GENERAL BYTES brings Android, Bitcoin and blockchain-based technologies to new and unexpected places. GENERAL BYTES is one of the world’s leading bitcoin and blockchain technology providers with over 12000 Bitcoin ATMs sold. GENERAL BYTES ATMs can be found in over 135 countries globally.
Tell us about yourself?
My backgound is in IT but have been working with digital currencies since the early days of Digicash and e-gold in the early 90s. Our founder, and CTO, Karel Kyovsky, is a veteran in computer enginering and electronics and has been involved in the crypto scene since the early days in 2011.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Keep improving your product, and always (and this is very important!) listen to your customers and use their feedback to make your own product better. For a company, clients are the most important assets and, where possible, should decide on the direction of a company’s products. This is the same at GENERAL BYTES, without our clients, our company would not exist.
What problem does your business solve?
GENERAL BYTES Bitcoin ATMs make it easy and convenient to onboard new users to the world of cryptocurrencies. In essence GENERAL BYTES provides a bridge between the physical world of cash and the virtual world of cryptocurrencies.
Our EveryTrade.io product makes it easy to keep track of digital assets and help them manage their portfolio. Even though it all started with Bitcoin, our software and ATMs support many different cryptocurrencies nowadays.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Back in the days we looked for a way to make cryptocurrencies available to the general public and the concept of an ATM is something everyone is familiar with. With this in mind we created our first model, the BATMOne.
Nowadays it is our clients that inspire us. Sounds strange to some maybe but they are the ones using our products on a daily basis so listening to them will help shape the products and inspire us to create new features.
What is your magic sauce?
Offer a good product at a great price and offer an ever expanding set of features. Our steady stream of updates and new features helps clients keep their machines relevant and up-to-date. It is because of this that we have one of the largest market-share in the industry. Our existing clients are more important than new clients and we realize that for us to succeed, our clients have to succeed. Without our clients, we would not be here.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
The next 5 years’ is a long time in crypto but we’ll keep expanding our product offering with new models and new features for existing models. What we are currently seeing is a trend to more 2-way ATMs (buy and sell crypto) and will start offering more models in that field.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Scaling. It is hard to scale up your company if the market is growing exponentially but because our founder and CTO already had years of experience in manufacturing and the tech industry, we managed to scale. It is not just you, as a company that has to be able to scale exponentially, but all your suppliers have to be able to scale too and this, can sometimes, be a bit of a challenge. Not a problem though, we love what we’re doing so not letting it stress us out and keep our heads cool and think in solutions, not problems.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We’d love to hear from you! Just visit www.generalbytes.com or EveryTrade.io for more information and you’ll find our social media links in the footer of the site. Follow, like, subscribe and let’s talk!
