I speak with Val Scholz, Head of Growth at Revolut. They have just raised their series c for $250 million valuing the business at $1.7 billion. We discuss the strategies they have used to get there. This episode is very product focussed as Revolut believe strongly in making the product so good that they have a viral word of mouth engine. Revolut has seen extreme growth and this episode gives a fascinating look into Europes most recent tech unicorn.
Val has provided a link that means if you sign up for Revolut you’ll get a free card. Click here to take advantage of this offer: http://www.revolut.com/?p=mattbyrom
Listen to the show:
Subscribe:
Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Personally, I think it’s learning coding. It helped me a lot to see certain things and solve certain problems I wouldn’t otherwise be able to solve, and the second thing is focus on the problems first. What are people struggling with, and then how can you communicate how your product or service is actually making their life easier?
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
I personally love How to Win Friends and Influence People. It’s something that Kevan from Buffer recommended a couple of years ago, and I think I read it so far four times. It’s very important in terms of the way we communicate is often the issue, whether it’s in a company, internal, or external, to customers. It’s often a perception of what we want to communicate and how other people perceive what we communicate, and the book is really useful and eye-opening in certain aspects of it.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
Actually, I don’t use much except a browser, in my case it’s Chrome, and a code editor.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
I think Nike actually. I love their brand, and when I grew up in the ’90s, I still remember all the amazing commercials that they had for football, like with Luís Figo, Zidane, Ronaldo. It was always kind of funny and inspiring, like the way they played football, and the tricks and the whole part, what they did with it, so I really liked what Nike did there, and also that they never really advertised a product. They advertised like a feeling, an emotion, and then because you’d love to be that football, you bought Nike shoes.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
I like Tim Ferriss Show a lot. It’s kind of like an inspiration for me because it seems like he wants to hack his life and basically automate a lot of processes in life. Actually, there’s a book that’s about The 4-Hour Work Week, which was very interesting, so a lot of people thought that you shouldn’t only work four hours a week, but what he actually meant is that often spend too much time on a repetitive task, and you could basically get rid of a lot of these things, and then you have more time on actually valuable things.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today my guest is Val Scholz, Head of Growth at Revolut. The recording of this podcast is very timely as Revolut has just secured a Series C of $250 million, valuing the business at 1.7 billion, and making them Europe’s most recent tech unicorn. It’s unbelievable to think that Revolut is just three years old. They’ve achieved staggering growth, so I’m super excited to speak with Val today to understand how they have achieved so much. Let’s dive right in.
How are you doing today, Val?
Val Scholz:
I’m good, and thanks for having me.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, you’re very welcome. I appreciate you taking the time to come on. It must be a particularly busy period for you at the moment.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, obviously it … I mean, it’s always very busy at Revolut. I think we’re going at an incredibly pace, and the way we see it, we’re still at the beginning, and we want to reach 100 million customers in the next five years.
Matt Byrom:
That’s quite a goal. Just for the listeners, please tell us a bit more about Revolut, how you work and what you do.
Val Scholz:
Basically we started Revolut around two years, three years now ago, and since then we acquired nearly two million customers, so what we’re doing is basically we’re building a better bank account. It’s easily imagined that we allow you to save money easily, stay away from your budget, you can make free international money transfers and spend fee free abroad. When we started, we basically were just like a travel card that gave you the interbank exchange rate, and since then we are adding more and more services every week to our platform.
Matt Byrom:
How does your business model work in that sense? Is it the money’s made on the extra services, in comparison to the exchange rate?
Val Scholz:
Yes, exactly. Basically when our founder’s started the business, he believed that a basic core banking product should be free and there shouldn’t be any fees associated with it, and that’s basically the core essence of Revolut, and then on top of this, we’re building new services, added services, that you can purchase if you want, but it’s not required. Some of the examples is our Premium plan. We’re launching at the end of this month our new Platinum plan, with the first European metal cards, and we added cryptocurrencies and a couple of other products that you can add if you want, like travel insurance.
Matt Byrom:
I noticed you also have a Business plan now as well for businesses to use Revolut as their bank, or to have different cards for different employees in the business, for example.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly, so it’s a similar problem, as with regular banking services, that business bank accounts haven’t had much innovation in recent years, so we thought we’re also gonna disrupt that industry, and we offer free FX and free international money transfers for businesses, plus corporate cards for employees, starting at £25 a month.
