Yes, many "about-to-be"-BTM-operators severely underestimate the amount of time/effort/nerves; problem solving skills & technical knowledge, business negotiation skills (e.g. working with location partners) and resources for customer service it takes to run these machines.
And that is all before we even talking about marketing/SEO; liquidity management; regulatory requirements and many other areas come in...
Many newcomers think they buy a machine; throw it into a corner and plug it in... - and then it's printing them money consistently every month.
And the companies selling you those machines have of course an incentive to induce such an image into your mind to sell more machines
The reality is unfortunately not even close to this.
Our team also had a learning curve to take back from 2016 onwards when we installed the first machine here in Ho Chi Minh City; for the first 2-3 years we certainly also did not operate on the level we are operating now and it was more of a sideplay for the owners of our mother company
BitcoinVN.
However, earlier last year the decision was made to put more experienced and skilled human resources behind this project and build it out as a proper department within the entire company - and the results of these changes have been very encouraging and resulted ultimately in a much better experience and service level for our customers, a massively reduced downtime and last but not least a multiplication of business revenue.
Very interesting to read your experience. Unfortunately, for many businesses in crypto, not just in your sector, people seem to have very skewed expectations. Like most businesses, it's a lot of hard work, patience and well, luck. I've not had very much success in my own ventures, but I recognise that those who do succeed are patient enough to experiment and try, learning as much as possible from different methods.
It's also non-formulaic, different geography, different economic class, demographics are so, so important to me. But I'm really curious if there were any proper attempt to study and assess the performance of all these BATMs globally. Every report out there is simply about growth, and no real insight into usage. Perhaps we'll touch base about this down the road.
Thanks for your time!
