YouSaid · the spoken record

Val Scholz

lines on the record: 63
first: 2024-06-21
most recent: 2024-06-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I mean, also the finances are impressive. I mean, I think they made nearly a billion profit last year or something. And I mean, they're growing like hell. I mean, Revolute is growing fast, but Neubank is growing even faster”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's so sticky, it's insane. They didn't have competition. I think they have like 100 million active users nowadays.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“most impressive thing I've seen was Newbank. I mean they have like a ninety percent retention rate like over 24 months. It's ridiculous. It's like they just figured out something in the Brazilian market that just is magic. It's basically like from what I understood in Brazil because of the financial crisis They made it illegal to not allow installment payments when you pay for let's say a laptop or food because a lot of people are so poor that they wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise so essentially everybody has to offer them A B it was illegal to put interest on it so obviously everybody chose to pay an installment because why not? There's no downside. What Nubank did was basically saying okay we're offering a credit card so you can pay with Nubank. You go to the merchant, split it into free payments, but then in New Bank you can pay it in one go and you get a 5% discount and then it took the money to basically lend it to others.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market, or you can segment the market where you basically can build a product where essentially you don't have much competition, where your product is 10x better than the status quo. And I think, you know, the best founders, they find these markets, define these unique insights, they grow through that, right? Rather than where everybody else goes.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The bigger you get, the easier you get disrupted, right? Let's say a market that's worth 10 million is nothing for a company like Canada makes, I don't know, I think nowadays three billion? Something like that. They don't even go after that market because it's just not big enough, right? But it also allows you to basically disrupt from that market a bigger market and then a slightly bigger market. I mean, in the end of the day, you have high conviction that there's need for a software like this because you already have proof points. You also have a lot of feedback around what's not so good with the tools, which allows you to navigate through it. But equally, it's obviously very hard because you have a huge competitor that is quite strong at what you do. Probably the easier way to see it is you want to go in a market where you don't have competition. So if you think about Revolut against Monso, right, like the markets we grew the fastest wasn't the UK. It was Ireland, it was Romania, it was Poland. While we still competed here and there with different banks, we went in a lot of markets where we just hadn't competition, which allowed us to raise more money, build better products, hire more people. There's always a way you can see.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's more like a thought experiment, but I'm wondering if there's really the need for the internet, the way we know it nowadays in 15 to 20 years. At the moment, you always have a phone or like a screen that connects you to a virtual world, right? And in that virtual world, it's going completely crazy. You have, I don't know, crypto and you have autonomous AI agents and like all kinds of weird things, right? But what happens if, let's say, in a few years, probably four or five years, you will have a lot of robots in the real world. You have Tesla's robots and I think Boston Dynamics. And these robots basically can speak to you like a human. They can do tasks like a human. Do you really need to go in that virtual world anymore? Does it become more like a Star Wars where, you know, you interact with the virtual world in a physical world?”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To put it, as Nick put it, we're like special forces. We go in, we don't fuck up. That mentality that every meeting, every design catch-up, every marketing campaign. Essentially anything you do is perfectly executed at all times, at the maximum speed. So if you have a typo in a design review, not good. If a screen shoot somewhere is missing, not good. If FAQ is missing, you know, like everything had to be kind of like Apple, you know, everything had to be perfectly executed at all times.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Monster is just a more modern bank. Revolut is a financial ecosystem. If you think about it, right, like you have 50 million B2C customers, I don't know how many million businesses. So suddenly you can just stay in the revolution. No more visa, no more Mastercard, something completely new”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“getting foundest to build better products or generally building better products. I think it's really hard to set a product that doesn't really add value to people.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we are looking into automating partnership manager negotiations because suddenly you can scale it up to million partnership managers. I think more spamming, I think at some point probably goes back to first principles, like who really offers value and what's old school traditional ways to reach people.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For whatever reason I thought that you can acquire a lot of customers with P2P payments, and so I spent four weeks trying to make it work that people can pay someone that's not on Revolut, didn't do anything.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was a Monday afternoon Chad, me, and Tom, and I think Alan basically set up a referral campaign, wrote an emo, and enabled free cards to revolute customers, and that generated like one hundred eighty thousand sign ups in a week. And I think back then Revolut grew around 10,000 sign-ups a week.