Matt Byrom:
Which would be the biggest sector of your business there? Is it the personal or business, or are you trying to grow one over the other? Where’s your focus?
Val Scholz:
Basically we are already quite big as a company. We’re close to 400 employees, so we have dedicated teams for business and retail, and both are very important for the business.
Matt Byrom:
Okay. Tell me about Revolut’s growth marketing strategy. What are your core areas of focus for the team?
Val Scholz:
Our main driver for traffic is word of mouth, so what we believe is that if you build a great product that actually solves real, painful problems, customers will come along, and our job is basically just to make it easier for them to recommend it to their friends, family and colleagues.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting, because it must be an incredibly difficult, or it is an incredibly difficult to track and to measure. How do you go about at least going some way to measuring that?
Val Scholz:
It’s actually true. I mean, obviously you have referral codes that allow you to track who’s coming to the platform, but then because word of mouth is so much. I mean, we are constantly in the press. I think we have every week articles in Forbes, New York Times, et cetera, so what we do is basically something like we’re estimating how much growth we should expect, then we’re trying to calculate the influence and word of mouth based on previous rates.
Matt Byrom:
Is that a PR strategy that you’ve put into place and engineered as a business, or has it just taken hold of its own now? Is it just because you’re getting so big and you’re so innovative that actually you’re just being written about everywhere?
Val Scholz:
No, actually that’s something we started as a business I think roughly a year ago. We hired Chad, who was before at Rocket Internet, and he basically built up the PR team from ground up, so we started in the UK and then expanded it all over Europe. As of currently, we have around seven PR people working at Revolut, and they keep constantly pushing what’s possible.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. The PR team is entirely internal, then.
Val Scholz:
Yes.
Matt Byrom:
Very interesting. I mean, if you’re getting such regular press, it’s obviously a fantastic position to be in. Just step back a little bit. You were talking about the incentive for … Obviously word of mouth you said is a big driver for you, and then you have an incentive for people to refer people to you. Is that something that was built in from the start, that referral program?
Val Scholz:
I think what’s quite unique about Revolut is that we actually don’t offer any incentive for referring people, so what we’d notice is that our customers just love our product. They’re tired of the traditional banking, where there wasn’t any innovation, which is expensive, and in the end they just profited from the customers’ money, and I think by offering a tailored solution to that problem, and helping people to stay within their budget, to help them save money, they want to recommend us to their friends and family.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. I mean, that’s exactly how I found out about Revolut. I’d been using the product for six to nine months, and I was told about it by our chairman, Matt Johnson. He actually said, “You gotta check this product out, it’s amazing.” I did, and it is amazing, and I’ve used it a lot since, so yeah. I guess in that instance, do you as a growth team work a lot with the product team to engineer, I guess, the experience for different users, and understand how people are using it, and understand then where people might be having a sticking point, or where there’s opportunities to improve the user experience for further growth.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly. The way we see it at Revolut, it’s two parts. One is what we consider more traditional marketing, so obviously we do SEO, content marketing, social media marketing and all these channels. On the other hand, we have basically the product, so we have different funnels, so it starts on the acquisition side, which includes traditional marketing, and then you have activation, retention, revenue and referral, and so what we’re looking at as a company on the growth part is basically how we can improve each of these funnels, so we have certain target values, let’s say an activation rate of 85%, and then we look at what the current rates are, where people might drop off, what is unclear, and then trying to fix that by running small experiments, and then implementing changes.
Matt Byrom:
Will they be experiments in the app itself?
Val Scholz:
It could be anything, really. Sometimes we just send out an email because we want to test a different communication strategy. Sometimes we change things in the app. It really depends on the use case and the problem, but in general what’s the most useful to take away is probably we look at how people use the product, where they might have a problem, we try to reach out to them, we try to go through the app ourselves, and then we try to think at the end how we can actually solve it, but the most time we actually spend on understanding the problem.
Matt Byrom:
You’ll actually reach out to the users that may be having the problems to actually survey them and ask them and talk to them about their problems and how you might be able to improve.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly, especially at our scale, it’s quite hard to consider all different use cases, so we’re trying to constantly talk to our customers, what they think, their feedback, where they struggle, and these sort of things.
