Company Name:<\/strong> Bitrefill<\/p>\n Founders:<\/strong> Sergej Kotliar + others<\/p>\n Date Founded:<\/strong> 2014<\/p>\n Location of Headquarters:<\/strong> Stockholm, Sweden<\/p>\n Amount of Bitcoin Held in Treasury:<\/strong> Undisclosed <\/p>\n Number of Employees:<\/strong> 76<\/p>\n Website:<\/strong> https:\/\/www.bitrefill.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n Public or Private?<\/strong> Private<\/p>\n Since 2014, Bitrefill<\/a> has been helping users spend their bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on everything from gift cards to mobile phone top ups to eSims.<\/p>\n One might think that, after a decade, the company\u2019s leadership has uncovered the secret to growing Bitrefill with relative ease. However, one of Bitrefill\u2019s co-founders and its CEO, Sergej Kotliar, says that the company still faces a number of challenges in broadening its user base.<\/p>\n \u201cThe main difficulty continuously in our company is finding customers,\u201d Kotliar told Bitcoin Magazine.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’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,\u201d he added, referring to the less than 10% of the world\u2019s population that owns crypto<\/a>, and even fewer who use it regularly<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cYou need to figure out how to reach them.\u201d<\/p>\n While Kotliar and the team at Bitrefill may not yet have reached every potential customer out there, they\u2019ve learned a lot about what to do and what not to do to keep a crypto company alive through multiple bitcoin epochs.<\/p>\n In my conversation with Kotliar, he shared with me some of the lessons he\u2019s learned.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThere 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 \u2014 and then they hit the wall,\u201d explained Kotliar.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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 \u2014 people on Twitter that don’t really need whatever the company is offering,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\nLesson 1: Don\u2019t Believe The Hype<\/h2>\n