YouSaid · the spoken record

Nilan Peiris

lines on the record: 87
first: 2023-09-24
most recent: 2023-09-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so they wanted to help us solve it. So, the second part of being of this word of mouth engine is for us, we managed to get this mission thing to work. So somehow we emotionally connect our cause. And then taking a step back, getting 10x better on price is through our customers helping us do it, which gets us even cheaper, which brings more customers that then creates this light will that spins around.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it's the authenticity within which they could see that we were genuinely trying to this like trying to bring the prices down was a scheme to help us grow faster, which is kind of where it started out was actually genuinely because founders, like they were really upset about how much it cost them with money. They found advice to solve that problem, and they're still really passionate about solving that problem. See that authenticity flow through the whole company because we've got to, when you look at ways, we're full of people on visas and immigrants and people that have worked and lived around the world and struggled with this problem and are passionate about solving it.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got more new customers from that email being forwarded around than any other kind of marketing. And when you've show this when I talk a conference, this email broke all the rules of marketing. It did have a call to action. It didn't have a button to sign up. It didn't have anything in it, right? But people just forwarded around saying you should check out WISE. Not all the customer base, but there was a proportion of the customer base that this resonated”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, so we generally, when we go on to have it, we're running cross-functional teas, but this is a verification team. The team that actually would verify the docs when you sent it to us, they went out to Singapore and verified them on site, face to face. So the fun bit here is how, why would customers help a company? This is one of the other learnings on word of mouth, like the way I think about this is that they're the rational reasons why people recommend, which we've covered. But there's these emotional ones as well, softer ones people would call brand. I prefer to call it on the mission. A very personal thing. It was like an internal company thing to think our customers cared about it. And then we rebranded like eight, nine years ago, first rebranded. And we wrote our mission and sent it to our customers.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Took a year of lobbying and a year of doing something unscalable effectively before we got the world's first EKYC license in Singapore. So you could take a selfie picture of your ID and then you could get verified. And that's what I call a 10x vendor experience than anyone else in the market. And that led taboo and word of mouth off the back of it. And that loop of getting your customers to help was also one of the learnings on word of mouth.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Face to face. And this is this happens. This is where they're banks that people use. So people go into banks usually and you meet, you know, you get face-to-face verified when you open a bank account. And you don't need to do this. We actually sent a small team out to Singapore, and we opened an office in the week. And customers, like you went through this really slick flow and then you got invited in to come see the team. Customers hated it, right? And it was really expensive, right? Obviously. But the magic was we got. We got the customers not to complain to us, but to complain to the government.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you bring up customer support if the products are clear, you hire lots of people in the back office if you haven't automated it. We get like 20% improvement year on years. We're doing that. But come back to your question. How do you step change that? How do you do a 10x better experience? I'll share with you a story from Singapore. It's quite a fun Meant to Singapore about six, seven years ago. And we asked for a license. We had 20,000 people on the waitlist or so saying, wise, please come to Singapore. Wow. And we went there, we asked the regularly, hey, can you give us a license? They gave us a license. And they said, do you have to physically meet every single customer?”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll cover a couple with you. Send us to the risk one first. So there's two risks we have. We have FX risk. You come to YCCO rate. And then you may send us the money a little later. If you're like moving a million dollars, you can't usually move it instantly. It might take you to three days to move it. The rate's locked. Could move against us. We lose some money. That cost, if you look back, so we halved that cost like over the last few years. And you can kind of imagine through understanding the bits of the product that generate exposure and limiting it and a bunch of algorithms behind that. More inspiring stuff is the people cost and the partner cost. Go through each of these one at a time. So the people costs our customer service team, operations teams. But I like to think of that as the cost of poor quality.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed, at a more extensive systemically expensive market. But let's get to that. So, what are the costs? So if you look in our PL, there's just three costs at transaction level. You've got people costs. You've got the cost of risk, realized risk. And then you've got partner fees. So, if you've got this mission of moving the world's money for almost nothing or zero as close to zero as you can, you've got to invest as much of your cash flow in engineering to try to engineer away these three problems. Just take them through briefly a bit. And remember, we're trying to do this 10 times better than anyone else. So, how do you really change the experience on each of them?”