Talks with a CMO: The Unconventional Path to Hypergrowth with Revolut | PAP#164

Speaker A: Foreign m.

Speaker B: Welcome to the first episode of the Project A Talk to the CMO Podcast. We're going to be interviewing one CMO each session to find out what makes their company grow, what strategies you should be using and maybe a few insightful bumps in the road. Just to arrogantly introduce myself first, I'm your host Luke Costly White and I'm the head of acquisition here at Project A. I've been working in startups for around seven years. I love digging into new growth channels and strategies and that's why I started the series to pick the brains of some great marketers. And without further ado, let's introduce our first guest. Our first guest is Victor Stoppa, the head of growth for Western Europe, uh, at Revolut, previously working in Clark and also at uh, one of our ventures at Liquid back in the day. Shout out to the crew. Now Victor, I thought about introducing you and Revolut myself but I don't like being hunted down by people's brand teams so I'm going to leave that to you. Firstly introduce yourself. What is Revolut, what do you do there and what are your biggest marketing challenges right now?

Speaker A: Thanks for your time and uh, the short term offer to join me today. Uh, yeah, so I'm Victor, uh, I work for Revolut. I think if you're into marketing you should know that term or that name. We have financial superpaive originally in the UK seven, eight years ago. Um, we are north of the 28 million customers worldwide. We're a global bank and we are actually defining ourselves as a financial super app which basically helps you to solve all your financial problems between one app, one source and um, yeah I've joined last year initially um, as head of growth for the German region, del speaking region and since a uh few months cup took over basically the western part which is everything, Germany, Austerland, the Benedict States and France and uh, yeah my marketing and growing such a business quite interesting because everywhere you go, each territory, each city, each region has its different needs, wants and problems and these are uh, like my biggest challenge on a day to day basis to at one high end to think about what does a German customer like on the other end what do the Dutch is like what the French is or Luxembourg officially.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think we talked about a little bit earlier that obviously Revolut is a little bit more established than some of the younger startups um, that we talk to on a regular basis. It's now in kind of a more mature phase of growth. What do you think that's meant for you in terms of strategy. What does that change in terms of the way you approach things?

Speaker A: So I like to think about it like a wave. So when Revolver coming, you're from the U.K. i would assume, um, based on the accent and the discussion that we had previously. So in there you had big challenge. With traditional banks it's very tough uh, for some customers to open up an account to get a credit card, a debit card, easy payment and all of that. But I think several years ago, um, when Nick, our founder discovered that issue, he basically found a solution that made him travel lighter so he didn't want to have and go abroad and pay high currency exchange fees in the US in Euro web. And with that product development we saw our first phase of growth which was organic growth, target growth. You develop something that solves for a problem and you see growth coming through that and that swapped over in ways into different markets, different demographics, different target audiences and still maintains until today. And our second stage of growth is basically where you maintain that organic growth, product growth and you're throwing paid growth on top of to help boost that and maintain that momentum. So I think we as a company were fortunate enough to hit at the right time, the right venue prop with the right offering and extended till today across different markets territories at the same pace that we did several years ago.

Speaker B: Yeah, it makes sense. And I know obviously we have a couple of app based businesses also in the audience. Obviously you guys are a uh, finance app and we always talk about the app stores as being the gatekeepers for those businesses. Essentially you win or lose by how well you can do that setup. What do you think are the best kind of options, the best weapons to basically allow you to succeed in uh, an app based industry.

Speaker A: So when I, when I talk to my team or we talk across different teams, we always look about what is actually hot and isn't hot right now in japs, what is trending, what's not, why do they trend? Why not? So there is, yes, there's categories in the episode, but if you are in the ranking, in your overall ranking in the top 20, you are a winner. That basically is super, super high growth. If you look at the likes of traditional banks in Germany, for some reason they're still number one in the financial categories and it's easy to explain why. Because they migrate offline users into the pet scale because they have harvested that years and years ago. So to break through, add an app canitu understand what makes the social media app trend suddenly, uh, all of a Sudden, what makes a gaming and trend? What do they do? Is there something that you can learn from? Is there something that you can adapt to and do you copy or use the tools that they have in the stores? Like do you have an asot, do you look at it? Do you look at your App Store conversion? You like your place? Do you have the right keywords? Do you sell yourself right in the right terms? I mean a lot of people don't understand it. For instance, the App Store in the English side of the App Store in Germany is actually packed ah, with UK content. So you always think about like okay, German apps. So I have to optimize the German language. But if you're an international product like PayPal or us, uh, or others, you also need to think about the English solution for the non German speakers in their respective country and these things you need to look at. So you need to make sure that somebody has an eye on the gate, on the Play Store App Store, but as well on the website. Even though we don't have a web funnel because we basically want app users, we still need to make sure that the first touch point, which is xdor, Play Store or website itself, that they're clean and that they have all the important info that the user needs to have to convert.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the App Store optimization thing is a really interesting topic. It's one of my kind, um, of pet favorites and I think that a lot of companies, you know, we had the session earlier about SEO. A lot of companies are aware of the importance of that and even when they transition to app, I don't think they take necessarily App Store optimization as seriously as they take SEO. For those type of companies that haven't made the investment yet or haven't decided that it's a priority, what would you say are the main reasons to do it and what do you think the most basic setup to get started would be?

