A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:27:03 · Hermann Frank, Pablo Srugo
They can sell you the phone and the subscription in a bundle. They can add other loyalty mechanisms from their ecosystem. For Cash App, for example, you get Cash App Green for free if you're a subscriber. Like with Revolut in The UK, you can pay with Rev points, you can pay your phone bill with Rev points now. So these make it unique. So structurally, a bank will be much better positioned to serve your telecom needs than a carrier actually can. Because they have other things to offer you, and because for them, this is a compounding portfolio product versus a singular touch point. [00:27:38] S0: That makes a lot of sense. And do you find the offering is any different? Like, for example, I'm thinking in terms of my... You know, the credit card that I have from Wealthsimple has no foreign exchange, you know, fees or whatever. So it becomes a more global credit card, which I think is a pretty common offering for these guys. Are you seeing the same things in plans where it's like you can use it from anywhere in the world, or is that... Or are the the terms of the plans pretty similar to what you would get from AT and T, T Mobile directly?
00:28:02 · Hermann Frank
[00:28:02] S1: So most of our customers offer, like, highly competitive to like high value phone plans. Like for example, the plans we have with Revolut in The UK. It's arguably the best phone plan in The UK. You have unlimited data in The UK on the best network there. You have very generous allowance of roaming data in The EU, which The UK typically doesn't have anymore since they exited. And you have a quite generous allowance of roaming as well with the messaging pass. And that all comes pre bundled in a highly affordable price. And that's something we were able to structure because we control both the roaming setup, we control the local setup, and Revolut is then able to plug in their ecosystem to give it more advantages. Like, there's a VPN included and other other features as well. In The US, Cash App has like one of the most attractive plans in in The US. Like, it's the first it's the very first truly unlimited plan in The US, and it's a plan that also has roaming allowances. And that's something you can every one of our customers can decide to package anywhere they want, depending on what they're trying to do and what they're trying to achieve for the phone plan.
00:29:23 · Pablo Srugo
[00:29:23] S0: Amazing. Well, I hope Wealthsimple brings it to Canada. But let's jump to the kinda second part here, the final part where we go deep and tactical in a couple areas. The first one actually, think is a good segue here, is building and crafting a narrative, a vision that helps you get customers on board. Right? Give big partnerships, especially with enterprise. And it helps you get VCs and investors on board, which for something like this... I mean, there's some companies where it's like, oh, I just bootstrap, you know, whatever at some point. You get big enough and and PE comes in or big VCs come in, and you can just get yourself there. But there's other companies where you're gonna need to raise real capital just to kinda get going. I think this is a bit more of the latter. Know, anyways, you can correct me if I'm wrong. But tell me a little bit about how you went out and crafted the story, crafted the vision, especially as you're you're... As you're fundraising. I'm thinking of the seed round, right, which is in '21, or the series a in '22. Like, especially when things were early and not clearly visible. How did you think about the storytelling aspect of it all?
00:30:18 · Hermann Frank
[00:30:18] S1: Yeah. So we were aware or quite early on that what we wanna build is built on, like, a fifteen plus year trajectory. Like, you don't go out and build it in six months, and then like you just put more money into it to scale sales. So we needed to sequence what we wanna build because it would be otherwise impossible to do. And to... Like, the very first product we built was the API, and then the next step for us was to very heavily go on after distribution. So like once we had the product, we knew, like, it's basically a land grab moment in the industry to onboard the largest consumer and enterprise platforms in the world to just seize distribution into tech for telecom. And that gives us like a very healthy surface. Like we have over a billion people now on the other end of our customers. It doesn't mean we have a billion lines. It doesn't even mean we're actively visible to a billion people. But we have integrations into platforms that have it. That allows us to now go and start selling into these user bases way more aggressively. That in turn buys us more volume on the networks, allows us to build integrate more networks, scale into new countries, and kind of create this flywheel of distribution means more volume, more volume means better pricing, more integrations, and we can we can scale with our customers throughout the globe. So that is a multi year sequence that we needed to create in order to to build a platform that is... That has this type of complexity.
00:31:58 · Pablo Srugo
[00:31:58] S0: Yeah. So I think that's that's the high level, like, in terms of what what you needed to do. Like, imagine I'm a founder. Thinking about raising a seed, raising an a. And what I'm struggling with... The business is a business. It's doing what it's doing. What I'm struggling with is creating a narrative and telling it in a way that VCs wanna come along for the ride. I mean, I've met so many founders, and I can tell you there is a big delta between... Like, you have the founder as the operator, and then you have the founder as the fundraiser or storyteller. And some are great at both, but many many founders are great at operating. They know exactly how to do the business. They know how to close customers. And then when it's like, okay, cool. Go tell a great story. They just fumble. They can't do it. They can't get themselves in the minds of an investor and so on. Obviously, you've been able to raise. You've raised over $90,000,000. And like I said, I think this is a side of type of business where you had to tell... You always had to have a story that was ahead of the business because just... It's a fifteen year journey, as you said. So I'm curious, you know, if you're talking to a founder and you think back to raising your seed or your a, what are some of the kind of the the pieces of advice that you can share? How you went about thinking of how to craft this so that VC's nod along and and wanna invest.
00:33:00 · Hermann Frank, Pablo Srugo
[00:33:00] S1: You need to have a big vision. Like, so a good way to explain is like you need to be able to tell like your three, six, twelve month horizon with like incredible detail, and like you need to understand what needs to happen imminently. And then you need to paint a much larger arc and vision in the back of like what could this be if we do the things right that are just in front of us. That's one thing. Like, you kind of need to have this, like, bifocal type of storytelling. [00:33:30] S0: And what was that? That second one. Like, if you had to tell me in thirty seconds, if everything goes right, here's what we come. What does that what does that look like?