How Gate.io 3X'd Their Users: An Interview with Marie Tatibouet | Ep. 43

Ty Smith0:07

What is up, guys? Welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Show. Today we have a special guest, Marie Tatibouet from Gate.io. She is the CMO. So we're going to discuss a couple things regarding Gate.io's recent explosive growth and sort of how they accomplished that. So first of all, welcome, Marie.

Marie Tatibouet0:28

Thank you so much for having me on the show, Ty.

Ty Smith0:32

Of course. So first of all, I mean, Gate.io is obviously an exchange. Beyond that, can you give us a little bit of overview of what Gate.io is?

Marie Tatibouet0:39

Sure. So Gate.io is a centralized exchange which was started in 2013. So that makes us one of the oldest cryptocurrency exchanges. And as a result, we've been through our fair share of challenges. A lot of the exchanges that were around at that time are not here anymore. They've been through too many hacks and all of that kind of stuff. So because we've made it this far, it's because we've taken security really seriously. And we also take the user experience and providing transparency and integrity to the user very seriously as well.

Marie Tatibouet2:04

This has also helped us push into a variety of other products. For example, Wallet.io, which is a wallet that's directly linked to Gate.io, so it makes it easy to take your funds from Wallet.io, put it on the exchange very easily to go and trade, and vice versa. It's also led to the creation of GateChain, which is a public blockchain that takes user security extremely seriously with an innovative technology that enables a vault account, which enables 100% safeguarding of funds. We can get into that later.

Marie Tatibouet3:25

But basically, I think what I would like to say about Gate.io is everything that we do really goes around serving the user and helping them have the best trading experience possible whilst being able to, number one, provide the most secure environment, and number two, just providing them with all of the best features and all of the best coins and projects that are available to them on the market.

Ty Smith3:55

Awesome. So you are obviously CMO. Can you walk me through a little bit what that role entails and how long you've been there?

Marie Tatibouet4:03

Sure. I've been at Gate.io for three years now. I just celebrated my three-year anniversary. Before, we were focused more on the Asian markets, and since I joined, we really expanded into more international markets. So there's been a very big focus there since I first got started. And I think before, crypto was very much focused on the Asian markets anyways.

Marie Tatibouet5:10

Japan, Korea, China were definitely at the forefront of innovation, and the users were very much from those areas. Now, it's a lot more mixed. The US has always been there, of course, but I think we've also seen Western Europe and Europe in general really push things along. They are typically kind of laggards in the tech space, and they seem to finally have caught up. So it is very exciting to really see the entire world come together.

Marie Tatibouet5:49

And I am especially excited, we saw Africa come in last year, and we're really seeing Latin America come into its own this year. And I think that's really exciting. So my arrival has really kind of gone with our geographic expansion. And what else does the CMO do? Well, the main thing that we're always focused on is providing the users with the best experience as possible.

Marie Tatibouet6:53

Because if we provide them with a great user experience, then they'll trade more. And since we only make money from fees, commissions, if they trade more, then we make more money. So I think our incentive is very much aligned with the best interests of the user. We don't take a fee, for example, when projects are listed, which is very commonplace in the industry and at most other exchanges, which really makes the listing of all of these projects very subjective. That's not something that we do.

Marie Tatibouet8:17

Another way I can show you that we have transparency and integrity is our 100% proof of collateral feature, which enables you to go and see, "Okay, I dropped off my funds in this account." You can go and see where it is exactly. This is not the case at a lot of other exchanges, and it's definitely not the case at a bank. Usually, they will take your funds and loan it out to someone else. And in the case of a lot of exchanges, not only will they take your funds, they'll probably trade with it if they have their own trading desk. They'll probably front-run you with your own money, which is kind of crazy. So us being able to provide so much transparency is definitely what made me fall in love with Gate.io.

Marie Tatibouet9:52

So our main, my main objective is help the users have a great user experience, whether that be through education, through creating a better user experience, UI, all of that kind of stuff. And then, of course, try and get new users, right? And I think we've been very successful this year by partnering with a lot of different projects and doing a lot of really solid cross-promotions. And I think we were particularly successful in May of this year when we added 1.4 million new users, bringing us all the way up to 6 million users on our platform.

Ty Smith10:34

That was all May?

Marie Tatibouet10:36

That was all of May.