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Connecting everything through a user ID, we could then segment the audience the way we wanted. If we wanted to look at only people in Austria at a certain age, we could do this. And we could see how much they cost us, how much money they generate us. What's the unit economics”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never come back, right? You have payment issues. So you should generate revenue. You don't, right? Because some weird authorization issue in I don't know Brazil. You have different campaigns that cost you different money, right? And so you want to understand, okay, which campaign actually generates how much revenue? Like how efficient are they? So how do you connect suddenly like Google Analytics data with Stripe data and mix panel data? And then I think in certain industries like banking, it gets even harder, right? Because we can't just expose every transaction of a customer and the details to a third party tool. What happens if they get hacked? I think for us it was like, okay, every software that's built and even like any third party software you use has a database. And a database contains all the valuable information. And that's your source of truth. If the database is wrong, I mean, the whole application is wrong. And so basically what we started doing is combining the various data sources in a centralized data warehouse.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think Tubigi companies use event driven data infrastructure, mixed panel amplitude, didn't really change for like probably 15, 20 years, which usually creates most of the issues in a company. I actually think that if you look at Uber, Airbnb, Meta, they don't use events, or at least not in the early days. We didn't use events at Revolut. I think the problem is often that engineering doesn't really have access to data, it doesn't use data much. They may be a bit scared of the topic. Traditionally, data people weren't very technical. Usually companies that had a data team had data analysts, not data scientists or the data engineering. And then essentially like product managers or business people wanted certain insights. So people went to MixPanel, went to Amplitude because it was easy, right? Just one line of code. I think then over the years with people, some companies realized this that actually you don't get a lot of insights because, you know, you have some payment data in Stripe, right? Some people churn.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was the interesting thing we never thought about it that way from the early days it was always like we don't want to build a bank. I mean we even had on a website right better than a bank account and bank was crossed out like I think it was always like the clear message like look banks are broken banks rip you off we don't want to be a bank we want to rebuild and build something better than before for a long time we really wanted to distance ourselves from the entire banking system right we didn't want to rip off our customers the same way we want to build better services faster services new innovative products and I think it helped us to basically build something that the competition like Monzo and 26 never done”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so basically what happened was the suddenly KYC times went from three minutes to or a minute to suddenly like two weeks. Customer support waiting lines went from, I don't know, 10 minutes to four weeks. So, you know, that was the challenging part, right? That it's just not one system that you have to scale up. You have to scale up every system internally in the company with rapid pace.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we launched it, we went in monet, Romania from 2000, and after three days we won 64,000. Just in Romania, we just launched the monet because we didn't want to break the whole system. We then had to turn it off because we grew too fast.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything rebuild everything in-house every few months. For example, I went there when we were like 80 people. I left when it was two and a half thousand. That's two and a half years. My team went from two people to over one hundred fifty in like nine months. Everything breaks. The way you communicate doesn't work anymore. The way you couldn't upgrade to a bigger database anymore, right? Basically Google didn't have bigger databases. So we had to split the databases and sync them somehow. 700 million transactions that we processed in one single month at the end before I left, which is growing every month with hundreds of millions of new transactions. It was just mad when we did referrals, for example, when we launched it. We went from 15,000 new users a day. And we only launched it in one market.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was more direct, I guess. I thought it was such a neat thing that, like, PDF, better. I mean, he comes from a scientific background, so he ultimately believes in truth. And one thing that Ridalio says in the book is that truth sometimes hurts. But if you find an environment that's more scientific and ultimately truth-seeking, it gives more an environment where you basically thrive and really get results. And so I think what Nick created was ultimately like an environment where truth matters. I could go always to Nick and basically say, look, that's wrong. Here's the data that proves me wrong, right? And he would always listen and consider it. And if he agrees with it or if I give him new data, he would change his mind. So ultimately, yes, there's probably some element of fear, but maybe that you put on yourself because you might feel”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worked with Nick intensely. I mean, it kind of like it's his way of thinking, right? Imagine you're spending every week with Elon Musk, half an hour, right? And every week you get feedback from Elon Musk about what you could do better, right? How he thinks, how he sees things, you know, what you didn't consider, what you could do better, you know, obviously, you know, you're going to learn a lot from that.