Toku — will it be a market disrupter?

Toku — will it be a market disrupter?: Page 3 of 3

By Zafar Anjum February 14, 2017

Business model

Toku — will it be a market disrupter?: Page 3 of 3

There are a lot of players in the telecom OTT space. Most of the players are valued at the number of customers that they have. Most of them are still running in loss. Avoiding the beaten track, Toku has gone for a Freemium model. “For us, profit has to be a focus from the start,” said Laboulle. “Our app is free to use as long as you are calling IP to IP. However, all the advanced features (like the call forwarding option) will be on a chargeable basis.”

According to Laboulle, the company’s target is to have above one million users by the end of the year. It wants to have global reach but the initial focus is on Singapore and Southeast Asia.

“We cannot control where we will have our traction but we want to be a regional player first,” he said. “Singapore, for example, is a perfect test market for us, as a lot of transient travellers visit the city.”

Laboulle sees great potential for adoption of Toku among global business travellers (who have to carry multiple SIM cards), and he thinks that features like call forwarding will be very useful for cost-conscious and short of staff startups and SMEs.

Future plans for the app include launching an Instant Messenger feature by this summer and adding video capability by the year-end.

Lessons from the military

Laboulle comes from a military background. He was in the Belgian Armed Forces. Did that military background help him in any way as a tech leader, we asked him.

Yes, he said. The military had taught him traits such as “lead by example”, and “accountability”, that he applies in his company too. Another lesson from the military was: Everybody is allowed to make mistakes but you should not repeat them. This wisdom works very well for startups and he used it during the development of Toku, he said.

Challenges ahead

“There are plenty of challenges and we are learning every day,” he said. “To make complicated technology easy — it is a big challenge. The connections tech in the app, for example, is very challenging.”

The market that Toku is competing in is quite challenging too. According an OTT expert in the telecom market, “the voice market is a dying market as it has already been disrupted by OTT giants such as Skype (which also links username with number) and Whatsapp/Wechat where calls are secondary after messaging, on top of that it is free. All we need today is Data.”

Laboulle, however, seems to unfazed by any such challenges for now, especially in the consumer space. His plan is to shift to the B2B space in the future. “We want to start with the consumer market, and once we have maturity, we will shift toward B2B.”

Only time will tell how successful that move will be.

(Zafar Anjum is DNA's Contributing Editor in Singapore)