Ty Smith10:38

Interesting. And I mean, let's discuss that a little bit more. How? You went, from what I understand, I was looking at the user numbers, in less than a year, you went from 2.5 million to 6 million. That's pretty incredible growth that I think, a lot of people in marketing, crypto marketing at least, you always deal with it's like, "Oh, well, you didn't do anything different, the market just changed," which is so frustrating to hear because you put so much work in during the bear market to take, to kind of capitalize on when the market is hot. What do you attribute that success to?

Marie Tatibouet11:55

So first of all, you have to put all of that work in during the bear market to be able to capitalize on it, right, Ty? If you don't put all of that work in, then it's not going to go so well. The best time to build is during the bear market, right? And similarly, the best time to make an investment and to HODL is during the bear market. Everyone always seems to want to invest when the market is hot, but the best time to buy is during the bear market. And similarly, the best time to build is during the bear market as well. So we did have, of course, all of this initial building done throughout the bear market. And it wasn't so easy, for sure, to survive the bear markets. I mean, it was okay for us, but I did see a lot of exchanges die, a lot of media, really sadly, die, and a lot of projects die as well.

Marie Tatibouet13:19

But we have really bounced back. And I think one of the things that we have seen is there have been a lot of new projects that have come out, kind of like phoenixes out of all of the ashes of the crypto winter. We've seen a lot of new projects come alive from that, and it's been really interesting. The way that I like to put it is if we're going to rebuild Internet 3.0, and if all of the different applications that require a cryptocurrency to kind of be attached to it as a financial incentive, if all of those applications need cryptocurrency, then this is really only just the beginning of cryptocurrencies, right?

Ty Smith13:20

And there's so many nefarious characters, I guess, that people that kind of get out there and show their face, I think, are at a huge advantage to build trust and get people to use your product.

Marie Tatibouet13:34

The human element is extremely important. We very rarely list any project that's anonymous because it's very uncertain. Our research team that researches all of the different projects is very strong, and there's definitely a host of different things that we look at. And definitely anonymity is not really recommended. But beyond just what you're saying, you can have a name and still not really be a face, right? And so coming onto a YouTube channel, coming onto our live stream really helps build that humanity of the brand. And it's something that we ourselves are looking to expand all of the time as well.

Ty Smith14:21

Yeah, it seems like you guys are investing pretty heavily in building your own media channels, between the AMAs that you guys have. I think you guys have a number of shows on YouTube. I'm forgetting the names, but...

Marie Tatibouet14:33

Yes, I host a show every Friday called Crypto Flavors. Diksha hosts Crypto Daily, where she talks about India. And we have our community managers also starting shows for their own local markets. I think for the local markets especially, it's really important because everything in crypto is always in English, but a lot of users are not just English speakers, right? So it's important to be able to do that. And I think one of the most important things about us having our own media is that our media is not really biased. I mean, sure, you could argue that we're going to say the project is great, etc. But when it comes to the market, I don't really have any vested interest in pushing you this or that way in the same way that I think the crypto media is doing as well as they can, but they are very dependent of sponsorship, and there are a lot of dodgy practices that are happening in the crypto media. I've seen a lot of media not declare that something's a sponsorship, that they're getting paid, whether it's in tokens or in USDT or whatnot. And that's not only unethical, but that's also, in most jurisdictions, illegal. So there's still a long way to go. So I think one of the things that our users really appreciate is that we don't have any vested interest in whichever way that we tell the story. And I think that's an important point to make.

Ty Smith16:19

Yeah, and so the decision to launch your own media channels, was that one that you made or someone else on the team?

Marie Tatibouet16:25

Yes, that was one that I made. The live stream, it became clear to me as soon as the live stream functionality was launched on our platform that that was definitely something that we should use. And we have seen that users really enjoy being connected to the channel, watching us, interacting with us, asking us questions, especially during the AMAs. I think they get a little bored of just my face. They like having a new face on. And typically, it's great because they have the opportunity to ask all the questions that they want to ask before they make the jump into investing into the project.

Ty Smith17:09

So regarding marketing for an exchange, because crypto marketing is a topic in itself, and then it gets even more divisional with marketing exchanges, marketing, I don't know, accounting software, marketing tokens. For exchanges specifically, how would you rank different strategies? What would you put at the top of your priorities regarding, maybe it's like SEO or social media management or influencer marketing? How would you rank the typical crypto marketing strategies for an exchange?

