What if you could improve your app’s adoption and user engagement by redirecting your advertising budget to your customers and clients?

We spoke to Lorien Gamaroff, the CEO of Centbee, about how they’ve flipped their marketing model, from paying for ad banners to rewarding their users for marketing their wallet via Bitcoin’s microtransactions – and how they launched the model via a provably-fair competition.

From ineffective ad banners to a viral incentivised marketing campaign

What is Centbee?

Gamaroff uses the company’s slogan to explain what they’re about: ‘Activate your lifestyle. There’s a great market of young people, teenagers, and young adults who don’t necessarily have access to digital payment methods and credit cards. We want to make their lives active and enable their lifestyles by being able to buy the things that they wish for, the things that make their lives fun.’ Centbee’s app lets their users achieve these goals by giving them ways to spend their Bitcoin SV on services like Uber and to go shopping at big brand retail outlets ‘so that they can have the life they wish for’.

Where in the world can you get and use Centbee?

‘Centbee is available in probably over 100 countries from east to west,’ Gamaroff proudly confirms. This wide coverage means you can go shopping in places like Mexico and the United States all the way to Japan. He reveals that the company has a big following in places like India and Indonesia, while they also serve several African countries and most of Europe.

A microtransaction-powered marketing model, launched with a provably-fair competition

The Bitcoin Association teamed up with Centbee to run a fun competition to get Centbee users to engage with the app more and share Centbee with their friends. In addition, the top six contestants won an amount of Bitcoin SV to enable them to attend the BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai.

Gamaroff describes the cornerstone of the campaign: Centbee’s Honey Programme:

‘Honey is just tiny amounts of Bitcoin SV that people can earn for doing basic engagements with the app. If you log in, check your transactions, look at all the products available in the store, change your theme or add a profile photo, you earn Honey. The Honey Programme also rewards people for topping up their wallet with Bitcoin SV and referring a friend.’

Soon wallets like Centbee will be legally required to verify their customers. Gamaroff divulges their proactive approach: By integrating those document verifications that users are generally reluctant to do into the Honey Programme, users are rewarded for their participation.

Though the Centbee team had been developing the Honey Programme already, the competition made for the perfect launch. With the help of a live leaderboard, users could see how they measured up to their rivals, to give them the experience of a real-time, global tournament.

A provably-fair competition with Bitcoin SV microtransactions

The Honey Programme has an element of the provably-fair contest. Gamaroff illustrates the mechanics: ‘Because it’s Bitcoin SV, we send your Honey directly into your wallet. If people did any of these engagements, they would get little notifications in their wallets saying, “You’ve earned so much money.” and those were all Bitcoin SV transactions happening on the blockchain.’

As blockchain is a transparent ledger, it’s quite easy to confirm that the monetary tokens truly exist on the blockchain. ‘This is a great way to show that the recorded amounts are, in fact, accurate because it’s impossible to fake that if you have a trail on the Bitcoin SV ledger.’

On the response to the competition, Gamaroff exclaims: ‘It was great! Not only was it free to enter, but everybody was a winner,’ referring to the fact that participants got to keep you at the Bitcoin SV they’d earned and spend it in the stores Centbee supports. 

Flipping the traditional paid advertising model

Now that the competition is over, Centbee continues to run their Honey Reward Programme, and Centbee users keep earning. 

Acknowledging that their Honey Programme has been a turning point in their marketing, he says: ‘We found it very difficult to market Centbee on existing Internet platforms and social networks (as Bitcoin-related products and services are often banned). With this programme, instead of putting our budget into those traditional platforms where we pay ad vendors, we’re considering moving our entire marketing budget into the Honey Reward programme to let word of mouth do all the work for us.’

Get Centbee wallet and start earning

Gamaroff is enthusiastic about the value their marketing model offers clientele: ‘All you need to do to start earning Honey is to download Centbee, start using it and share it. Now our marketing budget goes to our users, who use that Honey to shop with us. So I think it’s a great way to do marketing with Bitcoin SV.’

To learn more about Centbee, visit their website at Centbee.com. If you’ve got a smartphone and want to see what it’s like to use real digital cash at a very low cost, download the Centbee wallet on the Google Play store and the Apple App store. 

Lizette Louw
Louw