A brand nobody knew, in a category nobody could bank
I joined CoinDCX in August 2019. It was not a well-known name — not to the general public, and not even inside India's crypto circles. I knew the other exchanges. I did not know this one.
The harder problem was the category. The Reserve Bank of India had barred banks from providing rupee rails to crypto exchanges, and the matter was still before the courts. An entire industry was operating under a cloud with no certainty about whether it would be permitted to exist. CoinDCX was young, had raised a single round, and had very little budget. Every activity had to justify itself before it ran.
In March 2020 the Supreme Court set the ban aside. The market opened. Venture capital moved into the space almost immediately, and the objective became simple and urgent: acquire.
Three constraints that ruled out the obvious playbook
Every startup in India at that time ran the same acquisition motion — performance marketing on Meta and Google, scaled with capital. We could not run it. Not because we chose something cleverer, but because the door was shut.
That last point deserves explaining, because it looks like a weakness and was actually a position. Competition ran unconstrained. We measured every activity and every number, because we believed a downturn was coming. In a bull market nobody distinguishes between a user acquired well and a user acquired badly. In the downturn that follows, that is the only distinction that matters. Acquiring the wrong audience fast is not an advantage — it is a liability that arrives late.
Five calls, three of which cost us in the short term
Build before spending, then wait out the regulator. Six months went into a new, simpler app, launched December 2020. Then a bill exploring the prohibition of virtual currency was expected in Parliament, and we held for roughly six weeks until the picture was clear — knowing every week put us further behind competitors already in market.
Own the word, not the brand. Bitcoin was the term in circulation, and 2021 was a global bull run. We built the campaign around Bitcoin rather than around CoinDCX, on the reasoning that riding an existing conversation beats manufacturing a new one. It also had to be easy for others to extend — shoulder content was a requirement in the brief before any creative existed.
Refuse the claim. At the start of the campaign, competitors were advertising extraordinary returns — the gains you could have made, the money being minted. It converted. We declined it.
Every asset falls eventually. A brand built on gains has nothing to stand on when the market turns, and it has actively taught its users to expect something it cannot deliver. Beyond that, returns-led messaging in a category under regulatory examination invites glare, if not action.
We chose to be responsible in what we told people, first — and to stay on the right side of the law as a consequence of that, rather than the other way around.
A boast, turned into a question
Investment talk in India carries a flaunting instinct. People do not quietly hold assets — they mention them. The most iconic version of that in Hindi cinema is a challenge thrown across a room: मेरे पास गाड़ी है, बंगला है… तुम्हारे पास क्या है? We took a leaf from that cadence and inverted it. Not a brand telling you to buy Bitcoin. A peer asking whether you already had.
Returns-led messaging: the gains, the winners, the numbers. Effective, and a debt that comes due the moment the market turns.
A question between equals, in humour rather than hard sell. No claim, no promise, no number to be held to later.
Humour was a challenger's choice. We could not out-spend or out-claim the incumbents, and trying would have been a fight worth losing. Humour let us enter the conversation at a different altitude entirely.
Hindi did two jobs. It opened the campaign to the large majority of the Indian audience rather than the English-speaking metros where crypto adoption already skewed. It also gave creators an obvious move — switch to English, or mix the two — which meant the line travelled further and mutated more than a single-language campaign ever would have.
Everything that could go wrong, did
The campaign ran during the second COVID wave. Ad films were shot remotely. We did not run the full edit cycle — we released the first edited draft, because speed mattered more than polish and the window was closing.
The IPL was meant to carry it. We had bought significant inventory around the tournament, on the correct assumption that it was the largest attention window available to us all year. The 2021 season was suspended mid-tournament. Every rupee of that inventory had to be redirected.
What replaced it was, at the time, unusual. The campaign was launched by a celebrity on Twitter, picked up by others, and moved onto OTT. Around 200 influencers carried it, each with their own coupon codes and vouchers. Almost none of them were crypto creators — there was no meaningful crypto creator ecosystem in India then. They were KOLs from entirely unrelated fields, which is precisely why it reached people who had never sought crypto content out.
For a period, Bitcoin and CoinDCX were close to synonymous. That association paid on SEO, on performance, and on every other format we ran — long after the campaign itself had stopped.
Because paid social and search were closed to us, the time that would have gone into media buying went into understanding the customer instead — where traders were, what they consumed, how they decided. That research is what made placement and message work, and it is why the constraint turned out to be an advantage. A series of campaigns followed, including cricket sponsorships and the T20 World Cup.
What it delivered
Beyond the numbers: a category-defining brand association, a marketing organisation that grew from one person to 60+, and — the part that mattered most in 2022 — an acquisition engine that did not have to be disowned when the market turned.
The constraint was the strategy.
Every marketer says they'd love to be more creative if only the budget allowed. This was the inverse: the money was arriving, and the channels were shut. Being locked out of Meta and Google forced a level of customer understanding that a functioning performance-marketing account would have made unnecessary — and that understanding, not the media spend, is what actually built the brand. The discipline of refusing returns-led messaging looked expensive during the bull run and looked like the only sane decision eighteen months later. Both of those are the same lesson: what you cannot do, and what you will not do, shape a brand more than what you can.
The harder lesson is about what a number like 13M conceals. Growth organisations celebrate the user who arrives and systematically under-resource the one who stays — the top of the funnel is visible, attributable and easy to praise, while retention is diffuse and belongs to everybody. We were not immune to that, and I have since watched the same asymmetry play out in companies with no crypto, no regulator and no closed channels. It is not a category problem. It is what happens when acquisition is the only thing anyone is measured on.