Marie Tatibouet17:39

Sure. I think everything's important, of course. And I also think it depends what stage you're at in the space. When I first came on board, as an example, Gate.io was not so well known when it came to international media. So it was pretty hard for us to get mentioned in the media without paying. But the route that I chose was not to pay unless it was really a special situation, and definitely not to pay any of these smaller ones where they're not using ethical practices like I've mentioned, because that's just, I think it's just feeding what's first of all unethical, but also once you start paying, you can't really backtrack and not pay anymore. So we struggled for a while, but then Diksha Sharma, my head of PR, she was able to really establish all of her relationships with journalists. And now Gate is almost always, a lot of our press releases are up there when she sends them. A lot of the, we're often mentioned as one of the top exchanges and stuff like that. So that's all a lot of work. That's brand awareness, of course, right? Social media is really important because crypto is very much about community. And so social media is the platform that you most will need to use to engage with your community. For us, Telegram and Twitter are definitely the biggest, but we're also getting started with Clubhouse and a lot of other ones. It really, of course, also depends on your market. So some markets will use some social media platforms more than others. But social media, I would say, is definitely really important. Paid advertising is really hard in the crypto space because a lot of it is not possible, first of all.

Ty Smith19:48

Tell me about it.

Marie Tatibouet19:49

And that makes things hard, but that, you're able to interact with other media platforms and stuff like that. My experience has not been so successful. I think that's much more of a brand awareness thing, and so you have to decide, you have to decide where you want to invest your money when it comes to brand awareness, because you need brand awareness and then you also need, of course, conversion, right? And so the way that we are able to push conversion is usually with the listings and pushing the listings. And we're using the channels of social media to do that, PR to a certain extent. Influencers is also is not something we've used as much. I have worked with some influencers, but it can be a little tricky. And I think a lot of the influencers, more and more so, have taken on a lot of unethical practices as well. And that's a real problem, especially now that we're seeing bigger influencers, so who are not crypto-related originally, come into the space. And maybe they were making $2 for CPM because they were talking about, I don't know, shoes. And now because they're talking about finance, they're making $15 per CPM, right? So the amount of money that they're making on YouTube is a lot higher. And so you're seeing that they're really multiplying the number of videos around that kind of activity. And we've seen some pretty awful projects being promoted, like Trust the Kids, which is like exploiting charity for their own personal interest. I think it's a real problem. So with influencers, I'm very careful, and I really recommend to everyone to be extremely careful when they see an influencer promoting a project. Maybe they're going to be dumping on you. And actually, I was thinking about this when I was just walking around, and I was thinking, maybe these influencers, they should make the tokens that they accept and the address at which they accept them public so that we can see that they're not dumping on the users.

Ty Smith22:41

Yeah, it's an interesting concept. Yeah, no, and I do feel like the influencers that have been in the crypto space for a while are pretty good. We do a ton of influencer marketing, and we are very selective with the influencers that we work with because there is, like you said, unethical practices that just are not good for the community in general. And we're obviously here for the long term. We've been here for several years, and we have a vested interest in crypto being a self-policing industry to a sense. I find that the influencers that are coming into crypto during a bull run just to, like you mentioned, make more money off of the content they're already creating, rather than the ones that are here for crypto in the long term, are worse with these unethical practices, whereas the crypto ones are pretty on top of what's allowed, what's not allowed, what's ethical. So I will defend them in that sense a little bit. But yeah, no, I mean, transparency in general is always helpful, especially for people that don't realize, I mean, you can disclose things in a lot of different ways when you're an influencer, and sometimes things are not super obvious or easy to miss, which can be problematic.

Marie Tatibouet23:53

Yes, but it does, I think one of the things is it does all, of course, it lies with the influencer to be as transparent as they can, but it also lies with the user to be careful with, this is not virtual, this is virtual currency, but it is your money. You should be taking responsibility for what you're doing. That's definitely something that I always say every Friday. I say to all of the viewers, be careful with what you're doing. There's a lot of scammers out there. I've been impersonated so many times by now. It's really all of my...

Ty Smith24:39

Yeah, we actually have a, there's now a, because I didn't recently, I didn't invest in social media until recently, and then as we started doing that, I started getting impersonators. And now we actually have an impersonator agency, which is probably the first impersonator agency there is, who actually just copied our website word for word, just replaced every mention of Coinbound with their name. And it's like, it's such an interesting phenomenon that you don't see really in other industries.