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in everyone, but like Nick, for example, had seventy, eighty one and ones a week. So basically like every product team sync Nick was in it, every design team sync Nick was in it.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need a feedback cycle, right? You need to kind of see okay, I try A, is it good? Is bad? What's good? What's bad? What could I improve? I think the more frequent you have these things, the better because essentially you learn faster. Imagine like every cycle, every time you get feedback is a cycle. Every time you basically complete a cycle, you learn. So the more cycles you have, the faster you learn. And so often what managers do is basically your performance will every three months, right? It's not okay. Like basically that means it's very slow that you develop because if you do something wrong, if you don't think the right way, you know, if you focus on the wrong things, you get feedback after three months. So I think probably doing it daily is too extreme. I think once a week was kind of like what we found optimal to move really fast, but equally like for the whole team. Yeah, so we had like in every function we had once a week an update. And so for example,”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always like engineering doesn't have anything to do. Ultimately, I have a choice, right? I can try to do it on my own, but it's probably putting more load on me. It's not a sustainable solution. Or I need to try to make it work with him, right? And so basically what we did was I had four ketchups a day. So he had to give me an update every two hours and he got tasks on what he needs to change in the next two hours. After three weeks, it was just, I don't know, somehow he figured it out. And he knew kind of like what do you expect of him, which then essentially we could also just have once, so a week, a catch-up about what's going on in product design.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suns very counterintuitive, but essentially spending more time with them. So I have like Oleg, he's a good friend nowadays. He was the lead product designer at my team at Revolut. Very creative designer, but like very unstructured, unfocused. And so Revolut expected you every week. You need to show progress. So every week we have a design sync with Nick. You just had to show like, hey, we're making progress, right? That's basically what you work on the whole week. And all I basically like, he spent so much time just optimizing one screen. So basically we had 20-30 variations of one screen, but we didn't have like a user journey. So when we had the review, there wasn't much progress to be seen, right? We didn't really understand how the solution would solve the problem of the customer. Then the second week happened, right? Same problem. And I was like, okay, this is not going to work. I need new user flows and maximum two, three weeks.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends how you define a good culture. I think what a lot of people forget is that revolution is like that company that is at the 0.01%. You know, it's like a SpaceX, a Facebook, a meta. I think all these companies are very similar. Even if you look at something like sports, right? Top clubs like Real Madrid or Bayern Munich or Manchester City, they just expect more of you. It's more cut through environment. Like either you perform or you're out. There's a reason why there are elite clubs. I think it's similar in startups, right? If you like Facebook in early days, Apple, Microsoft, you have to win. It's the mentality of the founder. You want to be the fastest growing company. You want to be the dominant force in your market. So if people, you know, don't fit that environment if they can't contribute. It's not that people are necessarily bad or that in general they wouldn't be successful.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess it's because either people didn't clearly listen or pay attention, so they didn't fully understand what you expect of them when you give them feedback, for example, or give them a task. And then ultimately as a result, they didn't really expect quickly or learn quickly. You know, if you would see like, okay, maybe the person is not perfect right now, but he's picking up pace really quickly. So in like two months, he will be there. I think you're fine because it will take you longer to hire replacement. But if you feel like you give him a lot of feedback and it's just not getting better, it's not going to get better than in two months or three months, right? So that's kind of like what I'm looking for.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I usually try to make it work for like three four weeks, but if I can't make it work after four weeks, yes. What were the”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you have a gut feeling pretty quickly, probably a few days. Majority of people after week, you basically like, okay, that's not going to work.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to look for the people who have a structured approach at solving problems. Realistically speaking, just from analyzing some data, you will never know for sure whether it's the right or wrong path, right? But you want someone that is very structured, like thinks about like, okay, what could be the root cause? How can I get insights about that? Ultimately, like, you want someone that has an approach on how to solve and identify a problem. You can replicate it, right? Like it doesn't matter which problem I give you, you can basically use the same approach to solve the problem again. If someone maybe just solved it in the past but has no clue about how to do it again, it's a bit useless.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can use benchmarks, so for example, Unis, top Unis, if you go to LSE, Stanford, Harvard, you pre-vet it. So you're quite smart, you're probably quite ambitious. So if you did the universe, I don't know, worked at a tier one company, you probably fit the bill. So that's one way to attract these people. The second thing is that say if you're looking for someone more senior, like a product director, if you get promoted in two, three years to product director, there's something different about you. Because other people, when somebody works as a product manager for, let's say, 10 years, you ask yourself, okay, why are they not a director, right? Why are they not leading a team? So we use these proxies to basically guess whether it's the right fit or not. Typically in growth, we didn't look for people that studied marketing or stuff like that.