Matt Byrom:
That’s very interesting. We talked a little bit there about the channels that you use. What channels have been most effective for you to actually then acquire new users?
Val Scholz:
It’s definitely word of mouth, which is probably around 65 to 70% of overall users.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah.
Val Scholz:
Then the rest would be PR and some small initiatives.
Matt Byrom:
Okay, and do you do social media at all? Are you putting the adverts out on different platforms, on websites, on online and offline at all?
Val Scholz:
We currently don’t run paid advertising, so essentially all of our users came to our product without spending money on it. We’re actually growing our social media platforms completely without spending money. Everything is just organic, and we just believe that people are tired of this, how to call it, usual marketing, blah, blah. We don’t talk ourselves too serious, and you can that on our Twitter page or Instagram. We make fun of literally everything, and we’re confident in our abilities and product, and in our customer base.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting, so really for you I guess your marketing in many ways comes down to product, just having a phenomenal product, and word of mouth, people spreading that through their networks.
Val Scholz:
Exactly, so two companies I really admire, one of them is Slack and the other one is Intercom.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah.
Val Scholz:
I think they’re doing a great job in actually serving a need, so solving the needs of their customers by really understanding their problem and then offering tailored solutions, but also through their product marketing, so how they communicate actually the problem, and then how you can solve the problem, and I think it’s often something people forget this. Either you build an amazing product but then you don’t really explain the benefits of using this product, it’s often just you pitch feature after feature after feature, and the second thing is that often if you have like an amazing marketing strategy, you don’t actually have the product to back it up.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, so these two things, they work together, so you can’t really do one without the other.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely, and I can certainly see the similarities with Intercom. We use Intercom a lot, and it’s, again, a fantastic product, and it really solves that need of communication between users and the business owners or the people that are in the company, so I can certainly see the similarities there. If you’re running a lot of different marketing experiments to understand how people use their product, how are you managing those marketing experiments?
Val Scholz:
I suppose it just goes down from company goals, company focus, like what is the overall KPIs of the business, and then we break it down into KPIs for smaller teams, and then based these KPIs, so for example if the focus is to increase acquisition, you think about how you can achieve this, and then you have a couple of ideas, and you basically try them out and see what actually sticks and what doesn’t.
Matt Byrom:
What would be some of the ones that you’re working on at the moment in that instance?
Val Scholz:
Something we tried out around two months ago was using free cards as a driver to actually increase acquisition, so usually if you sign up for Revolut, we offer you a free virtual card, but if you want to get the standard card you have to pay around £5 for the manufacturing costs and delivery costs, and we tried out an experiment to see if people would be willing to recommend it to their friend if we offer a free card for them, and that was quite success. Basically, it tripled to quadrupled our daily use acquisition numbers.
Matt Byrom:
So in that instance people were perhaps getting up to the stage of … to choosing and buying their card, but actually you were finding that by giving the card away free, you were tripling to quadrupling the number of people who would actually pass that step.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly, so obviously those activation rate would be impacted by this, but in general it was just like the people that really loved the product, they were keen to give their friends a free card, and I think it’s quite unusual in the industry that you actually give something instead of getting something to refer a friend.
Matt Byrom:
Oh, I see, and it was also part of the referral mechanism, to actually give a free card, as well as actually receiving a free card when people sign up.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
A lot of what you’re telling me here is that you don’t do lots of outward marketing, but really you’re building a fantastic product and then testing all the different nuances that come along with that particularly product to just improve the ease of people using the product, more effectively more them forwards.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, and I mean, unless you have a massive budget and can burn cash like companies like Deliveroo or Uber, you need to find acquisition channels that are very cheap, but still drive a lot of users to your platform, and usually that’s by solving really big, painful problems, so let’s say if we take Slack for example. Communication tools existed for years. There was HipChat, I think MSN, Skype. The thing is, the tools never really solved the real problem that people had in a work environment, and then when Slack came, they did a couple of things differently, but that actually pushed people more towards using it, and then because that product was so good and it actually solved a problem, people started recommending it more and more and more, and then you can actually see that strategy in a lot of products, like Intercom for example, but also like Facebook or Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram. It’s usually the same thing.
