How Lightyear Built a B2B Brand in the ‘Unsexy’ Telecom Space

Try pitching a B2B telecom infrastructure company to Silicon Valley investors. As Lightyear CEO Dennis Thankachan revealed in a recent Category Visionaries episode, it’s not exactly an easy sell. His solution? Lean into the very things that make telecom “unsexy” – and turn them into strengths.

The Hidden Trillion-Dollar Opportunity

The scale of B2B telecom is staggering, yet often overlooked. “There is $1 trillion of global b to B telecommunication spend,” Dennis explains. This includes “business Internet connections, business wide area networking connections… dark fiber data centers, phone systems, things of that nature.”

Yet despite this massive market, Dennis still jokes about “trying to convince my parents that it’s a big thing.” This perception challenge – that telecom infrastructure is boring or unsexy – actually helped shape Lightyear’s approach to brand building.

Finding the Pain Point

The opportunity emerged from a stark reality: “Despite this stuff being so important to how enterprises do business, pretty much everything is digital… today, there is no digital means for an enterprise to buy these services and manage these services.”

This gap was being filled by consultants who, as Dennis discovered, were “super scummy and they were working with really large enterprises, making tons of money with great underlying unit economics, consulting enterprises, with just a lot of throwing dart at the wall type approach, limited data.”

Building Trust Through Transparency

Rather than trying to make telecom “sexy,” Lightyear focused on bringing transparency to an opaque industry. They built an inbound strategy around highly specific technical keywords that signaled purchase intent. As Dennis explains, “If someone is looking for key one access line pricing… it’s likely that a large percentage of the traffic around that keyword is a person that is a buyer that I would like to talk to.”

This approach helped them connect with serious buyers who appreciated their direct, no-nonsense approach to solving real problems.

The Vision Gap

The challenge wasn’t just technical – it was about imagination. “In the context of business telecommunications, there is no brand or product that elicits a positive reaction from a buyer with any sort of brand recognition,” Dennis notes. This created an opportunity to build something entirely new.

Their focus became clear: “doubling down on product and capturing more surface area of all the workflows within telecom in particular, without digging too deep into the nuance and not losing focus.”

Maintaining Focus

Despite pressure to expand beyond telecom, Dennis remains committed to their core focus: “The market is so large, there can feel pressure to like, oh, focus on something outside of telecom, do this, that and the other. I’m very much focused on depth over breadth.”

This discipline has paid off. Today, Lightyear has 275+ customers managing “deep into the tens of millions of dollars of telecom spend,” with 30x growth in just two and a half years.

The Power of Constraints

Interestingly, Dennis believes their success comes partly from embracing constraints. They’re “growing faster at bigger numbers with the constraints in place, because we’re operating as if that next dollar is not necessarily guaranteed.”

Lessons for B2B Founders

Lightyear’s approach offers valuable lessons for founders building in “unsexy” industries:

1. Don’t try to make your industry sexy – make it transparent
2. Build trust through deep technical expertise
3. Focus on solving real problems, not perception
4. Use constraints to drive innovation
5. Maintain focus despite pressure to diversify

The story shows that in B2B, sometimes the biggest opportunities lie in the least glamorous spaces. As Dennis puts it, the goal isn’t to make telecom exciting – it’s to be “the defining brand in B2B telecommunications” by solving real problems for enterprise customers.