Lessons from Running Bitrefill, Premier Bitcoin E-Commerce Platform

Company Name: Bitrefill

Founders: Sergej Kotliar + 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? Private

Since 2014, Bitrefill has been helping users spend their bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies on everything from gift cards to mobile top-ups and eSims.

One might think that after a decade, the company’s management has discovered the secret to Bitrefill’s growth with relative ease. However, one of Bitrefill’s co-founders and its CEO, Sergej Kotliar, says the company still faces a number of challenges in expanding its user base.

“The main ongoing difficulty in our company is finding customers,” Kotliar told Bitcoin Magazine.

“It’s difficult because it’s still a niche. In particular people who regularly use some kind of internet money in a wallet app are a small percentage or even a fractional percentage spread around the world,” he added, referring to less than 10% of the population to the world that holds cryptocurrencies. , and even fewer who use it regularly.

“You have to figure out how to get to them.”

While Kotliar and the team at Bitrefill may not have reached every potential customer out there yet, they’ve learned a lot about the dos and don’ts of keeping a crypto company alive through multiple bitcoin eras.

In my conversation with Kotliar, he shared some of the lessons he learned.

Lesson 1: Don’t believe the hype

Kotliar argues that one of the biggest illusions in the bitcoin and broader crypto space is that the communities of crypto enthusiasts and users are larger than they actually are. This becomes especially dangerous when founders of crypto startups are lured into believing the social media hype about their company.

“There’s definitely a phenomenon where a startup launches, they get a standing ovation on Twitter, they’re very quickly able to get their message and their value proposition out to that audience that might be inclined to use their thing and maybe convert them — and then they hit the wall,” explained Kotliar.

“The people they acquired this way are also very ordinary, which makes it difficult to get outside of that group. Companies get stuck because they’re captured by their initial audience, who at best are customers, but in the middle-of-the-road scenario, they’re just fans — people on Twitter who don’t really need what the company has to offer.” he added.

Because of this, Kotliar focuses less on what people have to say about Bitrefill on social media and more on providing the best customer experience possible.

This includes constantly adding more items and services that people can purchase with bitcoin and crypto through the site, as well as developing new products such as the Bitrefill Card, which allows users to spend their crypto just like a traditional debit card allows users to spend fiat.

According to Kotliar, avoiding the crypto echo chamber and focusing on solving real problems for customers has been key to his company’s success.

Lesson 2: Stay alive – without requiring VC funding

Bitrefill has survived for 10 years because it is able to stand on its own two feet financially without requiring repeated doses of venture capital funding to stay afloat.

“There are companies that default dead and there are companies that default alive,” he explained.

“Does this mean that if the current trajectory continues, will it be a dead company without additional funding or will it be an active company? When you get to that ‘we’re default alive’ point, it allows you to focus more on the things that matter and less on the things that will attract investment,” he added.

Kotliar went on to say that “the things that attract investment in our industry are often not necessarily the things that demand customers,” alluding to the fact that hype tends to drive investment in the crypto space more than a company meeting certain quality standards.

Focusing on the things that matter, like helping customers easily spend their crypto on gift cards for just about anything, as well as other services, has been key to keeping Bitrefill in business for ten years, despite the inherent ups and downs 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 a business afloat during market downturns. It is easy for crypto companies to keep their doors open and even thrive when the bull market is in full swing, but only the strong survive when the bear market occurs.

“During a bull market, we grow very quickly, and during a bear market, we manage to stay flat,” explained Kotliar.

“A lot of companies in our industry, in a bear market, will go under and lay people off. We’re not like that, but it sure 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 waves” of adoption.

“It’s a wave in Argentina right now,” he said. “There’s this 30% tax on foreign transactions, so some Argentinians use Bitrefill to buy games and stuff 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 more popular in the 10 years that Bitrefill has been around, Kotliar comes back to the point that to be successful as a company you need to aim to serve ordinary people as opposed to just Bitcoin enthusiasts.

“The world doesn’t care,” Kotliar said of Bitcoin’s ideology.

“In the Bitcoin world, some parts of it care more about the features you don’t offer than the features you do offer, which is weird. 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 tend to be indifferent to what other technologies do and do not provide, as long as they serve the purpose they are meant to serve.

“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’d go to a conference about it or you would get into a fight. with someone over a characteristic they have or maybe a characteristic they 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 core principle of Kotliar’s approach. He shared that the core of Bitrefill’s strategy is getting the product in front of people who might not otherwise be looking for it. He wants people to stumble upon it, which he claims “doesn’t always happen by itself.”

“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 responsiveness to user feedback.

“We’re getting a lot of feedback and have all kinds of channels open,” Kotliar said. “I think the main function of marketing is actually listening more than talking.”

Kotliar also noted that this process requires some discretion.

“We try to listen on every channel, but then try to figure it out — ask,” he explained, noting that the company gets its fair share of messages from people pushing certain symbols.

“(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 the company ends up taking seriously.

What’s next for Bitrefill?

After 10 years, Bitrefill’s mission remains the same: focus on what serves customers best (and ignore 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 considers Bitrefill to be “the best in the world in terms of paying Bitcoin,” he and his team are currently looking to add stablecoin functionality to Lightning.

Other than that, it’s business as usual at Bitrefill.

“Our goal is to be, you know, the one-stop-shop for any day-to-day use of cryptocurrency in the real world,” Kotliar said.

“That’s where we get our attention.”