Splinks

Alex Fischgenow started as a network architect and project manager across Eastern Europe and South Africa. In 2014, he was invited to work as a network architect in South Africa, where he discovered a booming market of emerging internet service providers trying to compete with giants like AT&T and Vodacom. When his contract ended in 2016, he and his co-founder saw the gap: these small providers had no unified software to manage their operations. They decided to build it.

Splinks launched in 2016 as a bootstrapped venture with four co-founders—including the main developer who had 48% equity, Alex with 20%, another partner with 24%, and a silent financial partner with 8%. The team deliberately reinvested profits rather than taking large dividends. By 2020, they hit $1M in revenue. They doubled to $2M in 2021, then reached $3M by the time of this interview, showing consistent year-over-year growth of around 70%.

Alex built Splinks specifically for small and medium-sized internet providers in emerging markets. The product consolidated everything into one place: billing and payment collections, ticketing, job scheduling, and network management. Customers paid an average of $350 per month, or roughly $4,200 annually. By the time of this interview, Splinks served 700 paying customers across 50 countries. The company added about 15 new customers per month with churn so low that losing two customers was considered normal—and even those were usually failed onboardings.

Alex invested heavily in brand-building and a lean but effective go-to-market strategy. He employed just two full-time marketing professionals and two quota-carrying sales reps, each targeting $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Sales reps earned a base salary of around $3,000 per month (varying by geography) plus 3-5% commission on annual revenue closed. Paid advertising was minimal—roughly $4,000 per month—because the niche was small and direct outreach proved more efficient. The team used Jira for project management and dogfooded their own product internally.

With 50 employees (35 engineers) and a strong unit economics model, Splinks was considering expansion. They'd launched new sub-products and were actively entering markets they hadn't previously served, including rural parts of the United States where internet service providers faced similar challenges to their emerging-market customers. Alex was hesitant about raising capital until new products and markets proved themselves, preferring to "get the numbers first" over the next two to three months. If growth continued, they'd consider fundraising, but bootstrapping remained the priority.