If you think about Instagram, what they discovered quite early is that people love different filters, so previously through Instagram it was quite hard to make professionally looking photos, because it wasn’t very clear. You still had Photoshops and these tools, and if you really were an expert you could create amazing pictures, but Instagram basically made that step super easy. You just selected a filter, maybe two or three settings, and that’s it, and that’s actually the reason that people started picking up Instagram.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, I read that. Sorry, I actually listened to a podcast. I think it may have been an NPR podcast, and they were saying that exact same thing, that Instagram, it was like their hockey stick growth started when they realized that they could make people’s everyday pictures look amazing by giving them a selection of filters that were really easy to add and change.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
I guess you’re doing similar things, similar tests, on your product to actually find out how the users adapt to those different things that you’re changing. What tools are you actually using to measure and understand that user difference? Are you using some tools to track the analytics of your apps?
Val Scholz:
Most of our work is based directly on our database, so we are very heavy on SQL, and we expected basically everyone in the company to understand and write your own SQL code.
Matt Byrom:
Okay.
Val Scholz:
All of our dashboards are built directly from the database, but additionally we use tools like Google Analytics and I think currently Facebook Analytics to do more granular analysis for acquisition and user behavior in the app.
Matt Byrom:
Do you map out the user journey that people take and then have data points at each stage so that you’re understanding, and you have the percentages or the different data points to improve at each stage?
Val Scholz:
Yeah, so for example, for activation, we basically defined what we consider an activated user based on research, and then we have different stages of the activation funnel that we track, and then we basically see where people are actually dropping off, where we need to improve certain things, and you can also filter this based on certain properties, let’s say for example countries. Every country has a different activation rate or stuff like this.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting as well. In this instance, I guess you’ve just received a big investment into the business. Are you looking to just carry on in the same way, or do you think you’ll spread out and do more marketing into different areas?
Val Scholz:
I think generally the way the business is structured is we are very lean, so last December we broke even. I think we’re the first challenger bank that actually did this, which was quite surprising after two and a half years. I think it took TransferWise seven years, so because we don’t really spend much money on any professional tools, usually build these things in house, we have more control over the whole experience and the whole user journey. It’s similar to what, for example, Apple does. Instead of outsourcing bits and bobs, we try to own the whole picture, and then we can actually tailor everything to our needs.
Matt Byrom:
I guess in that instance, how close are you working with the product team? Is there’s a difference between your team and the product team?
Val Scholz:
It depends really on the stage, so sometimes I work very closely with the product team, even leading a product team, and sometimes it’s more focused on communication, engagement, and generally our company’s very tech heavy, so even if you’re a data scientist, or for example me, we know how to code and can build stuff on our own.
Matt Byrom:
Okay, so you can effectively jump in between different roles to make things happen and make things work and test different experiments as they’re created.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly, so we have this get shit done mentality, and it’s basically it just matters that you actually get the result, and it doesn’t matter how you get there, so there’s no excuses, no whatsoever, it just matters that you actually reach the target, and that’s probably one of the reasons we’re growing so fast.
Matt Byrom:
What would your measure of success be? You mentioned about the free cards before. It’s almost like that’s a change that’s shown success in terms of acquisition. Would that just be something that is then implemented, or is there further decision to make around there?
Val Scholz:
I think usually the way it works is we have KPIs, so let’s say we acquired a thousand users per day a while ago, and then the KPI was to get to 10,000 users a day, and then you basically look at what you can do in order to push it. You try out different things, and then if you hit the KPI, you focus on the next thing.
Matt Byrom:
In that instance, it would be anything that you can do to increase user acquisition, so that’s something that you’re focusing on. If it does improve user acquisition, you would actually implement that, and then that would be the new norm.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly, so for example when we launched cryptocurrencies, that actually gave us a quite big boost in terms of user acquisition, because the market was completely over-hyped, everybody wanted to invest in in it [inaudible 00:20:43], and there wasn’t too much products that did that or allowed people to do that easily. I still remember trying … I think my KYC at Coinbase, I had to redo it seven or eight times in September, and when we actually went into the market, we just offered a product that it’s easy, convenient and fast, and people wanted to have that, but then obviously we designed the product in the way that we leverage certain aspects to grow faster, so when we launched crypto we basically had a feature unlock, so what it means is that you were a premium customer you could directly get access to the new product, but if you were a standard user, you had to either invite three friends or you upgraded to premium.
