When adoption means nobody knows your product exists | Mario Di Dio

Helium is building a decentralized wireless network and the software layer that runs on top of it, aggregating community-deployed Wi-Fi access points into a single network that carriers, MVNOs, and large indoor venues can use to serve their own subscribers.

In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Mario Di Dio, CEO of Helium, to learn how the company grew a network of forty five thousand access points serving one to two million people a day by selling offload capacity to carriers instead of building its own towers.

Topics Discussed: ● Why telco buyers are structurally risk averse and what that does to a startup's sales motion ● How Mario first encountered the Helium model in 2020 while at CableLabs, and what made it click ● The FreedomFi acquisition and how Mario came in to lead the mobile network effort ● Why Helium sold the consumer brand it had built specifically to create demand on its own network ● The reorg, the layoffs, and what a single point of focus did to the organization ● Why running enterprise B2B and consumer under one brand made brand voice nearly impossible ● How the AT&T and Telefonica Movistar partnerships solved the demand side without a consumer product ● The AWS analogy Helium uses to move carriers from CapEx-heavy tower builds to an OPEX connectivity model ● Why invisibility is both the proof of adoption and the monetization problem in telco ● What Mario watches for as the catalysts that accelerate carrier adoption of the offload model

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

Kill the demand-generation channel once partners own demand. Helium built a consumer phone brand to create demand on the network it was deploying. Once carrier partnerships landed, the demand problem belonged to someone else's subscriber base.

A single brand cannot carry two buying motions. Helium was selling to enterprise telco and to consumers at the same time, under one name. Mario described the cost directly: "What kind of brand voice do you have when you're at the same time you're selling to an enterprise B2B as well as to a consumer brand, right? So you have to pick one."

Risk aversion in telco is a pricing signal, not an obstacle to argue with. Mario's read on why telco buyers move slowly: "the penalty for a small error is gigantic and nobody's giving you credit when stuff works."

Reframe the buyer's cost structure, not the product. Helium's pitch to carriers is an economic one. "now we are switching the model a little bit like AWS did for cloud from a model where the carrier owns everything, very CapEx intensive."

Surgical coverage beats blanket coverage as a category argument. Mario points to comments from Starlink's president on an earnings call about hanging small cells off satellite backhaul as validation of Helium's approach. His position: "the old model of blanketing coverage of connectivity, it's dead.

Invisibility is what adoption looks like, and what makes it hard to charge for. "The more successful is the technology that you produce, the less visible it is to the end customer." Helium's own evidence: "the majority of that people don't even know that they are using Helium."

Refocusing is an org decision before it is a strategy decision. On his first three months as CEO: "one of the hardest things that you have to do is to refocus the organization, which means also reorg, which means let some people off, some friends that you work with."

Compress time to thesis with two levers. Mario's answer on what a CEO actually controls when the market timing is uncertain: "One is nudge the industry, the other one is ship. Just ship. Continue to ship product and continue to keep everybody focused on meeting those timelines."

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