Nilan Peiris: preference

Transcript context

…Awesome. Okay, so just to kind of dig into the meat of it, what has been the biggest shift in helping you significantly grow word of mouth, and make it such a huge lever of growth for Wise? Yeah, before I launch into this, let's just also take a step back, and why even focus on this? So in the early days, when I met the founders, Kristo and Tyler. It was quite funny, I got introed to them when they were just the founders, and without a team really, and with the beginnings of a product, and they said, "Nilan, you've got to meet these guys, they've got a great product, they just don't have any customers." And I sat there with them, and we kind of launched the first Google ads, and in the early days you try everything, hoping that something works. But taking a step back, think of money as the ultimate commodity. It's pretty hard to build an expensive business that moves your money somewhere, and it costs a lot, so there's less of it afterwards. So building a brand led money transfer business, the brand's got to be pretty damn good, right? You're going to feel pretty special afterwards, in order to have less money afterwards. So what we're looking for always, but what channels out there are super scalable, and can reach our entire audience, but have an incredibly low distribution cost. So, that's one thing that led us to word of mouth and the other bit, when we get on to talk about marketing later, the other challenge with marketing which is unique is because we are lower price, but a superior product, we have less margin to spend on marketing than others in certain paid channels. So that's another reason why marketing is inherently hard. Our marketing team does amazing work at Wise, in order to work within those constraints. But back to your question, which was like, what's the biggest thing we've done to shift word of mouth. When I joined Wise, and started wrangling with word of mouth, I spent a bunch of time with friends of mine in the US and around the world, Andrew Chen, some of the other growth gurus, this is going back 10, 12 years. It's like what mouths, who's done it? What's the system? What do you measure? There wasn't really anything out there. So we kind of had to figure our way out. So, first step was asking it, and the second step was kind of figure out how do you know what's driving it? And the best proxy we found for this was something that most people have heard of, that we actually used quite a lot is net promoter score. So from the very early days we'd start asking customers, and you probably have seen this survey, "Would you recommend Wise to a friend?" Never seen that ever in my life. Never been asked that question.…

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