Ty Smith25:04

But as far as influencer marketing from the standpoint of an exchange, you touched on the ethical reasons for being careful. Have you explored it to a sense where you could say it's effective or not effective for Gate.io?

Marie Tatibouet25:18

We have seen, we have seen some positive results. We haven't scaled it to make it to be able for me to be able to answer your question to the best of my ability. But yeah, I think we have seen some positive ROI. We have also seen some where I think it was more brand building. And that's okay. It's part of the mix.

Ty Smith25:44

Yeah, exactly. Especially early on, we always recommend, we'll recommend doing influencer marketing, especially YouTube content because it's longer form, because we can get an educational amount of content built up. So even if you don't see an immediate positive ROI on that, you at least have a place to point people that are going to check you out and need to see how something works.

Marie Tatibouet26:07

I think one of the things that I saw that I thought was really good was when EllioTrades partnered up with SuperFarm. And I think that the way that he did it was really interesting. He was very open about the fact that he was an early investor, and he really pushed the project a lot. And I think like for SuperFarm, that worked out really well. And I think it also probably worked out really well for EllioTrades as well. So I would, if you can, of course, not every project is like SuperFarm, right? But I think if you can find, whether it's someone as big as him or a smaller influencer, if you can partner like that in a real way where maybe the person is giving you real feedback and they're really going to push your project, and it's going to be very clear that they're an early investor, then I think it can be very beneficial.

Ty Smith27:08

No, you had touched a little bit earlier on the fact that you guys were very heavily targeted in Asia and have expanded beyond that. Have you found the need to tweak any strategies for Asia versus North America, for example?

Marie Tatibouet27:24

We don't do a lot of promotion in North America because, well, we still have some users, for sure. But in the US and Canada, we are closed for margin trading and a host of all of our functionalities because of all of the regulation. We're working on going past the regulation and making sure we have all the licensing and stuff like that, but it's still a work in progress. We're much further along in Western Europe, for example. So I might answer that for Western Europe.

Ty Smith28:01

Yeah, yeah, please do.

Marie Tatibouet28:03

Yeah. I do think there's a lot of things that are different. There's definitely a lot more convincing to do in Western Europe. The cost for acquisition is definitely higher. You definitely have to touch them more often, I think. They're a little more educated, and so a reward campaign might not work as well.

Ty Smith28:39

When you say a reward campaign, do you mean like a giveaway?

Marie Tatibouet28:41

Like any of the bounty hunting, giveaway, and stuff like that, it's been very popular in a lot of Asian countries. But I think the Western European or the Europeans, they're very interested in a lot of the high-quality projects. And I have met a lot of high-quality projects here in Europe. And a lot of them are actually quite far along when it comes to regulation as well. So I think that kind of brings an increased amount of trust in the project and hence in the investing in the project.

Ty Smith29:20

Interesting. Another kind of, I guess, similar question is, you've been the CMO for three years, which has seen bull markets and bear markets. How have the strategies changed between the two?

Marie Tatibouet29:34

Yeah, that's an excellent question. So I started out in the bear market. We definitely were pushing a lot of, still a lot of projects, but we're definitely pushing a lot of different kinds of campaigns. And then when the bull market hit, it was very much about just being able to keep up with everything. There was a huge influx in the number of users. I had to hire a lot of people. And we had to, one of the biggest things is we had to hire a lot of new customer support people.

Ty Smith30:11

Yeah, I'm sure.

Marie Tatibouet30:12

And that was a bit of a struggle because it's pretty difficult to do customer support for a cryptocurrency exchange. The amount of security that is needed, the amount of technical knowledge that is needed is very high. You can't just recruit a person who will do customer support for any other industry. They really have to be trained, and they have to be very patient, very patient. I have seen, it depends on the country, but there are some countries where the users are incredibly intense. And they will try and resort to semi-blackmail. I mean, it is a little nuts.

Ty Smith31:10

We work in a fun industry.

Marie Tatibouet31:12

But it's definitely challenging, and everyone that I've hired so far has been up to the task. So I'm really grateful to have found all of the great people who work with me.

Ty Smith31:25

Yeah, it's like a constant, I mean, this isn't even like a marketing thing, this is just like an entrepreneurship in the crypto space thing, that it's so hard to maintain the correct amount of staff, regardless of what kind of company you have, because the demand of the market changes so quickly, you're either always overstaffed or understaffed. It's such a hard balance.

