Lenny's Podcast · Sep 24How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)
About 70% of its roughly 1 million quarterly new users come from word of mouth, with an NPS near 70 against about -30 for banks. Price fell from 0.5% to about 0.35% by engineering out costs, and it moves about $12 billion a month with 20% EBITDA margins.
Tips
- Ask new customers how they heard about you, inside the flow▶ 7:09Of about a million customers who joined in a quarter, 700,000 found out about Wise from a friend, which is the 70% figure.
- Use the NPS survey to find who actually recommends your product▶ 11:07Each step up the NPS scale roughly doubled the number of people a customer told.
- Optimize NPS instead of conversion rate to compound growth▶ 11:58
- Send NPS comments to the whole company every week▶ 12:32This produced the three product pillars of price, speed and ease of use.
- Be roughly 8 to 10 times better on the key lever before expecting advocacy▶ 13:50Advocacy only began once Wise was eight to 10 times cheaper than the alternative.
- Skip the trust copy and let friends build trust for you▶ 17:28
- Blow users' socks off with an experience they thought was impossible▶ 19:54Wise's NPS is about 70, higher than the iPhone and Google search according to Peiris.
- Don't plug in existing infrastructure when you enter a new market▶ 22:10
- Allocate every cost to the transaction and reprice heavy cost segments▶ 26:26Wise launched at 0.5% and is now around 0.35%, and it is profitable on every transaction.
- Engineer away your three transaction costs to fund lower prices▶ 28:15Wise has halved its FX risk cost and gets about 20% yearly improvement on people costs.
- Enlist customers to lobby regulators when regulation blocks a 10x experience▶ 31:00It took about two years of unscalable effort and ended in the world's first eKYC license in Singapore.
- Send customers your mission in an email with no call to action▶ 32:41The email brought in more new customers than any other kind of marketing.
- Build conviction on core levers instead of split testing everything▶ 38:51
- Use a beta and small holdout to check for harm, not significance▶ 43:44
- Let teams build ideas leaders call crazy if they believe in them▶ 46:52The converter is huge in visits and people discover Wise through it.
- Extend into a product that fits repeated use, like an account▶ 50:45Launching the account in a market brought 20 to 30% more cross-border volume into Wise from that market.
- Reward hard problems and give teams air cover to stick with them▶ 54:22Wise now has accounts at the Bank of England and other central banks, each hard to get and each won through years of lobbying.
- Let local teams commit to a single global codebase▶ 59:48
- Regroup autonomous teams into squads and tribes past 30 teams▶ 1:01:51Quarterly planning grew from an afternoon to two days at 30 teams.
- Look for what customers believe but do not trust in your referral message▶ 1:04:53A 300% increase in referrals after 12 years of testing the referral program.