Speaker A: I don't think it's investment that's necessary for the beginning. I think you need to educate. So all of the marketeers need to have access to the App Store console or Play Store console and they need to understand what kind of metrics can I look in there? So you have product page visit, which basically is in the App Store telling you how many people end up uh, on my revenue page and actually spend some time, depends on how long, doesn't, can't retract that. But basically have visited the page and on the scene, what do we show, what do we say, what do we sell? And a lot of people don't do that because they work somewhere in some console and look at CPI and then it's going up down North Sea. You don't know. And you need to basically dig always into the next stage. So the recipients need to show an impression. You need to see that the conversion happens. Cool, we have got that done. Um, by now everybody should be able to do that. But you also need to analyze and understand at the first touch point how is that behaving versus the amount of traffic that you throw in. And I think a lot of people don't do that yet. We're going to get more and more and more education. But this minimum essence basically giving you access to all the necessary tools. At the end we said, yeah, like

Speaker B: you mentioned, also obviously this siloization between the teams and also that you need to be thinking about it at multiple markets. Obviously Revolut is a global app, maybe more global than most people think. Uh, we think about it as being really successful in certain markets, but you're actually available in a huge number. How does that change localization at that kind of scale? What are the kind of teething problems that you experience and what are the kind of biggest learnings that you've got of doing localization at that scale versus in other companies you might have been in the past?

Speaker A: So our teams are constructed in a way that we solve for problems without borders. Right. So basically our. Let's say you work on a Facebook console. You, you don't. You, you need. You get provided an asset in a certain language and you can display it in free market at the same time. So you can basically put it into the Swiss market, Austin market or German market. Ideally you localize it in a way that is applicable across all. And so please don't use any like terms that maybe a German would say, but not in Austrian. So to not to offend them, but that, that's one setting. So you need to have somebody who provides the local insights and basically feeds into how do we want to display German content. At the same time, you need to think about what works best in one market and to what extent is my hypothesis that it will work as well in my other market. If you think about France and England, I think it's a very interesting historical situation. So I won't say that you can't localize exactly the same things that you sell in England to the French. So you need to think about like, okay, how can I take the core bases that make it as French as possible or as Dutch as possible? And for that we Work with um, localization teams and product localization marketing organizations. So we have specific people, ah, and marketeers and product marketeers who just look at the serpent territory and they feed into our global engine. So if we see this potential for growth in Germany, basically it's coming from local insights feeding into a global engine. And that's how we can make sure that we actually grow and maintain that cycle of all the markets at the same time.

Speaker B: I got asked earlier what I think uh, the product marketing growth, uh, collaboration looks like and we had a really interesting discussion about it earlier. I think what I would describe it as, you kind of suggested that you do almost like feature based marketing. Like you, you look at uh, you know the problems that the market is facing, you select the feature that fits kind of the struggles that they're having and then essentially you just tell the story of that a lot of, to a lot of people that might come across as really simplistic, um, but it's been incredibly successful for you guys. What do you think is the kind of changes uh, that you have to make within the business in order to be able to follow that kind of strategy?

Speaker A: I think the beauty in the business of Revolut is that you basically put a lot of products into one product. So if something drops, something else will pop at the same time which is giving us the benefit of always being able to adapt and change very fast. But at the same time we always need to challenge ourselves. Is the space that we give to our current value prop actually something that the users are looking for right now? So we need to look. What we do is basically we look at, let's take an influencer ad as an example. You have 90 seconds to sell something. So most likely to educate a user about why they should buy a product, they spend 30 seconds per value prop less with introducing itself and the product itself. So let's say 20. So you have three value props max per perplacent. And let's say it's us uh, ordering a customized card, setting up a trading account and last one is to basically send money to a friend. That's what we sell because we think it makes the most sense. And then if you look at the data and no, nobody is basically ordering customized card. As an example, we have a lot of customers cards but uh, let's say nobody's ordering it. Then you know that you have one third of your vegetable to yourself. That doesn't really bring any revenue, any growth and it's not the reason why the business came for. So you need to also think about the future. So basically double down on the opportunity that influencer worked on the channel but at the same time always reflect based on who I brought last week. And that's how we always operate inside those. So we look to what is bringing the highest growth. Cool. Did they bring the highest growth that we wanted them to bring? So did they bring the users that basically traded, spotted the customized card and sent money to a friend or is there some bias in the data that you see?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's really interesting. This cohort look at both, not just CRM, which is obviously really common, but also looking at the feature usage tells you how successful the customer is going to be. And so it tells you what you should tell people to do that informs the marketing that you do at the beginning. I think this cycle is really interesting especially with the lens of the shift you guys have been doing over the last year or so. Obviously you famously became profitable over the last few months and this is a category shift for a hyper growth scale up uh, that's used to growing at a million miles an hour with no holds bars. We talked about a few changes in terms of process uh, and experience for the team but this must have been categorical. How do you make those kind of changes? How does it affect the marketing team but also how you collaborate with the other teams in order to reach uh, that kind of goal.

