Buycoins, an exchange founded in 2017 by Timi Ajiboye, Ire Aderinokun and Tomiwa Lasebikan to afford Nigerians a safe and easy way to buy, sell and store cryptocurrencies is now Helicarrier.
After being called Buycoins for the past three years, the company has decided to change its name to Helicarrier because its former name doesn’t do a good job of capturing all they do and have become. Similar to the name of the fictitious versatile super-machines that are capable of sustained flight via four massive turbine engines, Helicarrier is currently powered by over four products.
But before Buycoins, the company was called Bikcoin—a website for P2P Bitcoin trading.
Helicarrier, as the company is now called, is an umbrella company for five products, namely: Buycoins, a platform to buy, sell and store cryptocurrencies; Buycoins Pro, an order book for advanced digital asset trading; Sendcash, a platform for crypto-powered remittance; Sendcash Pay, a suite of developer tools that let you add borderless payment experiences to your digital products; and NGNT (Nigerian Naira Token), a naira-backed digital currency.
In celebration of the company’s history and the milestone of transitioning to Helicarrier, the company is holding an event titled, State of The Union, on October 30th.
But to understand ourselves Buycoins’ work over the past three years; the challenging, fulfilling, and exciting parts; and the rationale behind the change to a new name, we spoke with Tomiwa Lasebikan, co-founder and Chief Product Officer; Teju Adeyinka, Head of Growth, Sendcash; and Zino Asamaige, a member of Helicarrier’s Growth Team.
What inspired you to build BuyCoins and what problems were you trying to solve with this product?
So, I guess it was the challenge of getting started with crypto in Nigeria. There were times Timi and Ire would want to buy something from the US and want to send me Bitcoin as a means of payment for that. Well, being able to get Bitcoin in Nigeria was just an incredible amount of pain. Back then, we had something called “local Bitcoins”, but it was very fraud-prone and the user experience was really bad. We all had conversations and thought, “Oh, how difficult would it be to build a crypto exchange?” It was supposed to be a small little project, a walk-on, and a website for people to trade Bitcoin without stress. So, that was the start of the journey.
What challenges did you encounter during the building process?
There have been a lot of things. Especially because we are building something in a very new and rapidly evolving space. So, we need people with the ability to keep up with the fast pace of the industry. That can be very challenging.
We also had issues with educating our users to protect them from scams. We had to ensure people were well informed about what’s going on in the crypto space. To get people on board, we had to change the dominant narrative that crypto was for geeky computer scientists and whatnot. People were scared, so we had to find a way to amplify this narrative and break things down. Another challenge we faced was interfacing with regulatory systems. Even though that’s a global problem; big exchanges like Coinbase face regulatory challenges too.
So, I’ll say those have been some of the really difficult things we’ve had to grapple with over the last three years.
What are the challenges of building new products?
Getting people who are willing to even try out the products was challenging. For instance, with Sendcash, people who have never used Bitcoin before might feel intimidated to try it out because of the interface. So, we had to figure out a way to craft our messages and build experiences that make sense for people who don’t care about all the technicalities of using crypto.
We also had to deal with platforms’ regulations. For instance, MailChimp reached out to say we can’t use them anymore because we are a crypto exchange company and they do not support crypto exchange companies at the moment.
So, we constantly have to find alternatives for a lot of different things because people and platforms do not want to work with a crypto exchange company.
When it comes to managing customers, when we launched, a bulk of the work had to do with educating customers. There were so many questions we didn’t have answers to, but we couldn’t just send them away. So, we learned more about the space or used Google when asked questions, to ensure our customers are satisfied.
What were some of the most rewarding aspects of the building process and your earliest memorable milestone?
Back in November 2018, when we got our first dozen users, it was nice to see. Subsequently, there was a spike in trading volume and we felt we were building something useful. There were times we got comments like, “Sendcash is the best way for me to send money back home to my mum.” During the lockdown, not everyone could stand in queues at Western Union, so using Sendcash to send money was easier. Providing a service that changes dollars or crypto to naira in a few minutes is satisfying.
We created a crypto course at Buycoins in 2019, and it has been one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. It was an introduction to Bitcoin for beginners. We spent a lot of time simplifying the language, making it easy for anyone to read and understand. Right now, we have over 3,000 people taking the course, and the feedback we get from people is particularly because the course was easy to understand.
Would you say the course helped to increase adoption rate?
Yes, it did. Especially because, at the time, there weren’t a lot of resources on cryptocurrencies. It helped people searching for “What is Bitcoin?” to find our course, and when they saw all the people behind the course, they tried out our product. It helped us build trust and gave users the idea that we understood the space.
How have you gone about communicating the change of all your products to a parent company, Helicarrier, to current users?
Our users know that nothing has changed. From the point of view of using our products, they haven’t had to do anything extra. All these products were not added in just one day; we gradually built them with the users. So, when we develop anything the first thing we do is talk to customers about it.
What factors influenced the change of name to Helicarrier?
