easyMobile, the UK MVNO, has announced that it’s to shut up shop, albeit with a Terminator-esque “I’ll be back” post script. The venture proves, if nothing else, that this MVNO lark isn’t the licence to print money it might seem to some.
 

The idea behind easyMobile was to strip out a whole bunch of costs from the value chain, by selling sim cards and latter, handsets, direct over the web. Customers were initially expected to get hold of their own handsets (though this subsequently changed), which obviously meant that, among other things, easyMobile didn’t have to subsidise them, which is a significant promotional cost of sale for normal operators. Added to this, little in the way of customer support, retail overhead and of course, the cost of building and running the network itself, and you might be forgiven the image of Stelios chuckling to himself as he imagined amassing a second fortune to add to his easyJet dosh.
 

However, after acquiring only 80,000 customers, TDC, his Danish partner has pulled out of the venture and subscribers’ phones will be cut off on December 13^th. Customers are being offered a variety of alternatives and not being simply dumped, so it’s all being handled responsibly and Stelios has bullishly declared “I don’t Easy give up”. Well, actually, he said “I don’t easily give up”, but I couldn’t resist my deliciously ironic version.
 

More worryingly, he went on to say “I don’t think this is a blow to the brand, the brand has made money out of it” which kind of misses the point about what a brand represents and may explain why the marketing behind this somewhat missed the point too.  It’s like a car crashing after its brakes fail, only for the car company boss to say “So what? We sold it at full retail.”

It’ll be very hard for this brand to come back into the market after one failure and at the very least inconveniencing the only 80,000 people who were convinced to give it a go in the first place.
 

So, a second big success after easyJet continues to elude Stelios, despite some 20 or so other startups. This entrepreneurial thing isn’t as easy (geddit?) as it looks.