Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…But if you Google currency converter, there's tons of traffic, and that converter on the Wise homepage obviously includes our price, and lets you sign up. And so, should we build a currency convertor? Should we try to capture this traffic? Is it more effective to try to push our own product there? And you can kind of understand why it was Kristo, actually not me, that was like, "This is a crazy idea." And the founder, and the SEO team went out and built it, and it's huge now, in terms of visits. I think we've got a currency convertor app out there. I think we've got [inaudible 00:47:51] out there, and yeah, people discover wise through that, as an example of off-topic traffic, but that's a good example of one of those things where yeah, the founder said, "No," or, "That's' a bad idea," and we kind of went ahead, and did it anyway. Awesome. I'm just thinking about broadly all the things we've been talking about. There's a couple of things that were floating around in my head. One is, reminds me of Amazon, where Jeff Bezos realized there are things that are going to be always true with Amazon. People always want cheaper prices, they want faster shipping. And I think there's something else. And it feels like you guys found the same sort of thing. What are the three things people always want with a money transfer product? And let's just make those as incredible as possible, and in your eyes, make them 10 times better than what anyone else has out there. Yeah, totally. The business one example is relevant, and use it a lot when we talk to investors in the market, [inaudible 00:48:49] public helps validate this low cost, cutting price story. What's interesting is what changed though. So we started with transfers, but we got to account, and then we got to enterprise. Just what changed was we realized with account, if you just have to move $10, you're not going to download an app and do it. If you do it once, you're just going to do it in your bank. And so, that was a little bit of the insight behind building the Wise account, and we kind of focused on, there's a real problem with international banking. So, really good example is for businesses. So if you are a business, say, in... Say a business in Europe, you've got a customer in Australia, and you want to get paid, you send them an invoice in Euros, and someday, some money's going to turn up in your account, you're like, "I don't know." They paid you an AUD, it got changed by three banks on the way through. You don't know what it is. What you'd love to do is invoice them in AUD, and get AUD in your bank account. You might even have people who need to pay in AUD, so you have to call to keep it there. But to get an Australian bank account, I found out, you need to fly to Australia, you need to incorporate a business in Australia, you need to go to a bank with all those papers, and then they will give you an Australian bank account number.…

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