Matt Byrom:
Okay, so it had some viral capacity to it, really.
Val Scholz:
Exactly, yeah. I mean, most of our product is designed for virality, so we’re launching soon in the US, and I think we already more than 30 or 40,000 people in the waiting list, and the way it works is that you can bump yourself up the waiting list by inviting more friends, and then when we launch and gradually roll out our product, you have a faster access to it.
Matt Byrom:
Very interesting. Obviously it’s nice to move into a new market where you already have a huge waiting list to start, and I guess then if you’ve already built a product that’s being used in the UK significantly, you would expect that virality to continue when new users from the US sign up, so I imagine that those 30 or 40,000 users are going to turn into an extremely large number very quickly.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly, and it’s also like … I mean, expanding is part of our overall business strategy, so what we’re trying to build is basically like a global bank account, so if you think about the whole landscape, it’s currently even if you’re Santander or any global bank, it’s not actually global. What it means that if you actually switch from country, like the UK to a country like the US, you still have to create a new bank account, even though it’s the same bank. It’s kind of annoying, to be honest, for most people, so I’ve been actually switching countries quite a lot lately. I lived in Milan, Lisburn, and Southeast Asia, Vienna, London most recently, and previously to Revolut, you always had to create a new bank account. You got new IBAN numbers, and basically had to update every payment that you previously did,.
Similar to what WhatsApp did in that region for communication, we are trying to do the same, so when we expand more and more into new regions, we will offer our existing userbase accounts in these countries, so for example when we launch in the US, every existing user has a US account if they want, but also what it means for every US user, they can create a UK or a EU account, and the concept basically will be spread all over the world, and so in the more countries we’re launching, the better our product will get.
Matt Byrom:
It’s so easy. I mean, I’ve done that exact same thing, where I’ve been using Revolut and just switched between currencies, and your account is just a flip across the screen, really, isn’t it?
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly. It shouldn’t be more, right?
Matt Byrom:
Well, no, I mean, not if you’re building the ideal product, I agree. I mean, is partnership marketing something you do? You mentioned a lot about the PR and generating buzz and interest with different companies and things like that. Do you have many partners that you work with to help you market your product?
Val Scholz:
Yeah, so something we’re exploring recently is partnerships. We’re working together with bigger but also smaller partners in local markets, so one thing we’re currently exploring is a partnership with Booking.com, how they would benefit advertising Revolut, but also how we could leverage from their userbase, and that’s something we’re constantly exploring. In the end, if you wanna, let’s say, reach hyper growth, you need to use someone else, network with, so if you think about Facebook, what they did is something you can’t really do anymore, but they basically pushed you to send an email to all of your friends, and therefore leveraging your network to grow fast as a business. The thing is, if you do this nowadays, you get massive fines. Another approach is what Uber did is with partnerships, to give away promotion cards, to get free Uber roads as well. Partnerships is definitely something that’s very high on our list and that we are actively exploring.
Matt Byrom:
I guess that ties into the sort of affiliate referral part of your business as well, really, so seems to tie in really nicely.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, I mean, what we figured is that it’s, especially for bigger companies, it’s not so much about how much money they earn, it’s more about what value they can bring to their user, so in terms of booking the comm is they don’t care too much about how much money they would make with Revolut, but they care more about if it’s a product that their users actually want to use and like.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. I noticed on the Business product, which I actually personally don’t use so much, but I know that you have the offering, I noticed that you can send money instantly to various businesses. Is that something that everybody could sign up for, or is it actually a partnership that you’ve created with various different businesses to enable that instant sending?
Val Scholz:
Yeah, it’s basically like that’s the Revolut network effect, so something we believe in is that money transfers, no matter where, should be free, and they should be instant, so if you imagine for example sending money from a UK or a European bank account to an American bank account, that probably takes up to five days, and then you don’t really know how much fees you are gonna pay, and if you think about it, there’s no actually reason for this.
