Among top ‘150 CoinMarketCap’ in one year: a story of BitFlip

Personalities

Dmitrii Kuzmenkov

Dmitrii is the founder and the technical lead of Bitflip. Previously Dmitrii has occupied leading positions in Russian technological companies, but his ambitions allowed him to compete with the leaders of the crypto market.

Vladimir Kosenko

Vladimir is the co-founder of BitFlip. He has made the long way from web-developer to serial entrepreneur. Gathering experience in companies from Fortune 500 and FinTech startups, he has eventually found himself in blockchain industry.

It was a coincidence: at that time we launched a project in an elite real estate renting, and one of our clients spoke about how she accumulated her wealth. Despite the fact that we are in IT for several years, the topic of crypto was always aside. Surely we got interested then, as probably every other entrepreneur, but our starting point was trading. That happened around half a year before the “hype”.

There is no secret behind that – one has to estimate own capabilities and technical expertise correctly. We have started to gather opinions on Facebook: are people interested in that kind of project, would they invest their money in it? During the first ICO round, we have collected a small amount of money, yet were carrying responsibility towards investors and had to meet deadlines – that was a good motivation.

Undoubtedly we have faced mistrust as no one has ever launched such complex product just in one month - “that was absurd”. We were only three people, and sometimes we haven’t had a sleep while working on the code. Moreover, we had to take additional responsibilities for instance marketing. Despite all the difficulties, it was very fascinating.

As beginning traders, we faced many problems: difficult interfaces, the absence of supporting services, huge fees when trading fiat. The biggest disadvantage we met - was huge risks in cryptocurrency investments; therefore we decided to distance ourselves from it and earn on someone else’s risks. We decided to provide traders with a great platform.

The industry is very young, and every day we have visitors on our platform that have little knowledge in mechanisms and functionality, though it is all quite straightforward. Therefore we want to simplify the interface as much as possible, move away from professional form to attract young traders. After one year, this problem is still present, and services that aim to solve it gather millions of dollars.

We can say now that we succeeded in it – in a period of one year the design was drastically evolving, but a result of our work we reduced the number of customers complains and questions to our support team regarding the interface and trading system.

We plan to develop sub-projects. Now we have a web-aggregator of crypto news in beta-version, and soon we will announce it. The next in the line will be the news portal with the concept of the golos.io or steemit, which will allow any user to create content and get tokens for it after passing through the moderation of our redactor.

Finally, we can integrate our token FLIP into that resource. Developing the content-projects will allow us to attract additional traffic to the exchange, hold the audience and offer marketing strategies for the tokens that are placed in the exchange. We had these plans in our roadmap for a long time but came to it just now.

Second important step for us is the B2B service for crypto transactions. When we first started the exchange, we needed a quick solution that would allow processing transactions of bitcoin, ripple, litecoin, and ethereum. We chose BlockCypher, but then got problems, from losing the transactions up to a reduction of trust to the brand. At the same time, there are no analogies of this project that would have decent quality.

The work on another project is almost finished, and soon we will start testing it on our platform to prepare statistical data. We plane to promote this service so that you can meet us at corresponding conferences in Asia. Another milestone is our partnership program. Now we have more than 1600 partners, and we would like to expand further to the English-speaking audience. We have clear and transparent conditions, so it is very easy to cooperate with us.

As we periodically help to ICO projects, we notice that it becomes more and more difficult to get placed on an exchange: some have high prices, some places only via voting, some work only with ERC20 tokens. Therefore we significantly improved conditions of being placed on our exchange and are ready to consider perspective projects.

Yes, there are a couple of things that we find disputable or faulty. First of all, we locked ourselves into work, while we had to enforce ourselves participate in conferences as well. That would help us to attract more investment and valuable contacts; therefore our growth would speed up. We realize this mistake and plan to take part in sub-projects-related conferences, where we will be informing about the exchange as well.

Secondary, it is working with fiat. We cannot be 100% sure that it was a mistake – fiat gave us the appreciation of Russian audience, but brought many problems at the same time, that we had to solve instead of focusing on development.