PuraSIM
Travel eSIMs for 200+ destinations
I’m building PuraSIM, a bootstrapped travel eSIM business for people who want to stay connected abroad without dealing with expensive roaming or hunting for a physical SIM after landing.
I started working on it because the eSIM market is growing fast, but the buying experience can still feel unnecessarily complicated: too many plans, confusing coverage, and a lot of very similar offers.
With PuraSIM, I’m trying to make that experience simpler across 200+ destinations.
The most interesting part for me has actually been building the business around the product: Localization, automation, partnerships, conversion optimization, and figuring out how a small brand can compete against much larger eSIM companies without relying entirely on paid ads.
I’m still early, experimenting a lot, and learning as I go.
I’ll use this page to share what works, what doesn’t, and what I learn while trying to grow PuraSIM.
Would also love to hear from anyone here who has built in travel, telecom or ecommerce.
4 Comments
Hi Marc,
Well done with the project so far!
Have you thought of developing some proprietary software that can be offered along with the eSIM? Or do you plan to solely rely on the price as your main differentiator? The market is full of similar providers and most rely on the big players to buy data in bulk (probably just like yourself), so it'd be good to also consider other ways of securing your clientele for longer periods of time (returning customers), not just a smaller price point than your competitor.
The visual identity is pretty compelling (haven't checked if original, although I would hope so), which is a great thing, as that converts users into customers if they feel you're professional. Same for making it easy for people to contact you (haven't checked the service, but looking at other ventures, they don't even mention it sometimes). If it's actually working, that's also a nice strength of your venture.
I guess the big question still is: how do you get a lot of travellers on PuraSim? Probably, traditional SEO or paid ads won't do a lot. Maybe programmatic SEO (PSEO) destination mining or embedded "link-in-bio" widget white-labelling. Or have you thought of setting up an automated affiliate portal for travel influencers (probably at a high 15%–20% recurring commission on data packages)?
Another thing that I noticed: on the product details page, there are quite a lot of info on the pricing for each individual option, which clutters the page and makes the user dizzy and quite confused, as they have to make sense of all the words/numbers in those little squares. Maybe hide most of them under a "See more/all options" button and only display the default choice, which seems to be the popular one, and the best value one, and/or the best fit. Same for the Date Picker, a lot of text - I initially missed it, because it didn't use a special font or anything to make it stand out as a date picker (although, it's just suggestive from what I gather, as the plans are for set periods of time, so probably this can be moved somewhere else or removed entirely.
I also noticed that if you select a period of 5 months or so using the date picker, for example, it doesn't recommend the unlimited option, but returns an error/warning: "The longest plan for this destination covers 30 days. For 150 days: pick more GB/validity or combine 2 eSIMs." (which doesn't disappear when clicking Unlimited, another issue), so there's potentially some lost revenue.
The "Global Backup included" banner appears at the bottom of the pricing section in both sections, Standard and Unlimited. At the moment, it's marked as a discounted item ("Free"), but the "Ultra" plan has a "Global Backup included - Free [forever, I assume]" included as well. Probably, most users will find that quite odd looking and very confusing, silently making them lose trust in the product (which is especially bad right before checkout). Maybe consider hiding one when the other is displayed, or hide the banner altogether in the Unlimited section and include it separately under each option (Free forever for Ultra and Free as a current discount for Light).
I hope it helps! Best of luck!
I like your idea, it looks like very useful
I've been using Airalo. Are they one of the examples of an "unnecessarily complicated" buying experience? I didn't have a problem with it but I know others who found it a bit too much and needed help choosing a plan.
The “make it simpler” part is interesting because eSIMs are already pretty easy to compare on the surface.
I’d be curious which part of the buying experience users actually find confusing versus simply interchangeable.