I mean, the reason why banks don’t trust each other is essentially because there’s no worldwide central bank, so nobody that actually guarantees both sides, so both banks, that money transfer is actually valid and is happening, and you won’t get scammed, and therefore what happens is basically like banks go from bank to bank, and basically try to exchange money or lend money and so on, so the whole process is quite inefficient and in transparent, and by having more and more people on our platform, whether it’s a business or a retail consumer, we can send money instantly within the Revolut network for free. That obviously also saves businesses a lot of money, so in terms of … Let’s say you’re a startup that integrates payment. You probably pay around two to 3% fees for any payment transaction. Doesn’t really matter if you use Stripe, PayPal, or any other payment gateway.
Matt Byrom:
This will change that, really.
Val Scholz:
Let’s just put it this way. If we can lower the costs, why not do it?
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely, yeah, and it just makes Revolut more and more appealing, and I can imagine that supplier network will grow at a very fast rate.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, definitely. I think one of the biggest companies that we current have is UNILAD, and they serve billions of page views every month, and they are extremely happy with using Revolut for their content production.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. If you were to look back over the last few years or your time with Revolut, what would you say are the biggest impact changes that you’ve made? What’s really given you just exceptional growth or an exceptional success over what you expected?
Val Scholz:
I think offering certain products that serve the demand or the need for a better solution was probably the biggest drivers for growth, so crypto worked amazingly well. Most recently Vault, so basically Vault allows you to save money easily, so what we figured is a lot of people have trouble saving money. Whether it’s repaying their student loan or saving for their next vacation, people don’t really understand how they can put money aside, and so what we are offering is an easy way to round up your spare change and just lock it away. Since we launched it, I think last week, we have over 100,000 users using Vault to save money by rounding up their spare change, and this gave us a massive boost in terms of engagement, but also acquisition.
Matt Byrom:
That’s actually incredible, and it sounds like quite a simple thing to do, one of your more straightforward products, I guess, to just round up the amount people spend and put it into a separate part of the app, but I guess it’s given you an absolutely incredible new product.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, and what I figured is that often it’s a very complicated thing. I think most businesses don’t really focus on understanding the problem good enough, and therefore they offer solutions that often they sound cool, but they don’t actually solve a real problem. Basically what we figured out is, or what I generally believe is that too many companies spend time on building fancy products, using fancy terms like AI to promote them, instead of focusing actually on what the real problem is, like what people really need.
In terms of savings, it’s basically that people have issues saving money. That’s just fact. There’s like in the US I think over 90% of the people, of the population, doesn’t have more than $1,000 in their savings account, and then if you think about that problem, and if you really understand that problem, why this is the case and so on, then you can actually think about that solution, and that solution is usually quite easy. In our terms, the solution was allowing people to save, but without really noticing that they’re saving, so if you basically use the spare change to round it up, or if you use a daily saving of £5, it’s not something that you really notice on a day-to-day basis, but it basically adds up over time. Generally if you then offer these sort of products, they will drive a lot of engagement, but also on the acquisition side, because people just generally love what you’re doing because you actually solved one of their problems.
Matt Byrom:
Is your aim to then build out a suite of these mini products to actually I guess build a bigger business, really, to have a range of different things that people can choose from when they come and sign up for Revolut?
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly, so it’s similar to Google’s approach. We’re trying a lot of things out, so we’re operating slightly different to most businesses, so we call it like like a bacteria mode, so what it means is that instead of having like a North Star Metric, like a grand vision of what you should do in the next five, 10, 20 years, we are more like driven by KPIs, and then how it works is actually that we try out a lot of ideas, and then if they work out, if they’re successful, we invest more time. If they don’t, we kill them again, and often we don’t know what we’re gonna offer in the next few years or next few months, but we always make sure that we actually solve something that people really care about.
Matt Byrom:
Then see how many people actually adopt that, to see how many people really do care about that and want to use it within the product.
Val Scholz:
Exactly, yeah, and so you don’t end up having a lot of dead wood in your app.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, that makes sense as well, because I guess although you want to have a suite of products, you don’t necessarily want to have a range of different things that many people aren’t using a bunch of.
