20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut

Summary

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users

Episode: 20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users
Date: June 21, 2024
Host: Harry Stebbings
Guest: Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut

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Episode Overview

In this deeply insightful episode, Harry Stebbings sits down with Val Scholz, who led growth at Revolut through their rocketship journey from 0 to 10 million users. The discussion offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at Revolut’s product and growth playbook, from engineering viral referral loops to hiring practices, designing scalable systems, and building a product-driven, high-performance culture. Val provides tactical, data-driven strategies, lessons from big wins and failed experiments, and honest advice for founders and growth leaders aiming to build category-defining companies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How Val Entered Growth and the Early Days (04:16 – 05:18)

• Background: Val started as a software engineer, learning about SEO through a friend, which gradually pulled him into growth/marketing roles. Early projects included finding creative ways to generate traffic, such as promoting mind maps externally.

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2. Growth at Revolut: Focus and Referrals (05:18 – 09:46)

• Strategy Over Tactics:
  • “It's a lot better to do one thing, but do it really well than doing 10 or 100 things at the same time.” (Val Scholz, 05:27)
• Referral Playbook:
  • 90% of Revolut's B2C customers were acquired via referrals.
  • Product optimized so a new user could sign up and transact within 5 minutes, maximizing the likelihood they'd immediately evangelize Revolut to others.
• Speed and Loop Engineering:
  • The exponential power of referrals depends on time-to-invite: “If on average, I bring three people in, but it takes three years, it's really slow...If you get three people in every three minutes, you grow a lot faster.” (Val Scholz, 06:16)
  • Revolut focused on accelerating how fast new users would refer peers. At one point, they had to cap growth to avoid scaling issues.

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3. Optimizing Onboarding and Use Cases (07:41 – 10:25)

• Uncovering Pain Points:

  • User drop-off wasn’t due to dissatisfaction, but because many saw Revolut as a "travel card." Users lacked a daily use case.
  • Solved by reframing the product as everyday banking and fixing technical onboarding blockers (e.g., identity verification, funding wallets in countries like Italy).

• Referral Incentives Evolution:

  • Early growth had no monetary incentive — just free Revolut cards.
  • “We were always quite cash-stripped… so we had to become creative on how we could still give value.” (Val Scholz, 10:01)
  • When cash incentives were added, higher amounts yielded better CPA, but keeping CAC low was key (about £9 at Revolut; compared to traditional banks at £250).

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4. Product Expansion and Differentiation (10:40 – 13:45)

• Founder's Unique Insight:
  • Revolut’s genesis: Nick, a trader, frustrated by high FX fees when converting money abroad (“Banks basically ripped him off…”).
• Cross-selling Approach:
  • Used popular features (FreeFX) as acquisition drivers, then cross-sold new products (crypto, stocks, business banking) to an existing base.
  • Released premium/metal cards early on — “People wanted a bank card that actually looked like an iPhone... it was an ego thing.” (13:20)
  • Demand for premium cards massively exceeded expectations, with lengthy waitlists.

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5. Growth Experimentation: What Worked and Didn’t (14:07 – 17:47)

• Experimentation:

  • Tried cafeteria card handouts at tech firms—hard to measure, so moved on quickly if results weren’t evident.
  • YouTube influencer marketing worked well — calculated cost per acquisition based on channel math, doubled down on anything with clear uplift until supply exhausted.
  • Monetization and LTV: Early UA modeled on cohort retention curves, focusing on recurring engagement with everyday use cases (direct debits, savings).

• Be Data-Informed, Yet Actionable:

  • “You have your typical rates, like what's your subscription rate?...then you test 3, 4 in different niches and see basically what works.” (Val Scholz, 15:49)

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6. Diversification and Channel Strategy (17:47 – 22:24)

• Build Software that Does Your Marketing:
  • “Build software that does marketing for you... it scales exponentially...you need less people to get bigger results.” (Val Scholz, 17:47)
• Examples:
  • Paid marketing loops (PayPal, Uber), viral content/user-generated content platforms (YouTube, Pinterest).
  • SEO/content clusters: Canva dominates high-intent searches by massive in-house content creation and dynamic landing pages.
• Diversification Timing:
  • Double down on the first successful channel; be cautious diversifying too early as it increases noise and makes accurate attribution harder.

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7. Hiring and Building the Growth Team (22:24 – 32:40)

• When to Hire Growth Leaders:
  • “A head of growth makes sense once you demonstrate product market fit.” (Val Scholz, 22:48)
  • Prefer to grow ambitious, unproven talent internally—“rough diamonds”—rather than hired ‘growth veterans’ (few want to do it twice, it's a seriously intense job).
• What Makes Great Hires:
  • Don’t just test on conversation—“Do they understand deeply, did they really drive results?”
  • Key qualities: smart, driven, ambitious, hungry; “We can teach skills, but not attitude or mindset.” (Val Scholz, 26:38)
  • Look for hard evidence of impact, fast learning, preferably a technical background (e.g., computer science).
• Testing & Onboarding:
  • Take-home tasks based on hard, real-life challenges (“...as hard as possible and as close to reality as possible.” 30:17)
  • Hiring signals: look for structure, problem-solving, progress from feedback—not perfect solutions.
  • Quick gut sense if it’s not working (“If I can't make it work after four weeks, yes [I let them go].” 31:59)

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8. Culture: High-Performance, High-Pressure (32:40 – 36:40)

• Environment:
  • “Revolut is like that company that's at the 0.01%...It’s like a SpaceX or Facebook...it's more cutthroat. Like either you perform, or you’re out.” (Val Scholz, 32:42)
  • Perfection and speed in execution are core values—“Anything you do is perfectly executed at all times at the maximum speed.” (Val Scholz, 45:37)
• Feedback/Iteration:
  • “The more cycles you have, the faster you learn.”
  • Weekly reviews optimal for learning speed; direct exec/founder involvement accelerates team development.