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, but it's down to this level of if a customer, if an Australian customer calls up asking, where is my transfer, that cost of that call gets allocated back to the AUD GBP route. If a Brazilian business needs like 20 documents in order to be verified before we can give them an account, the cost of verifying those customers goes back there. So that at a very atomic level starts happening. So yeah, as you said, the more expensive customers end up paying what they cost”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you look at this and you analyze it, you'll find obviously there are 20% of customers generating 80% of the costs. And what you do is you get those 20%, you give them a rise because they should cover their costs and you drop the price for everyone else. And then the team works really hard on reducing these costs down. And then you move into a different segment in the market as the price costs come down. Does that make sense, Lenny?”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's try to unpick you a little bit. So, first question you'd ask is I know what you're doing, you're losing money on every transfer. That's supposed to be what you do. But we've been profitable for five years. And one of the magical things here was. Where I see profitable on every transaction. So it's probably about four or five years ago. I led this project to kind of start to pull together our pricing. So every month you get bills and they turn up in your P&L. But every single bill we got, we allocated the cost back to the customer or the transaction that generated it. And then we add our margin on top, and that's our price.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an incredibly inspiring. I'll try and share a couple of stories, analogies, and from ways. I'll talk about two things. Let's talk about price first. So it's a good question, right? So money transfer's been around since the Medicis. few people get together and it's evolved towards moving trillions around the world and generally retail consumers paying about six to seven percent around the world to do it how do you use a small team in europe start out and figure out how to move it we launched that 0.5 and now we're down to about 0.35 What changed”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the step then becomes this much harder question of these types of questions, like what is the theory? For moving money into a market. What is the theoretical maxim speed? Not just make it instant, make it cheap. What actually is the lowest it could possibly be? And instead of incrementally going, doing a jump to make it a little better, a little better, a little better, you can never get there. How do we take two years and end up there?”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is this thing around growth rate? So, especially product led growth, which is what we're talking about. So you can imagine we're going to open a new market to Indonesia. And the fastest way to do it is to take someone else's figure out how to move to Indonesia. We take that infrastructure and we'll plug it into WISE. You know what? We can do this. We'll get some users, but it doesn't grow like a hockey stick. It doesn't grow like a hockey stick because we haven't fundamentally changed the problems in moving money internationally. So got this man for like got to build a 10x better product than what's there. And if it's 10x product better, it basically, it doesn't exist already. So if you're plugging in something else, that's kind of a misstep. So it comes from a very logical place. How do I get users quickly? I can take a shortcut and do this, but that you kind of realize is wasted effort.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was talking to customers and looking at the service results. And then through that, in many different ways, price will come up, speed will come up, ease of use will come up, and they kind of aggregate up to that”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To put that in context, that means figuring out how to move money instantly. That means figuring out how to drop the price all the way from six all the way down to 0.35. And that's because there are systemic infrastructure issues in moving money around the world, which people haven't solved before. These proposers are just really hard to solve. They take years to solve, but they have huge kind of returns when you do it.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when we launch a market, or in the beginning, it was like much lower. It was in our 20s and 30s, set it in context like banks and financial services, MPS is minus 30. So most people don't recommend banks. It's like comes from a low-based stuff. What I found is when you build a product. Most founders and most teams kind of stop when it works. The next step, some people focus on conversion rate. Like, I'm going to make this really, really slick. Okay. And that's cool. You get a bit more growth. But to get to recommendation, you're going to blow user socks off. And the thing I, the phrase we use is you have to give them an experience they didn't know was previously possible And when you're in that place of doing something that no one has ever done before, that's where you get it. So the bar is all the way up there.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is literally get more people using it and they'll share with their friends that there's obviously a bunch of learnings we've had around what specific trust sentiments matter, especially geographically, but they're less powerful in the macro than get more people to use it. So, coming back to that, and love to get your thoughts on this one, so as you said, lots of people go off to NPS and they kind of heard people talk about it, heard people talk about recommendations. So my learning on this is you've got to work really hard. To get recommendation, so to get a nine or a ten, IPS is 70%. So it's really, really high. So it's kind of higher than the iPhone and Google search. They're like really, really high.