Val Scholz:
Compared to competitors, we offered cryptocurrencies, and we will soon have our banking license, and then we will be one of the first, if not the first bank worldwide, that offers cryptocurrencies in their portfolio, and it’s something we’re really proud of, because what we believe in is that cryptocurrencies are the future, and it’s a good example of our approach, because instead of focusing on what banking or banking services nowadays are, or have been in the past, we think more about what could be in the future, what are people nowadays interested, what people will be interested in the next five, 10 years, and then try to solve these problems and serve these needs.
Matt Byrom:
That’s a lovely sort of thing to think about as well, is actually solving people’s future needs as well. How long would a product like, say for example your Vault example, how long would something like that take in research and development to actually get it to a position where you launch it? Would there be a period of testing with a small subset of users, or is that you literally just trial and roll out, and just test adoption?
Val Scholz:
It really depends on the feature itself, but Vault probably took us around three months from basically starting to finish.
Matt Byrom:
Then if you were to again be able to give people actionable takeaways in terms of what they could do to improve their app, their business, their marketing, their growth, what would you suggest in terms of your experience?
Val Scholz:
There’s a couple of things. First I think traditional marketing, it’s dead, so what it means is that you should try to understand, or you should understand the technical part of products nowadays. You should understand tracking, analytics, all these parts, because in the end, they will help you a lot to grow faster any product. What I usually recommend is try to learn coding, try to learn SQL, try to dig deep in data, because otherwise it will be very, very hard. That’s one thing.
Second thing is it’s good to be an all-rounder, to have an understanding of multiple parts of the business, so in my case for example I have a background in design, marketing, engineering and product, and that helps me do my role better.
The third thing is that you should go deep in certain areas, so you can’t be an expert in everything, but if you have a good understanding of the whole marketing landscape, and you’re good with visuals and the whole psychology behind it, you could go very, very deep in, for example, PR and communications, and so you know exactly how you can push any business, how you can build a brand around a business, how you can make people excited about that business, but then your knowledge in other parts of the business or other industries and other areas will help you to see and connect dots that other people can’t.
Matt Byrom:
That’s fantastic advice, particularly on the data side. It’s more important than ever for us to really dig deep into the data and understand. I guess on the product side as well as the marketing side it’s so important just to understand what’s effective, what’s giving an return on investment, what’s moving the needle, and so often as marketers, or I guess in your case as well, product growth teams, you spend time on things that are not always moving that needle, so the data is so important to dig into.
Val Scholz:
Definitely, and it’s also good to have some sort of attitude. It’s better to have a product that a small amount of people really love and a other amount of people hate than a product than nobody cares.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. On the other side of things, then, what are the strategies that you’re going to be focusing on for the rest of this year, 2018? What’s on your roadmap?
Val Scholz:
It’s mostly like we want to build up more acquisition channels, to basically spread the growth more evenly, but then also we want to increase the virality of the product so we can grow faster. That’s mostly that side, and then something we’re working currently on is to completely rethink our whole communication strategy, so basically what Revolut is, what our brand is, what we stand for, and how you can use Revolut as a customer, because when we started Revolut, we were mostly focused on travel and free exchange, and since we now added a lot of day-to-day products, we want to shift that marketing strategy.
Matt Byrom:
Okay, yeah, so it’s rather than just to talk so much about the currency exchange, to actually talk in a wider sense about being a digital banking alternative, for example.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
Okay, and then you mentioned also there about different acquisition channel. Is there any particular that you’d like to dive into in terms of those that are on your radar for the next to test?
Val Scholz:
Recently we started doing basically doing influencing marketing for Instagram. I think we have a slight different approach to most businesses. We try to automate a lot of things, trying to hack in the system. Same goes for our SEO, content marketing. Just basically spread the acquisition channels from one or two to 10, and then just try to reach every possible customer or person on the planet through whatever channel available.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. It’s a broad goal. It’s true, though.
Val Scholz:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
You talk about content there as well. I know your content strategy at the moment, it seems to be that it’s quite product led as well. I noticed from reading your blog it’s very update-specific in talking around the specific features of your product. Is that something that you’re likely to change and start some thought leadership?
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly, so we’re doing more and more things about thought leadership. We pushed recently I think an interview of our CTO about cashless societies in five to 10 years in the UK, but also what we’re focusing lately a lot on the blog is to explain financial concepts in very simple terms, so stuff like what is an interbank exchange rate or what is inflation, and then break it down in terms that everyone can understand.
