This September, MVNO industry experts will converge on the city of Warsaw, Poland for the MVNOs Industry Summit conference. A number of global MVNOs are likely to attend, but one name in particular has already stood out: Sarah Neill, CEO of the fast-growing DOODAD data SIM network. Sarah will be speaking at the event and agreed to appear in an interview for the MVNOs Industry Summit, a portion of which we’ve posted below.
What is the current state of the market for data-only MVNOs: Where do you see the most opportunities in the next few years?
Data-only is in its infancy, but it is the future. At the moment, a challenge of data-only is that people are tied to their phone number. However, so much communication has already migrated away from traditional voice / sms, that this is really more of a habit that people are weaning off.
In 2012 more messages were sent via one of these non- traditional routes rather than traditional SMS, demonstrating that this turnaround has already begun.
And I think it’s only a few years away that phone numbers will have disappeared altogether. People know who they want to speak to, they shouldn’t need to worry about which country to call, or whether the number is out of date, or even have to remember a string of random numbers.
But the opportunity to lead the market has a lot of upside. Mostly, it becomes a much simpler pricing proposition, you’re no longer deadling with premium vs international vs local calls and text by country – just a simple data value.
But the big challenge that still remains is that people don’t know what a Megabyte is… And this is where we think we are really ahead of the curve in terms of our solution to communicating this.
What are the innovative features of DOODAD that make it different from other roaming services?
Glad you asked. The big gap in the market is for international data that people don’t have to worry about. As I mentioned before, people don’t know how much data they need, or use, and pricing can be notoriously expensive. Basically, we’ve scared people into turning OFF data roaming when they travel.
This is where we are focused. Providing international data people don’t have to worry about. We do this in a couple of ways:
- We are prepaid, and we give people 365 days to use their DOO-DATA (prepaid credit).
- Our pricing is super simple just 4 rates across all our 62 countries.
- Because people don’t know how much data they will use, we let them set a Daily Max based on their budget instead.
What are the greatest challenges for global MVNOs targeting the CEE market?
Most global MVNOs have a small physical footprint. We are fortunate enough to be based in one of the highest tourism destinations in the world. But our customers are everywhere. Getting in front of customers outside of your home base, is always more difficult, there are local idiosyncrasies that we may not get, language barriers, and we just aren’t physically there. But since launch, we had requests come in from all over the world. So we prioritized international shipping, we cover much of Central Eastern Europe already, and we’ll continue to expand on that.
Read the full interview and find out more about the conference here or discover more about Doodad.