Company Name: Bitfill
Founders: Sergej Kotliar + others
Founding date: 2014
Headquarters Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Amount of bitcoin held in Treasury: Not disclosed
Number of employees: 76
Website: https://www.bitrefill.com/
Public or Private? Private
Since 2014, Bitfill has been helping users spend their bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies on everything from gift cards to mobile phone top-ups and eSims.
You would think that, after a decade, the company's leadership has discovered the secret to growing Bitrefill with relative ease. However, one of Bitrefill's co-founders and CEO, Sergej Kotliar, says the company still faces a number of challenges in expanding its user base.
“The main constant difficulty in our company is finding customers,” Kotliar told bitcoin magazine.
“It's difficult because it's still a niche. Especially people who use some kind of internet money in a wallet app on a regular basis is a small percentage or even a fractional percentage spread across the world,” he added, referring to the crypto.com/company-news/global-cryptocurrency-owners-grow-to-580-million-through-2023″>less than 10% of the world's population owns cryptocurrenciesand even fewer who use it regularly.
“You need to figure out how to reach them.”
While Kotliar and the Bitrefill team may not have reached all potential customers yet, they have learned a lot about what to do and what not to do to keep a crypto company alive through multiple bitcoin eras.
In my conversation with Kotliar, he shared with me some of the lessons he learned.
Lesson 1: Don't believe the hype
Kotliar says that one of the biggest illusions in bitcoin and the crypto space in general is that the communities of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and users are larger than they really are. This becomes particularly dangerous when founders of cryptocurrency startups are fooled into believing social media hype about their company.
“There's definitely a phenomenon where a startup launches, gets applause on twitter, quickly gets their message and value proposition across to that audience that might be inclined to use their thing and be able to convert them, and then they crash into the wall,” Kotliar explained.
“People who acquired that way are also very stubborn, which makes it difficult to get out of that group. Companies stagnate because they are captured by their initial audience, which, at best, are customers, but, in the middle scenario, they are just fans: people on twitter who don't really need what the company offers.” he added.
For this reason, Kotliar focuses less on what people have to say about Bitrefill on social media and more on providing the best possible customer experience.
This includes constantly adding more items and services that people can buy with bitcoins and cryptocurrencies through the site, as well as developing new products such as the Bitrefill Cardwhich allows users to spend their cryptocurrencies just like a traditional debit card allows them to spend fiat money.
According to Kotliar, avoiding the cryptocurrency echo chamber and focusing on solving real problems for customers has been key to his company's success.
Lesson 2: Stay alive, no need for venture capital funding
Bitrefill has survived for 10 years because it is able to stand on its own financially, without requiring repeated doses of venture capital funding to stay afloat.
“There are companies that are dead due to non-payment and there are companies that are alive,” he explained.
“This means that if the current trajectory continues, will it be a dead company without additional funding or will it be a living company? “When we get to that point of ‘we are alive by default,’ we can focus more on the things that matter and less on the things that will attract investment,” he added.
Kotliar went on to share that “the things that attract investment in our industry are often not necessarily the things that customers require,” alluding to the fact that advertising tends to drive investment in the crypto space more than a company meeting certain standards. qualitative.
Focusing on the things that matter, like helping customers easily spend their cryptocurrency on gift cards for almost anything, as well as other services, has been essential in keeping Bitrefill in business for ten years, despite the inherent waves of volatility in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency space. .
Lesson 3: Ride the waves and learn to swim
One of the secrets to surviving as a bitcoin or cryptocurrency company is learning how to keep a business afloat during market downturns. It's easy for cryptocurrency companies to keep their doors open and even thrive when the bull market is in full swing, but only the strong ones survive when the bear market hits.
“During a bull market, we grow very quickly, and during the bear market, we manage to remain stable,” Kotliar explained.
“Many companies in our industry, in a bear market, will go under and lay off people. “We're not like that, but you definitely have to swim a lot to stay in the same place,” he added.
The fact that Bitrefill serves customers in over 180 different countries also helps keep it alive, as new waves of adoption occur in different countries at different times and for various reasons.
Kotliar says Bitrefill often experiences “regional waves” of adoption.
“There is currently a wave in Argentina,” he said. “There is this 30% tax on foreign transactionsso some Argentines are using Bitrefill to buy games and things like that to avoid the 30% tax.”
Lesson 4: Be where the people are (or where they could be)
Even though bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have become more common in the 10 years that Bitrefill has been around, Kotliar returns to the point that to be successful as a company you have to aim to serve everyday people and not just bitcoin enthusiasts. .
“The world doesn't care,” Kotliar said of bitcoin's ideology.
“In the bitcoin world, some parties care more about the features you don't offer than the ones you do, which is strange. No one would go into a store and say, 'Hey, you sell this stuff too!'” Kotliar said, referring to the idea that some bitcoin enthusiasts have taken issue with Bitrefill accepting other cryptocurrencies.
Kotliar argues that users tend to be indifferent to what other technologies do and do not offer, as long as they serve their intended purpose.
“You seem to care about Riverside (FM),” Kotliar said, referring to the app I used to record my interview with him, “but I don't know if you would go to a conference about it or get into a discussion. with someone because of a characteristic they have or perhaps a characteristic they should not have.”
He went on to explain that Bitrefill accepts different cryptocurrencies for different reasons, one of which is to meet the consumer where they are, a central tenet of Kotliar's approach. He shared that the core of Bitrefill's strategy is to introduce the product to people who would not otherwise search for something like it. He wants people to realize this, something he says “doesn't always happen on its own.”
“The big takeaway is that it's not enough to be at the bitcoin conference,” he said. “You have to be where the people are, especially the people who don't particularly care about bitcoin.”
Lesson 5: Listen, don't talk
Part of Bitrefill's growth has been fueled by its receptiveness to user feedback.
“We get a lot of feedback and we have all kinds of channels open,” Kotliar said. “I think the main function of marketing is to listen more than to talk.”
Kotliar also noted that this process requires some discretion.
“We try to listen on all channels, but we also try to discover it, filter it,” he explained, noting that the company receives a good number of messages from people promoting certain tokens.
“(We) find out what the real requests are, and if you get enough real requests, you get the feeling that this is real,” he added, referring to the suggestions that the company ends up taking seriously.
What's next for Bitrefill?
After 10 years, Bitrefill's mission remains the same: focusing on what best serves customers (and ignoring the noise in the process).
“We now have a whole team working on adding gift cards,” Kotliar said, “and we're still putting a lot of effort into the Bitrefill card.”
While Kotliar believes Bitrefill is “the best in the world at everything related to bitcoin payments,” he and his team are currently looking to add functionality for stablecoins in Lightning.
Other than that, everything remains the same at Bitrefill.
“Our goal is to be, you know, the one-stop shop for all real-world, everyday cryptocurrency usage,” Kotliar said.
“That's where we're putting our attention.”