Matt Byrom:
Okay, and are you looking at that from an SEO specific point of view, or from more of a customer support point of view, or both?
Val Scholz:
It’s basically both. I think it’s often like banks hide behind these terms, and their own words and industry knowledge, and the same way I for example don’t have any understanding of, let’s say, the travel industry and how certain things are phrased, or legal industry, let’s say. When I move to a new country, I basically don’t know or don’t really understand why I need to do certain things or don’t, and so it’s very helpful if people explain it to me in very easy terms, and it’s the same in the financial industry. For example, how do you save money or why saving is usually hard, why you actually lose money when you go abroad, and for example withdraw money from an ATM. It’s often very simple topics, but usually there’s not too many companies or people that actually explain this concept to make people aware of the problem.
Matt Byrom:
I guess it follows your persona of being a very transparent, helpful brand as well.
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly. We want to be true to ourselves. I mean, to be fair, not everybody likes us, but we’re very confident in what we’re doing, and we want to offer people very transparent view. Is it about posting about our user numbers, or how many people use our product on a daily basis, how many fees we charge, et cetera.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. Well, it’s been really interesting talking to you. I’d love to take this to our last five questions, which is five quickfire questions, so number one, what is your best piece of marketing advice?
Val Scholz:
Personally, I think it’s learning coding. It helped me a lot to see certain things and solve certain problems I wouldn’t otherwise be able to solve, and the second thing is focus on the problems first. What are people struggling with, and then how can you communicate how your product or service is actually making their life easier?
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic, and number two, can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Val Scholz:
I personally love How to Win Friends and Influence People. It’s something that [inaudible 00:41:00] from Buffer recommended a couple of years ago, and I think I read it so far four times. It’s very important in terms of the way we communicate is often the issue, whether it’s in a company, internal, or external, to customers. It’s often a perception of what we want to communicate and how other people perceive what we communicate, and the book is really useful and eye-opening in certain aspects of it.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely, and I’ll include a link to that in the show notes, so if any of the listeners head over to mattbyrom.com, click on this episode, and you’ll be able to click a link to that book as well. Number three, what software tool could you not live without?
Val Scholz:
Actually, I don’t use much except a browser, in my case it’s Chrome, and a code editor.
Matt Byrom:
Okay. Wow. That’s keeping it bare.
Val Scholz:
Yeah. To the minimum, because with these two things, you can literally build anything.
Matt Byrom:
Well, it’s true, yeah, and I would certainly be in trouble without Chrome myself as well.
Val Scholz:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
Okay. Cool. Number four, what is your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Val Scholz:
I think Nike actually. I love their brand, and when I grew up in the ’90s, I still remember all the amazing commercials that they had for football, like with Luís Figo, Zidane, Ronaldo. It was always kind of funny and inspiring, like the way they played football, and the tricks and the whole part, what they did with it, so I really liked what Nike did there, and also that they never really advertised a product. They advertised like a feeling, an emotion, and then because you’d love to be that football, you bought Nike shoes.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely.
Val Scholz:
It never really showed the Nike shoes itself.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, their product comes second, really. It’s all about the feeling and connection to the people in the advert, really, isn’t it?
Val Scholz:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
Last of is which other podcasts do you listen to?
Val Scholz:
I like Tim Ferriss Show a lot. It’s kind of like an inspiration for me because it seems like he wants to hack his life and basically automate a lot of processes in life. Actually, there’s a book that’s about The 4-Hour Work Week, which was very interesting, so a lot of people thought that you shouldn’t only work four hours a week, but what he actually meant is that often spend too much time on a repetitive task, and you could basically get rid of a lot of these things, and then you have more time on actually valuable things.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Absolutely. I’ve actually read it myself, and it’s an incredible book as well, so I will actually put that into the show notes for people to check out as well.
Val Scholz:
Cool.
Matt Byrom:
Well, Val, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. Very interesting, and slightly different podcast for me, talking a lot more product than marketing, but it’s been an incredible journey that you guys have been on. I encourage everybody to check out Revolut. It really is as good as we’ve been talking about there, so check out Revolut. Be another person on that statistic for Val, and please listen to the next podcast as well. Thanks again, Val.
Val Scholz:
Thank you.