The name change is critical for us because a lot of times, with crypto, it’s not very obvious the full range of things that people can do to be able to solve their problems. And so, it became increasingly clear to us that we were in danger of people narrowly defining what it is that we did. Some just think of us as a crypto exchange or platform for sending cash. It was something we wanted to fix. One day, it became clear to us that we’re the sum of this box and more. So, we had to turn all of these things into a consistent story and define the set of tools that we think of as the infrastructure for growing crypto adoption on the continent.
So, fundamentally, we think of ourselves as sort of building out the infrastructure for the rapid adoption of crypto. Each of the things that we build as a part of Helicarrier serves a purpose, but we have to ensure that is reasonably clear. We also ensure there’s a framework for users, investors, and even members of the press to be able to think about them very consistently.
One of the interesting questions we get asked is “How do you find your competitor?” We say, any crypto exchange or offline experience or WhatsApp groups of people trading crypto. Anything that would ordinarily be a remittance solution that you have to pay 5% or 10% fees for.
So, there are four major things we do: an exchange, Sendcash, Sendcash Pay, and our OTC desk, which is a way for businesses to effectively move money across borders. There’s also one more exciting thing in the pipeline.
What was your first memorable milestone?
I think our first milestone was when we hit a million dollars in volume processed in a month in the fall of 2018, just after YC Day.
I think December last year, the last month we had publicly shared, we added $20 million in monthly volume.
What was adoption like in the early stages of Buycoins?
In the first month of Buycoins, we had maybe 1,020 monthly active users in the month after YC, but now we have hundreds of thousands of registered users. So, it has been impressive growth over the last three years.
When did you notice a change in how users interacted with Buycoins?
I don’t know if I would describe it as a change. But the realisation is that we consistently grow goodwill. This is very clear, especially in moments where we right our mistakes.
I think in July last year when we had an upgrade for about a week and none of our services were working. But it was very fascinating, and amazing for me, to have no trouble with our customers the next morning. Users were helping us answer support queries on Twitter. When people asked, “What’s wrong?” before we got to it, other customers respond by saying, Oh, this is what’s happening with them. Don’t worry; they’re going to fix it. Your money is safe with Buycoins. This showed us how much confidence our users had in our product. And with the brand, generally.
We know that at this point, we have a huge fan base of customers that love using our product. They know that whenever there is a problem, we always try our best to solve their issues, and they’re very supportive of all of the things we do. They also give us very brutal feedback.
How would you describe Buycoins users?
That would be somebody that doesn’t want stress but wants to make cryptocurrency transactions. Or somebody who wants to be able to send money to Nigeria easily, or use cryptocurrencies to join a world of possibilities.
How are you making Buycoins safer for users?
Having to make security important is very critical because we are managing people’s assets. There are many risk factors we always have to address. So, what we do is, lean on the experts, learn from their experience battling these problems and just replicate solutions when necessary.
One good example is asset custody, where we don’t even worry about building the infrastructure ourselves because there are crypto custody companies that solve this problem, and we’re just like, okay, how much would it cost us? And we pay whatever the cost is to ensure that our customers’ funds are safe. That is the general mindset here. There are global companies that are incredibly good at this and offer world-class services, so, instead of inventing solutions from scratch, we outsource this problem. We also ensure we take our own security measures, so we know that everyone who uses the platform is verified and using their phones. There are a lot of measures we’ve put in place to ensure that whoever is sending us money is sending us their own money.
What is the hardest part of your role in customer service?
Well, I think the hardest part has been hiring, generally. One thing that Helicarrier takes very seriously is customer service. It’s very obvious in a lot of things we do. We try to make sure that anybody that works with us is as obsessed with it as we are. I spent a lot of time making sure that we got the right people, making sure we gave them the kind of experience that we wanted our customers to receive.
A large part of customer support’s work is telling customers that their money is not missing. Customers that have their money on any app open the app every second to check. Any changes and you hear, “Where’s my money?”
And there are times we have to explain to customers that their money was not missing and it is also missing because the value of assets reduces since we work in the crypto space. That’s why education was very important for us early on. You had customers that didn’t know that you shouldn’t send cryptocurrencies to certain addresses. No matter how much you tell some users not to send money to these addresses, they’ll still do what they want to do. So, having to explain to a customer that all your money is missing because you sent it to the wrong address is difficult.
How were you able to manage customers during CBN’s crackdown on crypto exchanges?
It’s been one of the obvious challenging points in the company’s lifecycle. We had to understand regulatory communication and ensure that we framed that effectively for our users and explained their implications to them. We had to let them know that their assets were completely safe.
The next thing for us was to figure out the shortest time for us to get back on our mission and ensure that users could do the things they want to do and extract the value they had always been able to extract from us.
Behind the scenes, we were able to process how we arrived at the problem in the first place, which involved figuring out which regulators or stakeholders to talk to, helping them understand the importance of crypto, and letting them know we are good-faith actors and that there wasn’t anything fishy going on in the space. We let them know we have the same goal, which is to empower Nigerians.
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I am the CEO of 9JAGISTLAND.My name is Adedeji Timothy and my co-owner is Oyekola Damilare.This blog is born out of our passion to educating to people in all aspect of internet life.We are enthusiastic about writing posts and articles online.
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