He landed in Portugal not knowing that it would be the last stop on a tour of several Ericsson subsidiaries that have been going on for years. In the country of Portugal, he and his good friend Meinrad “Meini” Spenger decided to leave the corporate world to invest in starting a telecommunications operator. The idea of what would become MásMóvil was to break the oligopoly that was later created by Movistar, Vodafone and Orange. Fifteen years after that, Christian Nyborg recalls, “The problem with telecommunications in Spain in 2006 was that there was no competition, so we entered.” “Now the problem is different: there is so much competition that what the user needs is to be guided,” he says. So, after three years away from the telecommunications company, this Norwegian-born entrepreneur embarked on his second project in this industry: an internet and mobile price comparator.
Shortly before MásMóvil celebrated its first decade, Nyborg had decided it was time to tackle new challenges. The operator was profitable, had a workforce of 350 people, was listed and did not stop growing, and what motivated him stopped facing the ups and downs of the venture.
“MásMóvil was the first Spanish unicorn, and yet we have been on the verge of bankruptcy six times: entrepreneurship is very difficult and in all industries, nothing comes for free,” he says, but it is clear that this profession is far from this profession. yours. “nine years [en la compañía de telecomunicaciones] I thought they were enough: I have an entrepreneurial profile, I like to start a business».
In fact, shortly after leaving the company held by his former partner (and still friend) Spenger, he tried to limit his involvement with the entrepreneurial fabric to investment; After a while, still unsatisfied, he tried to devote himself to enjoying the plantation and touring Asia with his wife. He says nothing satisfies him as much as entrepreneurship.
And so he went back to the blame.
His initial idea was to start a company where he hired Spanish engineers to work in Norway, but the project failed when the price of oil (key to the Scandinavian country’s economy) fell sharply. The second is this telecommunications ratio price comparison tool that is on its way to closing the first year of its life with big growth plans.
three years of life
Ysi – “What if there was something better?” short for the phrase – it has been around for three years, but a few months ago it became a reality within the reach of any user. “Today, operators are chosen based on recommendations from friends, advertisements, a call at the right time… But the question is therefore: What if there is something better?”, says Nyborg.
The company, which according to its founder is both a price comparison specialist and a “personal consultant”, is saving three million euros out of this businessman’s pocket, and some business angel who dared to help him is on a trial run. Having spent two years on the market and recruiting about fifteen people (including several executives from MásMóvil), he is now mainly focused on making the platform known.
“These first twelve months are just the beginning: we need to introduce ourselves to more people, build potential alliances to get traffic in our database,” Nyborg admits. “We’ll be big enough to make another leap in a year, because this project needs a lot of money,” explains the entrepreneur, without hiding that this leap will likely go through venture capital.
Commissions and analytics
Today Ysi is a web page that asks a potential user what he or she is looking for (whether it is 20 gigabytes for a mobile phone or a package that even includes a TV), analyzes the offers of hundreds of operators on the market and returns the most suitable one. . “Some operators are already informing us of what will happen, other offers are sought by our team, and in other cases this is auto-capture, but we also have specialists out there who understand the small print of each offer well, it could be an offer in just three months,” he says.
Their job is in the commission they get for each client that goes to one of these operators, as well as the trend and interest reports they prepare for them. The added value argues Nyborg because general comparators don’t have access to so many offers and no company will ever be favored on the checkout page.
And so they’ve already added almost 100,000 users. And they are already thinking of growing up. «One of my professions as an entrepreneur is transparency, so we founded MásMóvil, maybe you will not win in the short run, but in the long run yes, and users understand that ours works very well and is super transparent.” , confirms the founder of Ysi. Also, “business is scalable: vertical can reach other countries; can be taken horizontally to other sectors».