Insights from MVNOResearch - 3 things to know this winter

In his last blog, MVNOResearch, our omnipresent telco expert on Reddit and OG Visible employee, shared three things that were top of mind for him – like the launch of Visible’s eSIM Free Trial for Samsung and Google Pixel Devices. It seems like you liked it, so now we’re back.

Today, MVNOResearch will share what he’s thinking about now as we head into 2024. You know what they say: new year, new blog (?).

Reflections on 2023 and entering 2024

Well, technically it’s still January – so I can still reflect on 2023, right? 2023 was huge for Visible - we continued to grow, and we made progress on something that’s near and dear to our hearts at Visible: keeping the product and experience as simple as possible. We started 2023 with big plans for commercial launches, but then we decided that a pivot was necessary to focus on improving the user experience. By the end of 2023, Visible’s channels, buyflow, and activation experiences were considerably simpler and smoother. We know they aren’t perfect – yet! – but tremendous strides were made. Although there will be continuous improvement in the CX, we are now confident in spending our resources on major commercial launches in 2024. I’m not going to tip our hand here, but I can hardly wait for the reaction to our upcoming releases, including several in the first half of the year. Stuff you all have been vocal about.

Visible is not for everyone

I also want to acknowledge Visible’s new marketing campaign that “Visible is not for everyone.” While this may sound provocative, this has been a mantra since Visible’s launch. We believe that when a company tries to be everything for everybody, customers suffer from the lack of specialization. At Visible, we focus on “digital natives” – users who feel comfortable doing business digitally, who value simplicity and transparency, and who are smart enough to do the math on device deals not making up for expensive service plans. In exchange for users doing business digitally with Visible, we share the savings. If you prefer a traditional family plan rather than a single line, going into a store to transfer your pictures to your new phone, or you can’t figure out this eSIM thing, then maybe there are other carriers that would be a better match for you.

Shopping Around

Lastly, I’ve been seeing some posts on Reddit and other places comparing Visible’s $25 rate with other competitors that supposedly offer savings. However, these comparisons continue to gloss over major differences: an introductory $15 rate that jumps to $40 after three months, plans that don’t include taxes and fees and activation fees, plans that include a laughable amount of hotspot data instead of unlimited, or some fly-by-night MVNO data plan being called “unlimited” that slows to something like 512kbps after 10/20GB. But come on. We can see through that. Visible’s plan with unlimited everything including hotspot leads the industry in the price/value tradeoff by a mile, and it’s sustainable because our parent company owns the network instead of paying an owner for every GB our subscribers use.

Stay tuned for great developments, and we’ll talk again soon!