Another week, another turbulent seven days in the crypto markets.

If you’re here for the long term though, coins are on sale!

Marketing & Growth Hacking

We received several queries this week about marketing plans for the CoinFi April 6 open beta release. Some of you have wondered why you’re not seeing a big hyped-up marketing push.

In order to focus on delivering the best possible product, April 6 is a soft release, where we roll out a product skeleton and start gathering user feedback. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be testing and integrating more features while gathering real user data.

Although there are no fireworks planned for April 6, this is also a great opportunity to share more about our longer term marketing philosophy and a bit of what goes on behind the scenes.

We work actively to nurture relationships with journalists who cover finance and crypto markets – Tim frequently takes calls and interviews with reporters to provide quotes, background info, and offer his view of the market – here’s a recent mention in CNBC as an example. Here is another one.

Many of these interviews don’t translate into features because that’s not our current objective. We’re looking to add value and build relationships, so when we roll out our bigger platform features in Q2, we’ll be in a position to do a large PR push.

But perhaps even more important than building buzz via traditional marketing channels are the growth strategies we’re baking into our product development cycle.

The Power Of Content Marketing

“The process of integrating and optimizing your product to a big platform requires a blurring of lines between marketing, product, and engineering, so that they work together to make the product market itself.” – Andrew Chen

Being a media, data, and software company at the same time gives us some unique advantages when it comes to organic marketing.

One of the interesting things we can do as a media and data/software company is to use our content business as a way to build a self perpetuating marketing machine for our data and software offerings.

Content is a core part of our platform, but it can also be used as a marketing tool to drive a lot of targeted eyeballs.

Here’s a solid piece from the Content Marketing Institute explaining how content marketing differs from traditional product marketing.

And here’s an example of how this works in the real world:

While our data science team was looking at some of the social data we’re collecting, we published this piece on the so-called Ian Balina effect.

Whether you’re fan or not, Ian Balina is a popular (and polarizing) figure in the space. In fact, Ian himself tweeted the post to his 140,000+ followers as it got shared around. Tens of thousands of new visitors to the CoinFi site got exposed to our work and over a thousand of them signed up for the CoinFi waitlist.

We produced this piece to examine an interesting data phenomenon that could be interesting to crypto investors, and as it got shared, we brought in new potential platform users. It’s an example of how we can use content as a powerful marketing channel.

After our platform launch, we’ll be producing a lot more in-house content and analysis that ties in directly to the platform features we’re developing. The content itself adds value for existing platform users, but it’s also useful for the broader crypto audience.

Everyone knows what traditional product marketing looks like, but content marketing is a more subtle marketing channel that when done well, doesn’t really look like marketing at all. But the results speak for themselves.

Of course, content marketing is only one pillar of CoinFi’s longer term approach to growth – we’ll be sharing more about our growth strategies with you in the near future!

A Peek At The Platform

I’ll leave you with just a little peek at one of our early UI mockups.