Infobip
Infobip was founded in 2006 in the small Croatian town of Vodnjan from an insight by Silvio Kutić: global companies wanting to send SMS to their customers (OTPs, notifications, confirmations) had to manage dozens of contracts with local operators in each country. No single reliable global provider existed.
Initial customer discovery was informal but systematic: the team directly contacted IT and telecoms managers at European companies operating across multiple countries. They did not ask "would you use an SMS aggregator?" — they asked "describe how your current process works for sending SMS to customers across 10 countries".
The pattern that emerged was consistent: every company had a patchwork of local suppliers, with variable quality, separate invoices and no unified dashboard. The operational cost of managing that complexity was often higher than the cost of the SMS themselves.
This defined the Infobip product: not an SMS sender, but a global enterprise communications orchestrator. Customer discovery also revealed that decision-makers were CTOs or VP of Engineering — not marketing teams — because the problem was infrastructural, not promotional.
Infobip built direct connections with mobile operators in 190+ countries. An asset impossible for competitors to build quickly after seeing the market.
Enterprise customer discovery must identify who truly suffers from the problem — not who buys the product. They are often different people, with different motivations.