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this really was way stronger at trust signal than anything I could put on a landing page. And even when people came in through marketing, they'd be told. And so marketing can aid recall and all kinds of things because people are told by their friends that have a use case later on than Google. They're like, I remember this guy used this. And we do definitely get users, especially today as we've got a lighter brand through marketing direct. trust in isolation is a really hard problem to solve. You need to get underneath the skin of what it means. People don't think my money is safe. I don't know. This company is reputable. Unpick each of these problems and figure out systemically how to solve them. And we've done this to some extent, but really there's a massive shortcut, which is if you deliver your customers a good experience and figure out how do you make it so good, they'll recommend it, then that kind of shortcut. A lot of really hard trust problems.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's talk about that one event. Talk to Shib2, the trust problem. So I ran into the trust problem hardest in marketing. So just imagine you just started out, you got a money transfer company. It's good. Your product's really good. It's really cheap. You're putting that out and it says move money with wise. And really cheaply, like, is anyone going to click that? People did, right? Has anyone going to use it? Yeah, people did use it. And you did work all the usual trust elements. The bit I found that really helped the way I got my head around this was what people trust is their friends.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow. That's a really hard one. So the challenge is, as you know, everything is important. And things that we use, we have a bucket called convenience. And inside the convenience bucket, there are many, many things hiding in there. And it's actually, you can measure this on contact rate, conversion rate, whatever, many different ways and get many slightly different answers. So I think I've learned there isn't, I haven't got a good answer on things we.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All makes sense. Obviously, at the time, it was the beginning like everyone thinks there's 20 different things and then over time slowly you understand it it's these things again and again and a lot of building a successful business is kind of building conviction that these are the things that matter so now I'd say price speed is of use it sounds like but you know go back seven eight years but we were arguing with each other around what is it pressed is it this is this and like trying to get clear on what what are the things we”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we end up with a product that was priced, let's say 5.9% and the alternative was six, customers with users, but they wouldn't talk about us. We only got the advocacy when we were eight to ten times cheaper That's when people started talking about it.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like thinking hard about this question, how do we make this product so good that people use it, but they'll recommend it? And customers were pretty clear. The ones that were evangelical, the word we use, are the ones that had a much, had this cheaper experience. The ones that were talking about a fast experience. So, it's about price, about speed, it's about ease of use. And when you generalize to take a step back and look at consumer product companies, they have these product pinners, they call it. And they usually have KPIs around them. Second insight we got found is when we entered markets, like when we entered the US for the first time.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then the second magic of MPS is you get the numbers, but you also get the comments underneath it. I remember in the first year we built the MPS survey and we emailed out every week all the comments to the whole company, which was pretty small. We kept doing that, I think, up till about three or four years. Everyone got the MPS comments. When you read the comments, and now obviously we've got like all kinds of fancy models sitting on top of these things, customers kept telling us the same things. Make it faster, make it cheaper, make it easier to use. Do you know the beginning when I said price feed is of use, we kind of figured this out by...”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is pretty crazy when you see it for the first time. I'm going to get back to your question in a sec. It's quite a cool buildup to it Your product manager, like you've been in your career, one of your jobs is to figure out what metric are you going to optimize for? What are you going to try to get the business ground behind? And if you optimize for something like conversion rate and you move conversion rate with 10%, you kind of get this one-off hit. But if you move the MPS from 30% to 50%, you increase the viral coefficient of your customer base. So every customer that goes through tells XMA more, when you model this through the ROI on MPS increases, it's absolutely huge. So, this kind of got to say, this is the thing to zoom in on to how to move it.