My last couple of posts might have been a bit discouraging, particularly if you’re a shareholder of a mobile network operator that’s trying to roll out mobile money. The idea of deferring profitability for years, in the hope that you’ll sign up enough users to become a sufficiently valuable network to justify price increases at some undetermined point in the future, will strike many as excessively risky.

The good news is that by carefully crafting a value proposition and a marketing and communications plan, mobile money service providers can dramatically increase the odds that they will build a successful mobile money platform. They can do this with a nuanced understanding of the way that network effects in mobile money work.

Let’s go back to our original definition of network effects. A network that exhibits positive network effects is one in which potential users become more and more interested in participating in a network as the number of users in that network grows. But as anyone who has ever used mobile money knows, not all users are the same. If you are a widow living in rural Kenya who relies on your son to send you home money each month, millions of people can sign up for M-PESA without your interest in the service increasing one bit. Only when your son signs up does your interest perk up dramatically.

The market for fax machines is in this way very similar to that of mobile money. Each time a new fax machine was installed, the value of buying a new fax machine for any given user went up almost infinitesimally (since odds were that the new user and the potential user didn’t know each other and would never need to interact with each other). But when someone with whom you already communicated with bought a fax machine, your interest in owning one did indeed increase.

The successful fax machine manufactures grasped this point and shaped their go-to-market strategies accordingly. They focused their initial sales efforts on diplomatic corps, multinational corporations, and major newspapers. Why? Because those organizations had consulates, offices, and bureaus (respectively) scattered all around the world with whom they needed to communicate. By selling the head office of a multinational firm a fax machine, the value of a fax machine to their subsidiaries’ offices increased dramatically.

What does this mean for mobile money? When going to market, it’s important that operators identify the participants that, once they’ve signed up to the service, will attract others to join, too. For example, Telenor, which has recently launched easypaisa in Pakistan with an emphasis on bill payment, lined up some of the biggest billers in the country to participate in the platform. In the model of a platform-mediated network, those big utility companies are “users” that many potential users are going to want to transact with.