← All work

Founding Product Marketer · Zug, Geneva, London · 2019–2020

Globcoin: fifteen open pursuits, three product lines, and nothing reusable between them

SECTOR

Stablecoins and multi-currency payments

STAGE

Startup, post-token launch

MARKET

Switzerland, UK, France, Kazakhstan, Japan, Qatar

ROLE

Founding Product Marketer

PERIOD

January 2019 – January 2020

PRODUCT LINES

3

COMPANY

globcoin.io
Fintech & PaymentsWeb3

The situation

Every competitor stablecoin could be explained in four words: one coin, one dollar. Ours needed a paragraph about GDP weighting before it made sense.

Globcoin was three companies and two tokens. A currency manager in Geneva whose founders had run up to twenty-two billion dollars of institutional currency mandates. A Swiss entity in Zug holding the intellectual property behind a fifteen-currency index. A London company running a multi-currency prepaid Mastercard.

In January 2019 they put a stablecoin on Ethereum. GLX was pegged not to a dollar but to that index: the fifteen largest economies weighted by GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity, plus five per cent gold, tracking around 85% of the world economy. It launched at Davos and was trading on three exchanges within a quarter, and it had a claim no other stablecoin could make: every competitor was a bet on one government's monetary policy, and this one wasn't.

Underneath that sat a handful of people running a card programme, a stablecoin and a line of bespoke coins for events and communities, with no product marketing function and, according to my own first weekly report, no shared drive.

01 · What this engagement produced

11 of 34 outputs

Research

Competition

Segment, position and price

Message

Launch and enable

Measure and maintain

Solid is what this engagement actually produced. Dashed is what it did not reach.

02 · The diagnosis

It looked like a demand problem. It was a repetition problem.

With fifteen pursuits open and a handful of people to run them, the obvious read was that the company needed more pipeline and better decks. The weekly reports said something else. Every pursuit was being built from nothing: a fresh proposal for each prospect, a fresh deck for each tournament, a homepage whose main heading asked "How does GLX bring you to the next level?", and, in my own first-week issue log, documents spread across individual machines with no shared drive. The company was not short of opportunities. It was paying full price for every one of them.

03 · The mandate

Turn a currency index into things people would actually buy.

I joined on a consultancy agreement in January 2019 as the first person doing product marketing, part-time, alongside an MBA at HEC Paris. The written brief was narrow: a funding round for the card business and partnerships for the coin. What it became was every commercial pursuit the company had open: the pitch, the proposal, the positioning, the website, the launches and, in the end, the order book.

3

Product lines

card, stablecoin, bespoke coins

15

Concurrent pursuits

6

Countries

04 · When I arrived, when I left

When I arrived

When I left

A pitch rebuilt for every prospect

One proposal structure, three client versions

A deck rebuilt for every tournament

One architecture, three propositions

"How does GLX bring you to the next level?"

Five benefits a non-specialist can repeat

A roadmap that started last year

A track record that started in 2017

Card and coin sold separately, to different people

One offer, one buyer, one meeting

Market making held in three people's heads

A written runbook with a named owner

Documents spread across individual machines

One structured repository

05 · What I built

6 workstreams

Six workstreams, while fifteen pursuits ran.

01A repository, and who the customer actually wasYou cannot reuse what nobody can find.

01 Research

  • Raised it as a formal issue in the first weekly report: documents spread across individual machines, no accessible shared drive
  • Built a structured repository and moved the collateral into it, so the second version of anything started from the first
  • Sized the European opportunity by segment rather than in aggregate: international students, online shoppers, business travellers, digital nomads, expats and vacationers
  • Ran customer surveys behind the event-coin propositions instead of pitching them on instinct
  • Ten dated weekly reports covering every pursuit and every task, which is what made the pattern visible in the first place
02Where the coin actually satOne slide replaced the argument.

02 Competition

  • A two-by-two that did the positioning work: pegged to a currency basket or to a single national currency on one axis, fiat or crypto collateral on the other
  • One quadrant had a single occupant, and it was ours
  • For the card, a direct comparison against the incumbent consumer challenger, resolved not on features but on model, because they sell to consumers and we would sell to organisations who bring their own
  • Three days of meetings in Tokyo returned the two basket-based comparables that actually mattered and the fact that any listing in Japan had to clear the self-regulatory body first, written into the call report rather than left in somebody's memory

Where the coin actually sat

Pegged to a currency basket

GLX

Fifteen currencies and gold, weighted by GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity

Unoccupied

No basket-pegged, crypto-collateralised coin in the category

Pegged to a single national currency

The dollar stablecoins

Fully reserved, one currency, one central bank

Crypto-collateralised dollar pegs

Over-collateralised, still a single-currency bet

Fiat collateral

Crypto collateral

Two axes, four quadrants, one occupant in ours. The slide replaced the argument.

03Two products, one buyerThe packaging change the rest of the work hangs from.

