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Christoph Fahle
September 16, 2013

Startup of the week: deMIFI

Jeremy, Moji and Ali just moved to betahaus. The international or “multikulti” team, as Germans would put it is working on their startup “deMIFI”. They have travelled a long way just to help us out of a misery. We present to you: The saviors of German WIFI. Let’s thank them in advance.

Hi Jeremy, what’s your product deMIFI all about?

We provide portable WIFI hotspots that you can just carry around in your pocket. Everyone who comes to Germany to visit knows the WIFI problem over here. It is always such a mess trying to find the right SIM card or even cafés with WIFI connection. Due to unrealistic pricing, using data roaming is no option; you end up paying more on that than on the whole stay. Seeing that there is this need we decided to look for a solution. That’s what our portable internet devices are: they’re actually smaller than your mobile phone and they always provide you with an internet connection.

 

How can people get them?

Right now we provide them on the web but that isn’t the ideal way for people to get them. The whole beauty of it for travellers would be getting them in vending machines at the airport / train station or elsewhere and you only need to put in your EC card and decide about the capacity you need for how many days. That is exactly what we are bringing to life at the moment. At the end of your stay you can just give the devices back. It’s as simple as that.

Does something like this already exist?

Yes, there are a few providers that offer a product like this but not in the practical way that we are aiming at. For example, some offer a device like this for more than 250 Euros and you have to pay a monthly fee to keep it going and a daily fee when you want to use it. That’ is not what you call practical, right? Ours are rented for 2,99€ per 100MB and 3,99€ for 200MB and for 500MB it’s 6,99€ (a day). In addition, nobody is renting them out at those places as we want to.

Why did you start it in Germany as you are all not from here, right?

Yes, that’s right. I am from the US and the two co-founders are both from Iran. Germany is one of the hardest markets for any new telecom startup to enter so we thought that this is a good place to start because if we can make it in Germany we can make it anywhere. Also, every traveller coming to Germany has the same internet issues and there is no practical and cheap solution to it. (So far)

Where are you in the process right now?

 We just opened our online store for customers a week and a half ago. We weren’t able to do any advertising yet due to our move to betahaus but we already have quite a few orders. People were probably googling the problem and therefore found our website; this shows us that we are in the right timing with this. So our next steps will be getting the vending machines rolling to make it easier for everyone to have access to these awesome devices.

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