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January 25, 2007
Inside JaJah - Margins, Manpower, And More
In this month's edition of Brand Eins there's a feature on JaJah, the Austrian Internet telephony startup that tapped Sequoia as an early investo. (Brand Eins is the first print publication your a:c euro reporter has initiated a subscription to in many years -- it's Kapitalismus issue last March is what clinched the decision).
Image Source: JaJah Blog
There were a few pieces of info that caught our eye.
-Even with its low rates, it still made a margin on mobile calls. Conference calls and SMS delivered a 60 percent margin. (At least this was the case when they started up. Later comments suggest that case may have changed somewhat.)
- JaJah has 60 employees, half in Israel. Its founders are hoping to file for an IPO at the end of 2007.
- The startup is currently negotiating with a consumer electronics manufacturer to create a JaJah enabled handset for users that don't want to be tied to their PC to initiate calls.
- In 2006 the average turnover per JaJah registered was about €7 per month, an amount the founder expected to decline as the user base expands for its free call services. Volume and a new advertising platform will make up the difference, he told the Brand Eins reporter. The startup has already started to invest in customized ads technology.
- Incumbent operators are not as anti-JaJah as you might expect -- in contrast to pure play VoIP companies, JaJah needs the so-called last mile infrastructure to complete calls.
There's also some insight into how Sequoia operates. It brought in one of the co-founders of a previous success to help the team, the founder of ICQ, one of the earliest Internet chat startups and later acquired by AOL. It also would not sign an NDA. JaJah presented anyway and when the founder wanted to power up for slide presentation, the VCs told them they "don't like powerpoint - beamer off please".
Posted on January 25, 2007 02:10 PM | Posted to VoIP | Permalink
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