03 Segment, position & price

  • Stopped selling the card and the coin separately, to different people
  • Packaged them as a single offer to a single buyer: an organisation that already has a community
  • The offer: your brand on a white-label multi-currency card, your coin pegged to GLX, our rails underneath, with call centre, KYC, fraud monitoring and disputes included
  • Six consumer segments collapsed into one commercial motion. B2B2C rather than B2C, stated explicitly in the sales material

Two products, one offer

Multi-currency MastercardSix-currency walletInterbank-rate FXGlobal transfersGLX pegKYCFraud monitoringCall centreDisputes

Your community card

Your brandYour communityOur rails

The organisation brings the members. We bring the rails and the peg.

04The website, marked up and rewrittenThe mechanism was the differentiator and the reason nobody understood it.

04 Message

  • Marked up every page of the live site and rewrote it. The section headed "What is GLOBCOIN?" became "What is GLX?", because visitors were being introduced to a holding company before they met a product
  • "How does GLX bring you to the next level?", a heading that asked a question and answered nothing, became five concrete benefits: fully backed and redeemable one-for-one, stable and performance-stable, usable for global transactions, independently audited, and an exposure to the world economy
  • The hero subhead became one sentence a non-specialist could repeat: a stablecoin backed by fifteen of the world's currencies and gold, redeemable one-to-one for dollars
  • Flagged the roadmap as a credibility problem: it began in Q4 2018 and made a group founded in the nineties look like it had turned up last year. Rewritten to start in 2017
  • Customer journeys written per audience: an individual sending money abroad, an organisation collecting donations, and a named persona saving into a tournament coin two years before the tournament
05One template, four propositionsFifteen pursuits, and a finite number of arguments.

05 Launch & enable

  • A single commercial proposal structure covering programme characteristics, scope, obligations and commercial terms, then issued as client versions to Ibani, Lykke and Beyond Animal from the same spine
  • One event-coin deck architecture reskinned three times: a World Cup Coin for Qatar 2022, a Women's World Coin for France 2019 and an Africa Cup of Nations coin. Same argument, different tournament, different economics
  • GLX taken from one exchange to three inside a quarter, with the pairs that mattered: dollar, euro, bitcoin, ether and tether
  • Merchant acceptance launched, an NGO taking donations in GLX, and a fintech publication adopting it as its official stablecoin
06The part that had to run without meThe test of a function is whether it survives your absence.

06 Measure & maintain

  • Wrote the GLX market-making guideline: which price source feeds which pair, the spread to hold, the shape of the order book on both sides, the daily volume band
  • Named the specific failure mode to watch: bitcoin volatility opening an arbitrage against a basket that does not move with it
  • Named the owner and the deputy on the document itself, and moved tracking to a shared sheet rather than the trader's head
  • It held. The final quarter of my engagement was that job and nothing else, run off the document

06 · The outcome

What the engagement produced.

3

Exchanges GLX listed on, within a quarter

15

Concurrent pursuits run

6

Countries

3

Product lines from one currency index

Assets and activity, not revenue. Globcoin never published customer, volume or revenue figures I could stand behind, so there are none on this page.

07 · The judgment call

Stop selling the card and the coin to the same person.

Globcoin had two products and was pointing both at consumers. The card competed with a well-funded consumer challenger on price and convenience, which was not a fight it could win. The coin needed an audience that already cared about currency risk, and almost nobody cares about currency risk before it has cost them something.

The move was to stop selling either one directly and sell them together, as infrastructure, to organisations that already had a community: an NGO, an exchange, a football federation, a sovereign financial centre. The organisation brings the members and the reason to care. We bring the card rails and the peg. Two products became one offer, and a buyer could say yes in one meeting instead of two.

It did not save the company. It is the reason every pursuit that got anywhere was an organisation rather than a channel, and it is a pattern I have used since: when two products are competing for the same buyer's attention, the fix is almost always packaging.

08 · What this proves

Five things this case establishes.

I build the reusable layer.

One proposal structure, one deck architecture, one runbook and one repository, while fifteen pursuits were live.

I make technical mechanisms sayable.

A purchasing-power-weighted currency index rewritten into five benefits a non-specialist can repeat.

I diagnose packaging problems as packaging problems.

Two products competing for one buyer is not fixed by better copy.

I write things down so they outlive me.

The market-making runbook ran the last quarter of the engagement on its own.

I record losses with their reasons.

The Tokyo meetings said no, and said why. That was worth more than the two that said yes.

Frameworks installed

The Messaging Matrix

What I'm not claiming

Globcoin is no longer active and GLX is no longer trading. Nothing on this page changed that: a stablecoin not pegged to the dollar found a narrow market between 2019 and the moment the dollar-backed coins ended the argument. I have put no revenue, user or volume numbers here because the company never published any I could stand behind. Two other things worth saying plainly. For the first five weeks the bottleneck was not marketing at all: every card deal was frozen because the programme's processor would not onboard Swiss clients, and no deck moves a processor. And the contract called the role Project Manager, because nobody at a company that size writes "product marketing" on a consultancy agreement. The pitch decks, the website rewrite, the proposals and the positioning matrix are what the job actually was.