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. This over, you said, and then at the end, you got this scale zero to 10, and the theory is nine to ten that are promoters and zero to seven of the tractors, six to seven, so six detractors and seven to eight are kind of like neutral on your product. The intriguing bet was when we overlaid this. So we have word of mouth, about 50 odd percent, and then we have a referral program. The referral data over the MPS survey data, we saw something really interesting. It's very low in bite rates at one to six, and not just invite conversion rates of users that joined for invites. When you've got people from sixes to this 7A group, they doubled the number of people they told. Eight to nine, they doubled again. And nine to ten, they doubled again.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, from the very early days, we'd start asking customers, and you probably have seen this survey, would you recommend wise to a friend”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inherently hard team does a basic work at Wise in order to work within those constraints. Back to your question, which was like what's the biggest thing we've done to shift word of mouth? To join Wise and started wrangling with word of mouth, I spent a bunch of time with friends of mine in the US and around the world, and with Chen, some of the other kind of growth gurus. This is like going back 10, 12 years. Like, what it mouths, like who's done it? What's the system? What do you measure? There wasn't really anything out there. So we kind of had to figure out a way out. So, first step was asking it, and the second step was kind of figure out how do you know what's driving it? The best proxy we've found for this was something that most people have heard of that we actually use quite a lot. There's net promoter score.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of money as like the ultimate commodity. It's pretty hard to build an expensive business that moves your money somewhere. And it costs a lot. So there's less of it afterwards. So building like a brand led money transfer business. The brand's going to be pretty damn good, right? You're going to feel pretty special afterwards in order to kind of have less money afterwards. So what we're looking for always, but what channels out there are super scalable and can reach our entire audience, but have an incredibly low distribution cost. That's one thing that's the word of mouth. The other bit when we get on to talking about marketing later, the other challenge with marketing, which is unique, is because we're lower price but a superior product, we have less margin to spend on marketing than others in certain paid channels. So that's another reason why marketing is”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before I launch into this, let's just also take a step back and why even focus on this. In the early days, when I met the founders at Kristo and Tavert, it was quite funny. I got intro to them when they were just the founders and without a team really and with the beginnings of a product. And they said, you've got to meet these guys. They've got a great product. They just don't have any customers. I sat there with them and we kind of launched the first Google Ads. And in the early days, you kind of try everything that something works. Taking it a step back.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, integrated into the flow. So when we built it originally, we thought it's quite cool, like marketing and acquiring customers is part of the product. And we should actually stitch that into experience seamlessly so that we're able to do this more effectively going forward.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We ask customers is the short answer. So we have an attribution model, as you can imagine. And we've had one from the early days. And it overlays all the kind of cookie, the referral data and cookie data you have on visits coming to the website to kind of know that. And then you obviously have the soundtrack stuff. And we sample and ask customers a set of questions on this and then overlay that onto the what turns up in your web tracking as direct traffic to give you a sense of how big that word of mouth number is. That's what gets us back to the 70% there.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take about 0.65% on average across all our routes as price And they've been profitable for about more than four years now with 20% EBITDA margins. But probably that's that I'm most proud of and the hardest thing to make happen out of all of that was we acquired 70% of the users that found out about why's last month through word of mouth. Contextually, we have 16 million customers and requiring about a million a quarter, about 10 million actives. And yes, another million that joined WASE the first time, 700,000 found out about WISE from a friend.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking to solve the problems associated with cross-border money movement, which is that moving money across borders is pretty slow. It's actually really expensive and it can be really hard to do. We solve it with three products, our money transfer product, which is what we started with, our account, which we like to think of trying to solve the problems of international banking with our account for people and for businesses. And then finally, we've also got an enterprise product where we take the underlying infrastructure that's powered those products that we've built and embed them in the banks and products that people use every day. And then zooming into the numbers. So we've got to come a little way on the journey. So today we're now moving about 12 billion dollars a month. Between 30 to 40 percent year on year.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people focus on conversion rate. Like, I'm going to make this really, really slick, and that's cool. You get a bit more growth. To get to recommendation, you can blow user socks off. You have to give them an experience they didn't know was previously possible. And when you're in that place of doing something that no one has ever done before, that's where you get it.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source