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If people don't use metrics, so if you can't clearly see what the impact of someone was, if people use vanity metrics, for example a marketing manager, a head of marketing that basically says I managed 30 million budget, it's like, okay, maybe you generated $1 revenue, maybe $100 million. I mean, how does it matter? For us, I was trying to like looking for red flags or looking for the attributes we're looking for. We wanted to see that people learn very fast and learn faster than the average person. For example, I went to uni, but it dropped out. But like I still was kind of like, you know, progressing very quickly in my career.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No use tech. We used recruiters to schedule call, close contracts, but like sourcing, screen calls, CV screening was usually done by hiring managers.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You probably have a gut feeling of what you're looking for, right? Maybe a benchmark of companies you find really attractive. Let's say operations, right? Okay, Uber has really excellent operations. So you would try to find people, okay, maybe people that work two years, one year at Uber, people that maybe want to do the next step. You can target these people on LinkedIn and then essentially it's just basically message everyone that basically fits the criteria”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think so. I think it's, I mean, if you present it in a way like look, this is the culture of the company, right? So we're looking for these people. I think it also gives the other person an opportunity to see whether it's the right thing for them. It's a bit like dating, right? Like me at that point, I wanted to prove myself. For me, it was like, hey, I want to learn. I want to join a small company. It should become the next on Facebook. I just wanted to see what's different. And so for me, it was like, hey, yeah, I want to work weekends. I want to work long evenings. I really want to learn.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assuming too much, I had sons a bit harsh but like for example not checking whether people want to work hard you talk about it but not directly asking like hey do you work weekends do you work evenings people try to be too nice and maybe politically for those that don't”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was the main thing. I mean, I think we mentioned before, like Alan or Chad, I think myself, I think Nick basically looked for very young people, very driven people, very smart people. That was basically the main requirements, right? The thinking was kind of like, you know, we can teach people skills. We can't teach them the right behaviors or attitudes or mindset. So either you want it or you don't.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably two things like A, you don't test people far enough. So you maybe have a conversation. You don't dig deep into, let's say, they talk about a certain project or past incident, but you don't ask follow-up questions where you understand context, right? Like, did they contribute towards it or did they lead it? Can they explain in detail what was the problem or not? So I think, you know, the best founders, they really dig deep in understanding like, okay, what really happened? Do a belief that that person actually made that impact? Do they understand enough to make that impact? And then the second thing, which is essentially, if you look at sports, for example, you know, Michael Jordan, Christiana Ronaldo, Kobe Bryant, you don't have to motivate these people. It doesn't matter what they will do. They will always be the best. It's just their attitude. It's the mindset, right? And I think, you know, like you want to see the same thing in the people you hire. You want people that are hungry, people that are passionate.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to hit every week metrics. I mean, it's quite like black and white, right? Either the company is growing or it's not. It doesn't really matter why it's not growing, but it needs to grow.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally always believe it's better to have someone that grows with the company, the rough diamonds, but the ambitious, the hardworking, they want to prove themselves. To be honest, there's not many growth people that want to do it again. I think it's just like...”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I would still do some other channels, but it depends on the size of the company, right? Pretty big mistake is to go too early in too many channels. In the end of the day, you rely quite heavily on data to understand what works, what doesn't work. And you really need to understand it, right? Because otherwise you can't replicate it. The problem is the more channels you have, the harder it is to measure directly the impact of a specific channel. Because there's obviously like, you know, a lot of noise coming in. And then essentially because you have more noise, your decisions gets worse, and which makes it then a lot harder and slower to actually really nail one channel, for example, to generate a million new users a month.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in the early days, right, people build a two-sided marketplace where essentially you had to control or grow both supply and demand. I think what a lot of companies nowadays do, they control both supply and demand. So essentially, it's a lot easier because you can just, you know, rather than having to convince people to basically use your software and be super engaged, you can just pay someone for it. They can generate content for you. And as you build more content, you generate more traffic, which then generates you more revenue. I think what's nowadays happening is that because people understand kind of like the tactics to grow their channels, whether it's SEO, referrals, paid, they execute a lot faster. Usually bring things first in-house because you have more control and then as you grow, you shift it more towards user generated. So basically you cut your cost.