Thank you very much for your continued interest in our project.
The volume has gone down (not dramatically so) a bit since currently Vietnam is in lockdown and all borders closed (so no tourists are coming to use the machine which where a minor, but significant part of our user base); overall we are holding up quite well though.
In Vietnam (almost) everybody is quite aware of the situation and use of facemasks / hand sanitizers is widespread. Our firm also switched since last month to basically fully remote office and any physical interactions which still take place, are conducted with outmost care to avoid getting infected (many Vietnamese people live with and/or close with their parents and elderly family members which make it even more important to not become a spreader).
I've been following a few BTCATM projects over the past two years. The numbers are hard to ignore in terms of proliferation, and I am from Southeast Asia where in my own capital 2 ATMs were installed years ago but sadly, fell into disrepair (that I know of anyway based on the bitcoin atm radar of circa 2016).
Good luck to you. It's going to be bad for most businesses -- crypto not excluded -- but we will all come back bigger than ever!
Thank you.
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.