Not for everyone — on purpose

In the first post I wrote about telecoms product managers stuck competing on one axis: price. Build the network, light up the coverage, and you risk looking like everyone else offering gigabytes, minutes, and coverage.

So here’s a company that refuses to play that game: Efani.

Look at the spec and it seems unremarkable. An MVNO riding major US networks. Unlimited talk and text, around 40GB of priority data, some international minutes. On paper, expensive too: $99 a month, no discounts, no haggling.

But the spec isn’t the product. What Efani really sells is peace of mind.

Behind it sits an 11-layer authentication protocol, a mandatory 14-day cooling-off period before any number can be ported out, and up to $5 million of insurance if a SIM-swap attack gets through anyway. The threat is real, with the the FBI logging a 5.67x rise in SIM-swap fraud in a single year, and most attempts succeed. For a high-risk executive or a crypto investor, a hijacked phone number can mean a drained account, a stolen identity, and a destroyed business.

Read the customer reviews and their positioning becomes obvious. People talk about “sleeping better at night” and “putting my number back on my business card.” Nobody mentions gigabytes.

Three things worth taking from this:

• Sell the outcome, not the spec. The technology is impressive and obviously people still want their data and voice. But the product is really reassurance and peace of mind.
• A narrow audience shrinks your competitors too. By aiming squarely at high-risk, high-net-worth users, Efani isn’t fighting the roaming-and-GB price war. Almost no one else sells exactly this. It’s a smaller pond, but they own it.
• Price can signal value, not cost. When the alternative is losing everything, $99 is a serious, but not prohibitive price. The premium reinforces the promise.

Efani isn’t for everyone. And that’s the point. A sharp proposition tells the wrong customer to walk away, so the right one approaches you.

The question for the rest of us: what are you really selling? Rarely is it the thing on the tariff sheet.

So over to you — where have you seen a telecoms proposition win by narrowing its focus rather than widening it? Drop your examples below; I’ll pull the best into the series.

Take a look at Efani here.

P.S. For ideas about value propositions and differentiation here: Product Focus – Value Propositions journal. Learn more about Product Focus…