Company Name: Bitrefill
Founders: Sergej Kotliar + and others
Date of establishment: 2014
Headquarters location: Stockholm, Sweden
Amount of Bitcoin Held in Treasury: Undisclosed
Number of Employees: 76
Website: https://www.bitrefill.com/
Public or Private? What is confidential
Since 2014, Bitrefill has been helping users spend their bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on everything from gift cards to premium mobile phones to eSims.
One might think that, after ten years, the company’s leadership has revealed the secret to growing Bitrefill easily. However, Bitrefill co-founder and CEO, Sergej Kotliar, says the company still faces many challenges in expanding its user base.
“The biggest challenge going forward for our company is getting customers,” Kotliar told Bitcoin Magazine.
“It’s difficult because it’s still underground. Mainly the people who use some form of internet money in a wallet app are always a small percentage or a small part spread around the world,” he added, referring to the less than 10% of people worldwide who own crypto. , and 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 out there, they have learned a lot about the dos and don’ts of keeping a crypto company alive in the many bitcoin eras.
In my interview with Kotliar, he shared with me some of the lessons he has learned.
Lesson 1: Don’t Believe The Hype
Kotliar says one of the biggest fallacies in the bitcoin and broader crypto space is that communities of crypto enthusiasts and users are bigger than they really are. This is especially dangerous when the founders of crypto startups are lured into believing the hype on social media about their company.
“There’s definitely a thing where a startup starts, they get excited about Twitter, they quickly plan to get their message and their value proposition across to those audiences who might be inclined to use their thing and be able to convert — and then they hit a wall,” explains Kotliar.
“The people who got them that way also have different opinions, which makes it difficult to get out of that group. “Companies get stuck because they get caught up in their initial audience, which in the best case, are customers, but, in the average case, they’re just followers — people on Twitter who don’t really need anything the company has to offer,” he added.
For this reason, Kotliar focuses less on what people say about Bitrefill on social media and more on providing the best customer experience.
This includes constantly adding more items and services that people can buy with bitcoin and crypto through the site and developing new products such as the Bitrefill Card, which allows users to use their crypto like a regular debit card that allows users to spend limited amounts.
According to Kotliar, avoiding the crypto echo chamber and focusing on solving real problems for customers has been the key to his company’s success.
Lesson 2: Stay Alive – Without Needing VC Funding
Bitrefill has survived for 10 years because it is financially independent, without needing repeated doses of venture capital funding to continue operating.
“There are companies that die automatically, there are companies that do not pay,” he explained.
“This means that if the current trend continues, will it be a dead company with no more money or will it be a living company? When you get to that point of ‘we’re living by default’, it allows you to focus more on the things that matter and reduce 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 the things that customers need,” referring to the fact that hype tends to drive investment in the crypto space over a company that meets certain quality standards.
Focusing on the essentials, like helping customers easily redeem their crypto for gift cards for almost anything and other services, has been key to keeping Bitrefill in business for ten years, despite natural 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 company is learning how to keep the business running smoothly during market downturns. It’s easy for crypto companies to keep their doors open and thrive when a bull market is in full swing, but only the strong survive when a bear market hits.
“During a bull market, we grow very fast, and during a bear market, we manage to stay low,” Kotliar explained.
“Many companies in our industry, in a bear market, will go under and fire people. We are not, but it takes a lot of swimming to stay in one place,” he added.
The fact that Bitrefill serves customers in more than 180 countries also helps keep it alive, as new waves of acquisitions happen in different countries at different times for different reasons.
Kotliar says Bitrefill often experiences “regional waves” of adoption.
“Right now there is a wave going on in Argentina,” he said. “There’s this 30% tax on exports, so some Argentines use Bitrefill to buy games and stuff like that to avoid the 30% tax.
Lesson 4: Be Where People Are (Or Where They Might Be)
Despite the fact that Bitcoin and crypto have become mainstream in Bitrefill’s 10 years of existence, Kotliar comes back to the point that to be successful as a company you have to aim to serve everyday people as opposed to just the Bitcoin enthusiast.
“The world doesn’t care,” Kotliar said of Bitcoin’s views.
“In the Bitcoin world, some parts of it care more about what features you don’t offer as opposed to what features you do offer, which is weird. No one would go to a store and be like, ‘Hey, you sell this stuff too!’” Kotliar said, referring to the idea that some Bitcoin enthusiasts have objected to the fact that Bitrefill accepts other cryptocurrencies.
Kotliar says users often don’t care what other technologies do and don’t provide, as long as they serve the purpose they need them to.
“He seems to care about Riverside [FM],” said Kotliar, referring to the app I used to record my conversation with him, “but I don’t know if you can go to a conference about it or argue with someone about a feature it has or maybe a feature we shouldn’t have.”
He went on to explain that Bitrefill accepts different cryptocurrencies for different reasons, one of which is meeting the consumer where they are, a key belief in Kotliar’s approach. He shared that the core of Bitrefill’s strategy is getting the product in front of people who wouldn’t otherwise be looking for something like it. He wants people to stumble upon it, which he says “doesn’t always happen automatically.”
“The biggest takeaway is that it’s not enough to be at a Bitcoin conference,” he said. “You have to be where the people are, especially the people who don’t care about Bitcoin.”
Lesson 5: Listen, Don’t Talk
Some of Bitrefill’s growth has been fueled by its acceptance of feedback from users.
“We’re getting a lot of responses, and we have all kinds of channels open,” Kotliar said. “I think the main job of marketing is listening more than talking.”
Kotliar also noted that this process requires some understanding.
“We try to listen on all channels, but then we try to find – filter,” he explained, pointing out that the company receives its fair share of messages from people pressing certain tokens.
“[We] find out what the real requests are, and if you get enough real requests, you feel that this is true,” he added, referring to the proposals that the company eventually takes seriously.
What’s Next for Bitrefill?
After 10 years, Bitrefill’s mission remains the same: to focus on what serves customers best (and ignore the noise in the process).
“We have a whole team right now working on adding gift cards,” Kotliar said, “and we’re putting a lot of effort into the Bitrefill card.”
While Kotliar believes that Bitrefill is “the best in the world for everything related to Bitcoin payments,” he and his team are currently looking to add stablecoins functionality to Lightning.
Other than that, it’s business as usual at Bitrefill.
“Our goal is to be, you know, a one-stop shop for every day-to-day use of cryptocurrency in the real world,” Kotliar said.
“That’s where we put our attention.”