Meet the Inspiring Entrepreneurs Coinify
This month, you can meet the Inspiring Entrepreneurs Coinify. They deal with cryptocurrency and they offer both a payment solution, a trading wallet, and a buy-and-sell platform.
In this video, co-founder and CEO of Coinify will share his thoughts on starting in a new and unchartered industry, where the rules have not yet been specified.
We hope that the video and Coinify’s experience will inspire you!
My name is Mark, I’m the co-founder of Coinify, also the CEO, and Coinify is a multi-cryptocurrency trading platform as well as a payment platform, whereby people with cryptocurrencies as able to buy and sell those on a store.
Name one thing that was the key driver in your success
The key to us was that we very early on took that approach that we needed to be very compliant. Adhere to the normal regulatory space, even though the space of our industry is not regulated, and by that teaming up with financial institutions and even get a bank as investor.
Tell us about your best day at work
The best day at work is entering the office, especially being the CEO, and you have like three meeting rooms occupied with people, people having meetings by the desk, phone is ringing, people are talking. You know the whole vibrant space of everybody’s busy with something and even better, I don’t even know what they’re doing. The sense of I’m not in control of everything. The company’s a organism that can do a lot of decisions by themselves which is, being in a start-up phase, is where you get that point where this is more than just start-up, cause I’m not even involved in everything. Things are just happening. That’s what makes me very proud and makes me very happy.
How has e-Commerce changed since you first started selling online?
Well, e-Commerce have started to change a lot. Let’s say if you go even before we started, and paid with credit cards online, and you see a lot of fraud, a lot of chargebacks and all that stuff, then you see today that there’s a 150 different payment channels out there, from wallets and vouchers and Apple Pay and other different payments, to where we are now, where you can accept cryptocurrencies, which is definitely a game changer, in the light of you’re talking about a whole new technology compared to other payment channels, which is different ways using the same technology. I think that’s a big game changer for the whole market of e-Commerce.
Luck or hard work? What makes an entrepreneur successful?
It comes naturally that hard works need to be done. Another thing is that you need to be inspired and motivated. You can work hard, but not being motivated and inspired and eager to do the right thing. Then you just work hard, not being efficient.
What advice do you have for entrepreneurs looking to start a webshop?
I think it’s the whole aspect of either having a super sexy product that people will mouth-to-mouth use, and do that kind of advertising, or have a very very clever marketing strategy. Otherwise you will be online and nobody will find you.
What did you wish you had done differently?
Not a lot, I must say. I think we have been very lucky in the way we started our business, how we positioned our business. And you can say luck is something you need to deserve, but I think we have deserved the luck we got, but we’ve also been lucky in terms of timing. So it’s difficult to say that I would have done something differently.
Are there any hacks that you discovered along the way?
Well, yes. How we operate in terms of shortcutting into the market is our go-to-market strategy. Not having a B2C-platform, which is normally what you do if you have a webshop, but scaling our business into other companies, who already have the audience. In our particular space, it’s having a trade component, that we can put into wallets, that already have millions of users, and thereby having them to do all the work. And we were happy to, already in 2015 we signed with the biggest wallet in the world, so immediately we got access to 10 million people and that’s how the fun began with Coinify.That we got lots of traction, lots of clients overnight, without even doing any marketing. So, sometimes you can do your own website, use that analogy, or you can go into a, Amazon, who already have the audience, and then thereby get access to the users. And that’s what we did.
Why did you choose Clearhaus?
Well, it was quite obvious for us to use Clearhaus in the early days. Because it was Danish, I could call the CEO, he took the phone we were actually taken care of support-wise, but also in the whole management team, and could meet them physically which makes much more trust, compared to having a global player out there, that you could not get access to.