[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the bottom Up podcast. I'm Mike Parsons broadcasting to you from the work from home studio in a world of isolation, but what's not. On its own, uh, the learnings from Revolut, the Amazon of banking. And yes, we're doing our case study and on this show we're going to be doing part three of what we can learn from Revolut.

And so first of all, we did product where we learned that they are building everything themselves. They have a huge focus on simplicity and ease, and they're really building FOS have over 10 million. Users. In the second show, we learned that they have a pretty hard fast and culture in terms of people.

That's the second P and that's definitely created some challenges for them. When you consider the fact that, um, [00:01:00] you know, they churned a lot of employees at the, at the beginning of that. They learned from that, and they have overcome. The third P is promotion. And what's particularly interesting is everybody knows about Revolut.

Uh, particularly in Europe. It's huge. It's just launched in the U S as recently launched in Australia. So there's a pretty high familiarity with the brand. But what's really quite interesting is how little they've spent in paid traditional advertising to build their brand. So they've really used the product at the heart of it.

And that's why I'm excited to share with you this third part of our case study on Revolut. Okay. Promotion marketing, brand growth. How do they do it? Well, there are a lot of learnings from Revolut. I am going to give you a bunch of them. Please remember that. If you want to go deeper, we have a whole master class, uh, on Revolut at bottomup.io where you can get all sorts of goodies.

So [00:02:00] check that out. All right. Lesson number one, it's called growth teams. Now that growth teams are these small, agile, decentralized teams, very local that they deploy and they're, well, let's be honest, they're just kind of skunkworks teams or agile teams or scrum teams, if you wanted to call them that, and they're very small.

And these growth teams are all about getting a bunch of cross functional people, get them into one team, setting a audacious goal and grow like crazy. So usually in their case, they have like the country manager and then a marketer business developer. Comms manager and community manager in the team. So you can imagine that the community is about activating the community.

A comms manager is going to be more about messaging a business developer might be about choosing the right products, features, services, um, maybe bring in some partners. And the market [00:03:00] is all about pulling together a campaign to kind of activate, maybe sign up ah deposits, whatever goal that they have.

These growth teams are really important. And one of the things that is strongly inferred about how they work internally is that this is not dissimilar to how they build their product teams as well. So there's a lot to learn from this idea of growth teams. So you've kind of got the inside piece there.

Let's, let's shift a little bit to the outside piece and let's have a look at how they thought about customers. And there is a huge lesson in Revolut in terms of segmentation. Here's what I mean by that. They focus not on. You know, the mainstream or the, the casual customer, not the early adopter. They went right up into the cutting edge to what they call the innovator segment.

And that's where they've started. Now, this innovator segment, they kind of influence the early adopter who influenced the early majority, [00:04:00] the late majority, and the laggards. So they've really focused on what they saw was sort of a tipping point segment that. Kind of creates a snowball effect across their entire audience, which is everyone, because everyone, every adult over 18 needs a bank account.

Now, what was really interesting about these innovator segment, or archetype or persona, is that they really love entertainment, shopping, and travel and eating out. And this works very nicely with their product because you use Revolut in a lot in all of those activities. So when you're traveling or you know, restaurants, splitting bills.

So this was brilliant. So they picked a segment that had high application, high relevance to the product. So a lot of their success was really finding this high influence, uh, this kind of snowball effect with this early segment. So there you go. You've know that they've got their growth teams, they focused on the innovator.

Let's have a look now at the third [00:05:00] learning, which is all about baking the marketing into the product. This is where they actually kind of made the product itself kind of viable. And the greatest example I can give you is bill splitting. Um, they've made this, um, really seamless to throw a bunch of friends on the list, split the bill.

It goes out to everyone. It happens in just a few clicks. And what's so great about this is. Every single time you use the product, you're potentially recruiting a new customer for them. Now, here's the other thing that they did, and they did a lot of kind of classic tactics, but an absolute classic one out of the marketing playbook is the waitlist.

So what they've effectively gone and done is they've created scarcity, interest, and curiosity around the product. So here we start to see that the way they're promoting is a bit more like Dropbox. So you might say that the product inspiration is kind of Uber like. But if [00:06:00] you look at the promotion and the way Dropbox build itself, this is Revolut is doing a classic Dropbox here.

They're creating scarcity and interest. And if you go and recruit friends, it's good for you. Everybody wins. And um, I think that although it sounds sort of like, so what a wait list. It's a marketing classic. And when done correctly, just like Revolut does, it works a treat. Okay, so let's zoom out and have a look at how they've built this mega brand without many marketing dollars.

One growth teams. They've done a really good job of organizing their internal teams around these audacious stretch goals. They had laser like precision focus on a segment that was not only viable in itself, but they knew would be, um, creating this snowball effect, this kind of contagion, uh, amongst friends.

Next thing they did is they'd put the marketing right in the product. So every [00:07:00] time you're bill spitting, traveling, sharing money. All of these things are generating a member acquisition. And lastly, I deployed the classic white list and they did a lot of other things, but this really captures the broad extent to which the really reframed how to do growth marketing for a neobank or in the larger financial services market.

I think this. Is really cool too, to their success. So there's a lot to learn there from Revolut when we think about our third P promotion and I can't wait to see you for our last episode, which will be around profit, where this perhaps the biggest insight yet. So I hope you've enjoyed it so far I'm Mike Parsons; chief innovation  officer atQualitance

We'll see you on the next episode of BottomUp skills. [00:08:00]