Jetpac Part 1: Creating a $2M business in 1 year

Back in 2016, Circles was Singapore’s first digital MVNO disrupting the traditional telco industry that had long been dominated by its incumbents. However, over the next 5 years, hordes of new entrants would quickly erode our initial unique value proposition of high-data, no-contract affordable data plans. Our growth was plateauing fast, and we needed to find new streams of revenue.

Having worked on the Singapore market for the past 2 years at that point in time, I joined the project having sufficient context on the market, customer and systems to take on this challenge.

Discovery

Starting from a blank sheet, we generated and filtering product categories that had large revenue potential, relatively quick time to launch and an overall fit with the brand. We also looked at market trends, hypothesized specific customer pain points and identified why Circles would be in the best position to address those pain points. Eventually, we shortlisted three big ideas to conduct deeper primary research on, one of which was a travel product.

In the post-pandemic world, a clear market gap had emerged. Many activities had shifted online during the lock-downs and data usage surged significantly, almost 2.5x more per day compared to pre-pandemic levels. This made the traditional roaming options provided by telcos an increasingly expensive option for a growing population of travelers as the borders reopened. At the same time, the eSIM market was growing steadily. In 2021, an estimated 225M eSIM enabled smartphones were shipped and GSMA projects that by 2025, 35% of all network connections will be made by eSIM tech. With this growing adoption, the switching cost of changing mobile plan providers becomes significantly lowered. 

For the user, this meant that they were becoming more incentivized to look to roaming alternatives and it looked evitable that the industry was moving towards the disruption of roaming.

Our value proposition: 

1) Affordability: meet your high data needs without breaking the bank, 

2) Convenience: hassle-free set-ups and no juggling (and losing) your SIM card, 

3) Peace of mind: no bill shocks, no hidden charges, no breach of trust

Traditional roaming options provided by telcos an increasingly expensive option for a growing population of travelers as the borders reopened

Validation

We conducted customer interviews using the Jobs-to-be-done framework, and consolidated insights on how important each customer need is, and how well it is being met in the market.

We also ran 7 rounds of A/B tests and fake-door-tests, each with 2 to 3 variations of visuals and messaging to validate our assumptions about the user pain points and value proposition. Ultimately, users cared the most about Convenience and Peace of Mind, where it meant they could enjoy hassle-free and worry-free travel. 

Prioritization

Learning from our research and competitor benchmarking we consolidated it using the Kano model, which helped us identify if a feature was something the user was expecting, excited by or indifferent towards. And this significantly removed ambiguity around the scope of the MVP.

Design

Building out the customer journey was tricky. At that time, eSIM was relatively new technology, and the set-up process was different depending on the phone model. We had to strike the right balance of giving just enough instructions to first-time eSIM users to guide them through the onboarding process, while avoiding too prescriptive that it became unnecessarily long for people who were already familiar with eSIM.

Development

There’s usually not much of a story to tell at this phase; typically as the PM, you’d be working closely with the engineers, defining edge cases, smashing bugs, etc, etc. 

However, this was my most intense (read: most stressed out) phase of the project. For context, we had decided to build this product outside of the existing tech stack, primarily to minimize disruptions to the live environment, as we planned to move fast to catch the first post-pandemic travel season at the end of 2022. And move fast we did - the engineers were deploying changes every hour, and bugs were logged and checked off on a whiteboard. 

At these breakneck speeds, the last thing anyone wanted was… more things to build. But, I had failed to consider capabilities to enable business operations as part of the MVP, and we couldn’t leverage existing systems because the product was built completely outside of the tech ecosystem. This became a blocker for launch, and we had to quickly define, agree upon with internal stakeholders and develop these capabilities.

Launch

Finally…! After an arduous and hectic three months, it was launch day, and the results spoke of the hard work behind the launch.