Company name: Bit refill
Founders: Sergej Kotliar + others
Date of establishment: 2014
Number of employees: 76
Website: https://www.bitrefill.com/
Public or private? Private
Since 2014 Bit refill has helped users spend their bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on everything from gift cards to mobile phone top-ups to eSims.
You might think that after ten years, 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 some challenges in broadening its user base.
“The biggest difficulty in our business is finding customers,” Kotliar told Bitcoin Magazine.
“It’s hard because it’s still a niche. In particular, people who regularly use some form of internet money in a wallet app make up a small percentage or even a fractional percentage spread across the world,” he added, referring to the less than 10% of the world’s population owns cryptoAnd even fewer use it regularly.
“You have to figure out how to reach them.”
While Kotliar and the team at Bitrefill may not have reached every potential customer yet, they have learned a lot about the do’s and don’ts of keeping a crypto business alive across multiple bitcoin eras.
In my conversation with Kotliar, he shared with me some of the lessons he had learned.
Lesson 1: Don’t believe the hype
Kotliar claims that one of the biggest illusions in the bitcoin and broader crypto space is that communities of crypto enthusiasts and users are larger than they actually are. This becomes especially dangerous when crypto startup founders are lured into believing the social media hype about their company.
“There’s definitely a phenomenon where a startup launches, they get cheers on Twitter, they manage very quickly to get their message and their value proposition across to that audience that might be inclined to use their thing and be able to use them to convert – and then they hit the wall,” Kotliar explained.
“The people they brought in this way are also very stubborn, which makes it difficult to step outside that group. Companies get stuck because they are captured by their original target group, which at best are customers, but in the middle scenario are just fans: people on Twitter who don’t really need what the company has to offer.” 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 continually adding more items and services that people can purchase with bitcoin and crypto through the site, and developing new products like the Bitrefill cardwhich allows users to spend their crypto just as users can spend fiat with a traditional debit card.
According to Kotliar, avoiding the crypto echo chamber and focusing on solving real problems for customers is key to his company’s success.
Lesson 2: Stay alive – without the need for VC funding
Bitrefill has survived for a decade because it can stand on its own two feet financially, without needing repeated doses of venture capital to stay afloat.
“There are companies that have gone bankrupt, and there are companies that are still alive,” he explained.
“This means that if the current trajectory continues, will it be a dead company with no additional funding or will it be a living company? When you reach that ‘we’re alive by default’ point, you can focus more on the things that matter and less on the things that will attract investment,” he added.
Kotliar further shared that “things that attract investment into our industry are often not necessarily the things that customers need,” referring to the fact that hype tends to drive investment in the crypto space more than a company that meets certain qualitative meets standards.
Focusing on the things that matter, like helping customers easily spend their crypto on gift cards for almost anything and other services, has been essential to keeping Bitrefill in business for a decade, despite the inherent waves of volatility in the Bitcoin and crypto space. .
Lesson 3: Ride the waves and learn to swim
One of the secrets to surviving as a Bitcoin or crypto business is learning how to keep a business afloat during market downturns. It’s easy for crypto companies to keep their doors open and even thrive when the bull market is in full swing, but only the strongest survive when the bear market arrives.
“During a bull market we grow very quickly, and during a bear market we manage to stay flat,” Kotliar explains.
“Many companies in our industry will fail in a bear market and lay people off. We are not like that, but it certainly takes a lot of swimming 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 happen in different countries at different times for different reasons.
Kotliar says Bitrefill often experiences “regional adoption waves.”
“There is a wave going on in Argentina right now,” he said. “There’s this 30% tax on foreign transactionsand so some Argentinians use 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)
Despite the fact that Bitcoin and crypto have become more mainstream in the decade that Bitrefill has been around, Kotliar gets back to the point that to be successful as a company, you should strive to serve everyday people and not just the Bitcoin enthusiast .
“The world doesn’t care,” Kotliar said of Bitcoin ideology.
“In the Bitcoin world, some parts of it are more interested in what features you don’t offer than what features you do offer, which is strange. No one would go to 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 are typically indifferent to what other technologies do and do not offer, as long as they serve the purpose for which they are needed.
“You seem to care about the 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 an argument with someone about a position it has or perhaps a feature it shouldn’t have.
He further explained that Bitrefill accepts different cryptocurrencies for a variety of reasons, one of which is meeting the consumer where they are, a core tenet of Kotliar’s approach. He said the core of Bitrefill’s strategy is to bring the product to the attention of people who otherwise wouldn’t look for something like it. He wants people to stumble upon it, which he says “doesn’t always happen naturally.”
“The big takeaway is that being at the Bitcoin conference is not enough,” he said. “You have to be where people are, especially the people who don’t really care about Bitcoin.”
Lesson 5: Listen, don’t speak
Part of Bitrefill’s growth is due to the fact that it was responsive to user feedback.
“We get a lot of feedback and we have all kinds of channels open,” says Kotliar. “I think the most important function of marketing is actually to listen more than to speak.”
Kotliar also noted that this process requires some discretion.
“We try to listen on every channel, but then also try to find out – sift,” he explained, noting that the company receives a large share of messages from people pushing certain tokens.
“(We) find out what the real requests are, and when you get enough real requests, you start to feel like this is real,” he added, referring to the suggestions the company ultimately takes seriously.
What’s next for Bitrefill?
After 10 years, Bitrefill’s mission remains the same: focusing on what serves customers best (while 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 all things Bitcoin payments,” he and his team are currently exploring adding functionality for stablecoins on Lightning.
Furthermore, it is business as usual at Bitrefill.
“Our goal is to be the one-stop shop for all everyday cryptocurrency uses in the real world,” Kotliar said.
“That is where we focus our attention.”