky for us, it was AT and T, one of the largest carriers in the world.
00:17:26 · Hermann Frank, Pablo Srugo
[00:17:26] S1: Exactly. We were just able to plug into the same integration that they had. And for the first use case we had, it worked fine. Like, it would never work for, like, what we're doing today, but, like, it worked fine for that kids smartwatch use case. And then we started onboarding customers there, and we we went to the network and said like, hey, we build a product like on your network, and like here's what it does, and here's like where we are. And they saw the growth. Like they were wondering where is the growth coming from. It's aggregated, like it was like relatively flat. So that got us into the door to get our very first deal with the carrier. And lucky for us, it was AT and T, one of the largest carriers in the world. [00:18:08] S0: Yeah. The big one. Before moving on, actually, if you don't mind, let's let's just dive a little bit deeper on that because you find the aggregator... First of all, just in terms of timelines, started 2018 with the first idea. When does this kind of Stripe for Telco's idea come, and and how long are you in this exploratory phase until you discover this aggregator?