Speaker A: So I think it's communication and education. Right. So a few years left the room and it would interesting to, to remind ourselves I used to work for Liquid. So leads are super important for some businesses. Right. And more the better because you have more potential to call away with just having uh, a keynote on that. So how to convert a lead? Yes, very important to have as many leads as possible. It gives your potential. But if one out of the thousand does, a sale is wasted. The 999 options basically. And you paid money for them. Right. So the question is for us always it's not about installs and signups and basically bringing in the user. It's really about bringing the value of the users. And are we digging deep enough to get the right users? Because we can get a lot of users. We have proven that. Cool, fine. But now the next stage is to actually get users from users directly as a primary account, directly as something else. And for that you need to actually talk to your teams and start educating to look behind the next metric. After the cpa, after the cpi, it can be anything from product usage. So basically go to a product team, ask them, hey, I Brought you last week 1000 new users. Did they actually do what we asked them to do or are they not signing up for it or what's wrong with them? Then integrate them into your data stack, make it available instant. So look at it on the first day, second day, third day, fourth day. Especially for incentivized campaigns. If you have incentivized campaigns. So you often pay something for the user to do something. So they are coming for money? Are they doing everything for their money? Do you have the data available? Are you looking at that way? And optimize for actually the second first step into the funnel, because that's how you want to get quality of the user. Uh, and that's how it helps you steer to different things that you just mentioned two seconds ago.

Speaker B: Do you think that you need a different team set up in order to have this kind of the synergies that you talk about between products and data? Like I did the session earlier, uh, unfortunately while you were away, um, it was beautiful, I promise. Um, on data and marketing as being like a marriage, um, you guys have a very kind of interconnected relationship between those different elements. Do you actually have like embedded pieces of the different, like marketing data, uh, tech product within squads or teams or anything like that? Or it's just you have a very strong collaboration aspect.

Speaker A: I think we all have a very high appetite for understanding problems and uh, the highest appetite, when I look at it like, like when I started, uh, I always said like, okay, the money that these bring into Revolut has to come from somewhere. Can we understand it somewhere? Like, what is the biggest bank that uses transfer money into Revolut? And then the second bit is where is the money going? So what do they use it for the most? And that is, I mean, I couldn't get the data in the beginning by myself, so I had to learn some SDO and all of that. But that question really, really interested me so much because I knew that's where basically the biggest problem lies. And um, you need to attack the first one, become the first one. And you need to understand what are they using it you for and what are they using the first one for. And then we can come and start basically optimizing for that. And if you don't get it yourself, uh, your growth analytics team, which we have for instance, they need to think also further because we all run for the same KPIs right now. Everybody should optimize for RI and for CBA because we're all in this time, so it's tougher to justify growth that is unpropable. And your data team, you need to have a data team in growth or you need to have very skilled growth marketees that can all get the data by themselves, which is tough.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think maybe we go quickly into a, into a micro level. Um, I think this, this journey, this transition away from cpi, cpa, cost per order, whatever the metric is towards roas but then also beyond that to like actual usage what it ends up being in your final metric. Like we have companies in here obviously like liquid that you mentioned earlier where the, the probability that they sign up and invest within the normal window of a uh, um, paid social shampoo is very unlikely. But understanding your trigger metrics, the different parts along the journey that really inform you of the quality of the customers. This is what you were saying earlier, uh, allows you to move towards the profitability. What does that journey look like if you had to make it in steps?

Speaker A: So I think the point to make here is that it never like growth or marketing doesn't stop somewhere. It's not like you're bringing the user to a door and then you let the product take them in and then ideally CRM take them out or make them go into the different rooms. Right. But growth should always care about to the last bit as well. Because I actually believe that in some depending on the business model. Obviously here also part of growth. Right. But you need to, it's the biggest trigger for you to improve your quality met rates because you already have somebody in surpass like the opt in stages. You need stages and can talk for them. And I think the, the, the most important bit about making sure that you can like operate on it is that you need to always take a step back. Are we really following the right path right now? Like take. If you're in a phase of growth you most likely see KPI is blowing up and everything goes up ideally. But then you need to go out sometimes and take a look holistically are we doing the right thing? Or maybe it's a time for us to also slow down our growth for like two weeks to actually see if we are really on track. And I think a lot of like now due to different like economic environments I'm in more companies reduce their spend and suddenly have realized oh spent a bunch of money on our phone campaign on my organic baseline maintains the setup same like a year after. And I don't think like a brand effect lasts for a year. Like you need to take a break, look back and review of if everything what you do is actually right. Wrong.

Speaker B: Yeah, it definitely makes sense. I would love to continue chatting for another three hours maybe. Um, not with the audience, that would be weird. But, uh, I think I will get in trouble if I do. Um, if you will be interested in being on the podcast later as a CMO, please let me know. Send message here on LinkedIn. Thank you so much, Victor. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining our podcast today.

Speaker A: Thank you. We hope you enjoyed, uh, our podcast. If you did, how about you subscribe on Spotify and or itunes and give us a rating? Thanks, guys.