Lessons From Running Bitrefill, Premier Bitcoin E-Commerce Platform

Company Name: Bitrefill

Founders: Sergej Kotliar + others

Date Founded: 2014

Number of Employees: 76

Website: https://www.bitrefill.com/

Public or Private? Private

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

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

“The main difficulty continuously 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 some small percentage or even a fractional percentage spread out across the world,” he added, referring to the less than 10% of the world’s population that owns crypto, and even fewer who use it regularly.

“You need to figure out how to reach them.”

While Kotliar and the team at Bitrefill may not yet have reached every potential customer out there, they’ve learned a lot about what to do and what not to do to keep a crypto company alive through multiple bitcoin epochs.

In my conversation with Kotliar, he shared with me some of the lessons he’s 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 bigger than they actually are. This becomes particularly dangerous when founders of crypto startups get lured into believing the hype on social media about their company.

“There is definitely a phenomenon where a startup launches, they get cheers on Twitter, they very quickly sort of manage to convey their message and their value proposition to that audience who might be inclined to use their thing and are able to convert them — and then they hit the wall,” explained Kotliar.

“The people that they acquired in that way are also very opinionated, which makes it difficult to go outside of that group. Companies get stuck because they become captured by their initial audience, which, in the best case scenario, are customers, but, in the mid scenario, are just fans — people on Twitter that don't really need whatever the company is offering,” 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 people can purchase with bitcoin and crypto via the site as well as developing new products like the Bitrefill Card, which lets users spend their crypto just like a traditional debit card lets users 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’s capable of standing on its own two feet financially, without requiring repeated doses of venture capital funding to remain afloat.

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

“This means if the current trajectory continues, is it going to be a dead company with no extra funding or is it going to be a live company? When you reach that ‘we're default alive’ point, it lets you focus more on the things that matter and less on the things that will attract investment,” he added.

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

Focusing on the things that matter, 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 ten years, 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 company 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 strong survive when the bear market comes around.

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

“A lot of companies in our industry, in a bear market, will go under and fire people. We're not like that, but it definitely takes a lot of swimming to remain in the same place,” he added.

The fact that Bitrefill serves customers in over 180 different countries also helps to keep it alive, as new waves of adoption happen in different countries at different times for a variety of different reasons.

Kotliar says Bitrefill often experiences “regional waves” of adoption.

“There's currently a wave going on in Argentina,” he said. “There is this 30% tax on foreign transactions, and so some Argentinians are using Bitrefill to buy games and stuff like that to avoid the 30% tax.”

Lesson 4: Be Where The People Are (Or Where They Might Be)

Despite the fact that Bitcoin and crypto have become more mainstream in the 10 years that Bitrefill has existed, Kotliar comes back to the point that to be successful as a company you have to aim to serve everyday people versus solely the Bitcoin enthusiast.

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

“In the Bitcoin world, some parts of it care more about which features you don't offer as opposed to which features you do offer, which is strange. Nobody would go to a store and be like, ‘Hey, you also sell this stuff!’” said Kotliar, referring to the notion that some Bitcoin enthusiasts have taken issue with the fact that Bitrefill accepts other cryptocurrencies.

Kotliar argues that users tend to be indifferent to what other technologies do and don’t offer, so long as they serve the purpose they need them to serve.

“You seem to care about the Riverside [FM],” said Kotliar, 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 over a feature that it has or maybe a feature that it should not have.”

He went on to explain that Bitrefill accepts different cryptocurrencies for different reasons, one of which is meeting the consumer where it’s at, a core tenet of Kotliar’s approach. He shared that the core of Bitrefill’s strategy is getting the product in front of people who otherwise wouldn’t seek something like it out. 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 need to be in where people are, especially the people that do not particularly care about Bitcoin.”

Lesson 5: Listen, Don’t Speak

Some of Bitrefill’s growth has been fueled by its being receptive to feedback from users.

“We get a lot of feedback, and we have all kinds of channels open,” said Kotliar. “I think that the main function of marketing is actually to listen more than to speak.”

Kotliar also noted that this process requires some discretion.

“We try to listen in every channel, but then also try to figure out — to sift,” he explained, pointing out the company gets its fair share of messages from people pushing certain tokens.

“[We] find out what the real requests are, and if you get enough real requests, you get a sense 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 have a whole team now that's working on adding gift cards,” said Kotliar, “and we're still putting a lot of effort into the Bitrefill Card.”

While Kotliar believes that 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 aim is to be the, you know, the one stop shop for everything day to day usage of cryptocurrency in the real world,” said Kotliar.

“That's where we're putting our attention.”