Written by Jonas Mercier
06/15/2018
We have almost no turnover
We have almost no turnover.
The internet telephony provider Mixvoip celebrates its 10th anniversary this Friday. The SME from Luxembourg and its 45 employees managed to has succeeded in making a name for itself in the telecom market and today they open up internationally. Their founder looks back on the beginnings of the adventure.
Mister Didelot, could you tell us more about the beginnings of Mixvoip?
The initial idea wasn’t to work with VoIP, but to create an online sales platform for SMEs which would be named Swooke. In fact, it was a bit like the Letzshop.lu initiative just launched by the Ministry of Economy.
But my business partner and I, we wanted to quickly launch a small product that would bring us a stable income. Therefore, internet telephony became our core activity.
I was working for two but I paid myself only half a salary.
When I founded the company with Pascal Knebler, we managed to gather a capital of 80.000 euros. During the first two years, I was working for two but I paid myself only half a salary. We were therefore somewhat profitable.
But we experienced a strong growth during the years 2014 and 2015, where we participated in a research project with the University of Luxembourg which was aimed at the development of our products. We were able to get funding, which allowed us to hire sales people.
You started competing with the telecom giants in their market. That’s bold for an SME…
The telecommunications market is huge since every company is a potential client. We are in a time where the traditional telephone network is migrating to the Internet. Since 2015 and until 2025, everyone needs to switch to the IP technology.
Companies will need to invest in order to change their current infrastructure and for this they have to search for and compare the different providers in the market. From the beginning we focused on a B2B audience. Every company has different needs. Investing in mass marketing like it’s the case for the private market, with identical solutions everyone, is not necessary for us.
In the beginning, the big telecom players simply ignored us.
In the beginning, we aimed at the small SMEs and the big telecom players simply ignored us. This was our chance.
Most of our employees started their career with us. As beginners, they wouldn’t even have gotten a job interview with our competitors. We trained them internally and I am very prouf of what we have accomplished.
Moreover, we have almost no turnover. We have become one of the main players in the market. We have 1.700 customers and we get an average of two new customers per day.
At the beginning of the year, you opened two offices, one in Belgium and the other in Germany. Why did you choose to tackle foreign markets?
Our ambitions to expand to other countries existed from the start – the internet doesn’t know any borders. When we moved to our new office in Steinsel in 2016, we found a new shareholder who invested half a million euros in Mixvoip. This allowed us to to dare to take the risk of attacking the Belgian and German markets.
But the risk wasn’t actually too big once we had the capital because the only thing we could loose was a bit of money. Did we make a good choice? Should we have stayed focused on the local market? The future will give us the answers to these questions. In any case, we have already gained customers. We are not yet profitable, but we are growing. We had expected to break through more quickly in Belgium, but for the time being, we are developing most rapidly in Germany.
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