1. Focus on the community

If you want to embrace a community, you really need to be part of the community. I was a reader on the r/Bitcoin forums on Reddit and I realized that it was the right place to reach our audience. I posted the news of us accepting Bitcoin there and it quickly became the #1 headline in the Bitcoin channel. I am always in that forum and on Twitter, commenting on questions and helping readers out. Throwing up a Bitcoin logo on your website, for example, simply isn’t enough anymore to engage with the community.

When you want to target a community, whether it’s PayPal users, Bitcoin users or just people who want to manage their gift cards, you need to show them the value that your product will bring to their lives. That’s really hard if you don’t understand them. Spend time understanding your customers.

2. Listen to your customers

I know this can sound cliché, but we had a number user experience problems after launching. Everything from crashes to usability problems to the inability to track sent cards to friends. Before we started building more features and functionality, we ensured that what we had built was robust and stable.

One of the great things about having an app, is that you have feedback loops in the app stores, that tell you what your customers think of you (really!). We focused on getting our apps to 4 stars plus, and a lot of that work was around fixing bugs and improving UX.

We also found that people wanted certain features and functionalities that we had never even thought of. The more people asked for something, the higher we prioritized it.

We on-boarded brands that our customers were asking for and we ensured that we started offering weekend support for them, too — this really drove loyalty and engagement.

3. Be original & innovate

After accepting Bitcoin, other gift card sites started following our lead. Copycats will always follow you — but you need to innovate to stay ahead. In order to stay ahead of the curve, we launched Gyft Points — our loyalty program that rewards customers for using Gyft.

It’s been our most successful innovation to date, but we have more in the works. Anyone trying to catch up has to spend time copying our innovations, instead of innovating for themselves — a great position for an early stage market leader like us to be in.

4. Reward the right behavior

This is key. The whole point of Bitcoin is that there is no fraud risk and very low payment fees — so why not give that back to the customer? We did — in the form of Gyft points with 3% back for Bitcoin users. We even went one step further by giving everyone retroactive points for past purchases — this really locked in a ton of loyalty and goodwill for us.

While credit card and Paypal purchases also earned loyalty points, we decided to give them fewer points to reflect their increased risk and higher transaction costs.

5. Laser-focused marketing & advertising

I’m a huge fan of community (e.g. reddit), intent (e.g. search) and demographic (e.g. interest) based marketing. We approached some major publishers in the Bitcoin space early and partnered with them to advertise to their audiences — we established relationships and some coveted real estate. Given that these audience segments are typically small — you can get a lot of awareness within a community at a cost efficient price point.

Retargeting is also very important — it’s one thing to reach the right customers, but you need to bring them over the hurdle to purchase too.

6. Mobile first

When trying to disrupt, think mobile first. How would this business look if we started from the perspective that mobile was the only way forward. Once you nail that use case, then you can expand your web presence. It took us nearly a year to launch a website after we launched our mobile app.

We now sometimes test things on the web and if it works, we roll it out to mobile — but our intention is always to consider what the impact will be in a mobile world. Also, the test cycles on web are much faster than on mobile.

7. Minimum Viable Product is not enough

Product development strategy is key. Many startups fall into the trap of believing that minimum viable product is enough, yet it’s actually just the foundation for innovation — your customers are not going to fall in love with an MVP, but it will give you enough to start gathering feedback and iterating on your product.

In order to build great product, small teams need to be focused. We use tools like Crittercism and New Relic to ensure that what we build works as intended. We’re always fixing bugs and improving product fidelity. We started using Utest for QA testing which also helped us improve our product significantly.

8. Be agile & nimble

When Apple announced Passbook integration, we had the team work the entire weekend to get it launched the next week. And we did. We had such great success with our iOS app, we quickly realised we needed to get Android out before holiday season 2012. I took 6 weeks. We launched Samsung Wallet integration in even less time.

Being laser focused doesn’t mean you can’t experiment either — you need to take chances sometimes. If we had waited for Bitcoin to go mainstream, we might not have been the first player in the gift card space to launch it.

9. Find scalable ways to partner

We launched our Gyft Partner API exactly a year ago and since then we have onboarded dozens of partners. Most notably is American Greeting’s mobile greeting card offering, justWink. Using our API’s, they have been able to offer gift cards to their millions of users on their mobile phones, all delivered on the Gyft platform.

We get daily requests to use our platform for delivering mobile gift cards. Companies of all sizes can sign up and start using our API instantly.

10. Work with great people

I can honestly say that the team members at Gyft are some of the best I have ever had the privilege of working with. We are also very fortunate to have worked with very supportive investors who I can call on at any time, including Ashton Kutcher (via his investment fund, A-grade), Google Ventures, Chamath Palihapitiya from S23P and TX Zhao from KarlinVC.