Amber is a Bitcoin investment automation app that makes it easy for anybody to buy and hold the digital currency.
Founded by Aleksandar Svetski, Ashley McVeigh and Chantelle de la Rey in January 2018, Amber works a little like a gym membership, where you put aside a small amount every day, week and month and slowly accumulate the world’s fastest growing asset.
“I’ve been telling people to buy some Bitcoin for years now, but it’s always been in the ‘too hard’ basket for most,” Aleksandar says.
Aleksandar says the most common obstacles to Bitcoin acquisition have been:
- I don’t know how to buy it
- I don’t know where to buy it
- I don’t know how much to buy
- I don’t know how to store it
“I decided to do something about it,” he says, “and put together a vision for a product that would solve those problems.”
Amber simplifies the process of acquiring cryptocurrency, making it obtainable for virtually everyone.
“It can cost as little as a coffee a day,” Aleksandar says. “That’s an amount anybody can set aside, with the potential for outsized returns in the long term.
“The issue is that most people don’t understand money, finance or investing, but have heard about Bitcoin. Instead of having them stay out of the market, or do what many did in 2017 – invest in Ponzi schemes, or what are known as ‘alt coins’ or ‘initial coin offerings’ that are worthless – we make exposure to Bitcoin so easy.”
Aleksandar says the biggest struggle the team has faced is being able to differentiate themselves.
“We’re a fintech product, more so than a crypto product. Trying to be a fintech product that uses Bitcoin as the asset class for safe, steady investing, and being able to differentiate ourselves from the rest of that noise, has been hard,” he says.
“We have had some good successes that set us apart. One of our key highlights was when we picked up a sizable investment from QUT Bluebox at the end of 2018, making us the only product of our kind to have investment from a university.”
Attracting funding for Amber has been a long road, but Aleksandar is proud to have taken the slow and steady route.
“We avoided the entire ‘initial coin offering’ (ICO) space and stayed adamant that we were going to sell equity in the business to investors, not some made-up token worth nothing, with no rights,” Aleksandar says.
“Everyone thought we were crazy in the early days, because if we had done an ICO, like so many did, we probably could have raised millions overnight.
“I’m glad we stuck to our guns, because fast forward to 2020, we’re one of the only companies who started in early 2018 that are still around, and with a fraction of the money those ICO startups raised.
“We have raised $1.7M, and that money has been hard at work funding the development of our product, an incredible team, and some customer acquisition. As little as possible has been spent on anything ancillary because product, team and customers are our primary focus.”
In 2020, Aleksandar says the Amber team is doubling down on product and customer acquisition. They are building more automation features and refining their back-end technical processes so that as they begin to scale, their tech stack can handle it.
“We’re also raising a little more money,” he says. “Enough to get us to the cash flow break-even point. We’ll be rolling out a version of Amber into Europe so that we can broaden the total addressable market.”
Bitcoin has come a long way since the first network was created in 2009. But, according to Aleksandar, it still has plenty of room for growth.
“If Bitcoin becomes a global currency, as the trends and data suggest, it still has 100x growth ahead of it,” he says. “Having some sensible exposure is a great idea.”
