Company Name: petrevil
Founders: Sergej Kotlyar + others
Establishment date: 2014
Headquarters location: Stockholm, Sweden
The amount of Bitcoin held in the vault: Not disclosed
Number of employees: 76
Website: https://www.bitrefill.com/
Public or private? private
Since 2014, petrevil It helps users spend Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on everything from gift cards to mobile phone top-ups to eSims.
One would think that after a decade, the company’s leadership would have unlocked the secret to Bitrefill’s growth with relative ease. However, Bitrefill co-founder and CEO Sergey Kotlyar says the company still faces a number of challenges in expanding its user base.
“The main ongoing difficulty in our company is finding clients,” Kotlayar told Bitcoin Magazine.
“It’s difficult because it’s still a niche niche. Especially people who use some sort of internet money in a wallet app on a regular basis, that’s a small or even a fractional percentage that’s spread around the world,” he added. Less than 10% of the world’s population owns cryptocurrenciesand And even fewer use it regularly.
“You need to know how to reach them.”
While Kotliar and the Bitrefill team may not have reached every potential customer yet, they have learned a lot about what they should and shouldn’t do to keep a cryptocurrency company alive through Bitcoin’s multiple eras.
In my conversation with Cutler, he shared some of the lessons he’s learned.
Lesson 1: Don’t believe the hype
Kotliar claims that one of the biggest illusions in Bitcoin and the broader crypto space is that the communities of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and users are larger than they actually are. This becomes especially dangerous when cryptocurrency startup founders are tempted to believe the hype on social media about their company.
“There’s definitely a phenomenon where a startup launches, gets cheered on Twitter, and very quickly is able to take its message and value proposition to that audience that might be inclined to use their product and be able to convert them — and then they hit a wall,” Kotlyar explained.
“The people they acquire this way are also very stubborn, which makes it difficult to break out of that group. Companies stumble because they become obsessed with their initial audience, which, in the best case scenario, are customers, but in the middle scenario, they are just fans.” – People on Twitter They don’t really need everything the company has to offer, he added.
For this reason, Kotliar focuses less on what people are saying 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 purchase with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies via the site as well as developing new products such as Betterfill cardWhich allows users to spend their cryptocurrencies just like a traditional debit card allows users to spend fiat currencies.
According to Kotlyar, avoiding the cryptocurrency echo chamber and focusing on solving real customer problems has been key to his company’s success.
Lesson 2: Survive — without venture capital funding
Bitrefill has been able to survive for 10 years because it is able to stay afloat financially, without needing frequent doses of venture capital funding to stay afloat.
“There are defaulting companies, and there are surviving defaulting companies,” 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?” He added: “When you get to the point of ‘we are virtually alive,’ it allows you to focus more on the important things and less on Things that will attract investment.”
“The things that attract investment in our industry are not necessarily the things that demand customers,” Kotlyar continued, referring to the fact that hype tends to drive investment in the cryptocurrency space more than a company that meets certain qualitative criteria.
Focusing on the important things, like helping customers easily spend their crypto on gift cards for almost anything as well as other services, has been essential in keeping Bitrefill in business for a decade, despite the waves of volatility inherent in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency space. . .
Lesson 3: Surfing and learning to swim
One of the secrets to surviving as a Bitcoin or cryptocurrency business is learning how to keep the business afloat during market downturns. It’s easy for cryptocurrency companies to keep their doors open and even thrive when a bull market is in full swing, but only the strong survive when a bear market comes.
“During a bull market, we grow very quickly, and during a bear market, we manage to stay flat,” Kotlier explained.
“A lot of companies in our industry, in a bear market, would fail and fire employees. We’re not, 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 occur in different countries at different times for a variety of different reasons.
Bitrefill often experiences “regional waves” of adoption, Kotlier says.
“There is currently a continuing wave in Argentina,” he said. “There’s this 30% tax on foreign transactionsSo some Argentinians use Bitrefill to buy games and things like that to avoid the 30% tax.
Lesson 4: Be where people are (or where they could be)
Despite the fact that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have become more mainstream in the 10 years that Bitrefill has been around, Kotliar goes back to the point that to be successful as a company, you have to aim to serve everyday people rather than just Bitcoin enthusiasts.
“The world doesn’t care,” Kotlair said of Bitcoin’s ideology.
“In the Bitcoin world, some parts of it are more concerned with the features it doesn’t offer rather than the features it does offer, which is weird. No one is going to go into a store and say, ‘Hey, you also sell this stuff!’” Kotlyar said, referring to the idea that Some Bitcoin enthusiasts have taken issue with the fact that Bitrefill accepts other cryptocurrencies.
Kotlayar argues that users tend to be indifferent to what other technologies do or don’t offer, as long as they serve the purpose they need them to serve.
“You seem to care about Riverside FM, but I don’t know if you’re going to a conference about it or getting into an argument,” Cutlair said, referring to the app I used to record my interview with him. With someone about a quality they have or perhaps a quality they shouldn’t 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, which is a core principle in Kotliar’s approach. He shared that the core of Bitrefill’s strategy is to get the product in front of people who wouldn’t be looking for something like it. He wants people to find him, which he claims “doesn’t always happen on its own.”
“The main takeaway is that it’s not enough to be at a bitcoin conference,” he said. “It needs to be somewhere where people are, especially people who aren’t particularly interested in Bitcoin.”
Lesson 5: Listen, don’t talk
Some of Bitrefill’s growth has been driven by its receptiveness to user feedback.
“We get a lot of feedback, and we have all kinds of channels open,” Cotlier said. “I think the main function of marketing is actually to listen more than to talk.”
Kotliar also noted that this process requires some discretion.
“We try to listen to every channel, but we also try to discover and sift through,” he explained, noting that the company gets its fair share of messages from people promoting certain codes.
“(We) find out what the real orders are, and if you get enough real orders, it feels real,” he added, referring to suggestions the company ends up taking seriously.
What’s next for Bitrefill?
10 years later, 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, and we’re still putting a lot of effort into the Bitrefill card,” Cotlier said.
While Kotliar believes Bitrefill is “the best in the world at everything Bitcoin payment related,” he and his team are currently looking into adding functionality for stablecoins on Lightning.
Other than that, it’s business as usual at Bitrefill.
“Our goal is to be, you know, the one-stop-shop for everything related to the daily use of cryptocurrencies in the real world,” Cutlair said.
“This is where we turn our attention.”