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's two ways to make it work either your user generated content, Pinterest, YouTube, you can basically create content or topic clusters where you basically create hierarchy of how you create dynamic landing pages. So essentially software creates landing pages that match the keywords that people are searching for. Like if you have a lot of user generated content. Often nowadays, if you look, for example, at Canva, what they've done is they created content. You basically have crazy big in-house teams that generate content for you so that you can create these topic clusters, which I think is actually one of the most exciting things that I've learned in the last two years because I've never seen that before or probably haven't understood it before.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's amazing, right? And I think it's similar in other firms where, I don't know, let's say WhatsApp or Revel it in a way, Revolut is very incentivizing for others to join because at some point it becomes, you're basically uncool if you don't have Revolut. You get the group pressure to get Revolut. So let's say you play paddle, one pace for the whole group. If one person doesn't have Revolute, everybody else will push him to get Revolut because it's more convenient to get paid.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do a paid marketing loop. I think Uber did it quite well where they offered money, or actually like PayPal in the early days. You offer someone money to sign up and essentially as long as they bring in more money, like the whole loop is working. We have content acquisitions. So for example, YouTube is a great example, right? Like somebody signs up to YouTube, uploads a video, and then other people are going to watch it. They share it on other platforms. For example, if you build search, right, let's say Canva, for example. It's really hard to get rid of Canva, right? Even if they don't spend anything anymore, even if they don't improve anything anymore, because for nearly everything you're going to search around marketing, graphic design, PowerPoint presentations, like Convest the number one spot. Conver nowadays is much larger in terms of volume generated to the website than Adobe. So it's really hard to disrupt them.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The market is so saturated, oversaturated, traditional marketing means like it's not scalable, right? Essentially, it only scales with human output. So essentially, if I want to have twice as many people coming to my website, I need to hire twice as many people, which becomes, you know, as the company grows, it becomes more and more expensive. And then typically teams would get less efficient, so I need even more people. If you look at growth, which is essentially, you know, you build software that does marketing for you, it basically scales exponentially. I need less and less people in the future to get bigger and bigger results”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we probably had a more broader product portfolio. Equally, we focused more on everyday banking. So we built a product that was more useful for everyday banking, right? Standing orders, direct debits, budgeting, savings accounts. Essentially, I guess then the combination of all of them gave people more reasons to stay and use it rather than the Nat West or Barclays code.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think initially it's about getting data, right? Yeah. So obviously, let's say in the first year, you have no clue how long people stay in five years, right? You can look at cohorts, so month by month cohorts, and you can look at the drop-off of these cohorts. So let's say people that sign up in January versus people that sign up in February. How many people come back a month after? And so you can compare it. Do you improve things? Do you make things worse? That's A. And then B is basically, do they ever flatten? Ideally, for example, Revolut in the early days, you could see, okay, maybe 35% of the people made the first payment in the first month. But then basically it flattened. And then I think it settled around 20%. And so after three, four months, it just didn't drop below 20%. So it always stayed there. And then essentially, when we started to optimize the product, you actually saw more like a smiley curve. So it actually increased and we got high again. So cords that used to be a 20-something.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think growth is actually quite simple. It doesn't really matter which channel you're using, but it's always basic math. Let's say an influencer, you look at like, okay, on average, how many views will it generate per video? So you can expect roughly how many people will see it. And how many people do you think will click through from the video to actually your website or app store? You can take conservative market estimates like 5% or something. And then essentially how many people actually convert from checking out your website to actually becoming a user. After that, it's basically like you have your...”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we tried a lot, but some experiments are hard to measure. For example, we went to all the big tech companies like Google, Uber in our lunch break to hand out cards in their cafeteria. Obviously, it's hard to measure like, okay, what's really the long-term impact, right? So I think it was just like we tried a lot of things. And once we saw something works, we just doubled down and just did it until you couldn't do it anymore. We saw, okay, YouTube influencers work really well. We saw a spike in one country. Okay, let's just get every YouTube influence on the market. And then after the month there weren't any left and you basically find the next thing.”
2024-06-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source