Marie Tatibouet31:48

We've mostly been understaffed so far. But we have really pushed things along. I think we're at where we need to be right now. And I'm just waiting. Right now, the market is stable, I guess, sideways, I guess.

Ty Smith32:06

Yeah, stable is a good way to put it. It's an interesting, we're like sideways kind of. I mean, we did just pump like 12% yesterday or the day before, but...

Marie Tatibouet32:13

So it's hard to say. It could be any minute. I have my button ready to go and recruit more, but we're stable for now. But I think I've been, what is very exciting about the crypto space is that everyone I've been able to hire so far is really passionate about crypto. And so I don't need to motivate them so much. They do what they love to do, which is like read about crypto, engage with people about crypto, and we all talk about crypto all of the time. So, and I'm sure all of their loved ones are also very happy because they get to, I don't know if you have some friends who are not in the crypto space, but they don't want to hear about crypto, right? So it's better that we get it all out.

Ty Smith33:02

Yeah, well, now they do. Now they're like, 'All right, everyone's making a lot of money doing this. How do I get in?' But yeah, no, for years, it was like, 'Ty, we don't care about Bitcoin.'

Ty Smith33:15

All right, cool. You had mentioned a lot of helpful information regarding getting listed, and I think a lot of companies that listen to this podcast and are looking for marketing resources are interested in getting listed on exchanges. Can you walk through a little bit regarding what goes into your process for listing a new company, a new token, on Gate?

Marie Tatibouet33:37

Sure. So the first thing I will say is, like I said, we don't take a listing fee. We do ask for budget, but the budget is allocated to the marketing promotional activities. None of it goes into our pocket, just so that's clear. So we ask for budget, and then the budget is allocated between some of the different activities, like the trading competition, the listing vote, etc., etc. But what makes a good project, we typically like to see some volume. So we want to see maybe a few million dollars' worth of volume because, and it has to be real volume, right?

Ty Smith34:25

Is that daily, couple million daily?

Marie Tatibouet34:27

Yeah, yeah, daily. We can tell if it's all being pumped by a whale. Like I said, our research team is incredibly experienced. So yeah, of course, we also, like I said, we don't really usually engage in an anonymous team, but anything's possible, of course. The reason for that is we very rarely delist any, it's really, really rare for us to delist any project. So we need to make sure that the project is going to really be used and really going to stay on with us for a long time. So yeah, we need to see some initial volume. We do also have a partnership with TrustSwap. So any of the projects that get listed on TrustSwap are kind of like sent our way and will typically be listed on Gate. So that's also another way. And I think just fundamentals, obviously. We've seen a lot of interest this year in NFTs and in DeFi. And I feel like the next wave might be a kind of combination of the two. We've seen a lot of the gaming coins really pump this week. And I wouldn't be surprised to see more of that coming. It really seems like all of the gamers, the esports people, are really becoming very familiar with cryptocurrency and are going to look to really engage in that vertical this year.

Ty Smith36:10

Cool. Thanks, that's super helpful, and I think people are going to find that valuable. I want to wrap this up. It's been awesome chatting with you and learning about everything. Before we go, though, where can people find you online?

Marie Tatibouet36:24

Sure. So come and look for us on Gate.io, very simple to remember. On Twitter, you can find us @Gate_io. And to find me, I am starting a newsletter really soon. I'm going to be talking about altcoins and stuff like that. You can come and find me on Twitter @MarieTatibouet. I know my name's a little long. Or you can just type in like CMO Gate.io, and you should be able to find me. Follow me on Twitter, and I will be posting my newsletter out there. I'll be posting once a week and just talking kind of what I do on my live streams, which is just talk about all of the really exciting new projects that are coming out there. I'm super psyched for August 5th with the ETH upgrade. I think there's a lot of great things that are going to come out of the upgrade. It's going to be a struggle with all of the miners, that's for sure. But without struggle, we can't go past and move forward. So I welcome it.

Ty Smith37:39

Yeah, I think it's going to be an interesting couple of months regardless of what happens with price, just there's so much going on. All right, well, thank you for your time. It's been really cool chatting with you, and so yeah.

Marie Tatibouet37:50

Thanks so much, Ty, and a big thanks to all of the Coinbound audience.