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9. Founder Impact and Leadership (36:17– 38:28)

• Nick’s Approach:
  • Deep involvement (80+ weekly 1-on-1s)—transformation through “intense” feedback cycles, truth-seeking, and logical rigor.
  • “You can always go to Nick and say ‘look, that's wrong, here's the data’…he’d listen and change his mind if persuaded.” (Val Scholz, 37:19)
• **Culture of ‘Truth’ over ego—relentless pursuit of best answer, rapid iteration.

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10. Scaling Pain and Systems Breaking (38:28 – 41:08)

• Hypergrowth:
  • Teams scaling from 2 → 150 in 9 months, whole systems rebuilt every few months.
  • “Everything breaks...the way you communicate doesn’t work anymore...we couldn’t upgrade to a bigger database anymore...” (Val Scholz, 38:38)
  • Referral campaigns could 32x new users in 3 days—created huge operational bottlenecks (KYC, support) requiring temporary shutdowns.

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11. Data Strategy and Analytics (41:08 – 43:23)

• Conventional vs. Centralized Data:
  • “Most companies use event-driven infra (Mixpanel/Amplitude), but that’s not your source of truth.”
  • Built a central warehouse combining all sources (transactions, marketing) via UserID, enabling full-funnel, cross-channel economics and insight.

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12. Best/Worst Growth Decisions (43:23 – 44:01)

• Best:
  • Launching free card referral campaign: “Generated 180,000 signups in a week; prior weekly run rate was 10,000.” (Val Scholz, 43:26)
• Worst:
  • Building P2P payments for customer acquisition—“didn’t do anything.” (44:01)

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Notable Quotes

• “You want to go in a market where you don’t have competition...The best founders, they find these markets, they find these unique insights.”
  — Val Scholz, 00:00 & 47:11
• “The bigger you get, the easier you get disrupted…You want to go in a market where you don’t have competition.”
  — Val Scholz, 47:11
• “It's a lot better to do one thing, but do it really well...”
  — Val Scholz, 05:27
• “Build software that does marketing for you. It scales exponentially.”
  — Val Scholz, 17:47
• “Hiring: you can teach skills, but not attitude or mindset.”
  — Val Scholz, 26:38
• “Anything you do is perfectly executed at all times at the maximum speed.”
  — Val Scholz, 45:37

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Val’s entry into growth: 04:16 – 05:18
• Referral strategy deep dive: 05:27 – 09:46
• Onboarding and use case discovery: 07:41 – 10:25
• Product expansion and innovation: 10:40 – 13:45
• Growth experiments and influencer playbook: 14:07 – 17:47
• Scaling and failures with growth loops: 38:28 – 41:08
• Data infrastructure: 41:08 – 43:23
• Lessons on hiring and culture: 22:24 – 36:40
• Best/worst decisions: 43:23 – 44:01
• Advice for underdog founders: 47:11 – 48:33

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Memorable Moments

• Explosive Impact of Referrals:
  Rolling out referrals in Romania spiked daily new users from 2,000 to 64,000, overwhelming KYC and support.
• Product-Led Community Pressure:
  “At some point, it becomes uncool if you don’t have Revolut… group pressure to get Revolut.” (19:22)
• Hiring for Hunger:
  Val's preference for younger, less-experienced hires with exceptional drive—a self-replenishing talent pool prepared to work extraordinary hours.
• Culture as High-Performance Sport:
  “Either you perform or you’re out... There’s a reason why they are elite clubs.” (32:42)
• Market Selection As Strategy:
  Outpacing Monzo by targeting Poland and Romania where no challenger banks were present.

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Final Rapid-fire Lessons (44:06 – 50:11)

• Founder Mistake: Not using your own product daily.
• Dangerous Growth Myth: Can’t build true product-led business starting with paid channels.
• AI’s Impact on Growth: Short-term increase in spam, outbound automation; sustainable value will return to fundamentals.
• Changing Minds: Val questions whether the internet as we know it will even exist in 20 years if ‘robots’ become our real-world interface.
• Underdog Advice: Win markets with little/no competition—leverage unique insights and execute where the giants are absent.

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Featured Company Shout-outs

• Nubank is praised for its stunning 90%+ retention and unique product-market fit in Brazil—“their product is so sticky, it's insane…they have like 100 million active users.” (Val Scholz, 48:40–49:43)
• Revolut vs. Monzo: “Monzo’s just a modern bank. Revolut is a financial ecosystem.” (45:06)

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Summary for Founders and Growth Teams

Revolut’s pandemic growth wasn’t magic; it was rigorous focus on:

• Engineering lightning-fast, easy referral flows,
• Building truly differentiated product features,
• Relentlessly hiring for hunger and raw ability over traditional experience,
• Constantly reinventing systems to match scale,
• Putting world-class founder talent at the heart of daily iteration and review,
• Entering markets where competition and noise were low, and
• Letting data drive all decision-making—building the infrastructure for it even if it’s technically tough.

If you’re a founder or growth leader, ask yourself:

• Are you making referrals truly seamless?
• Are you focusing on markets where you can be 10x better?
• Are you hiring for attitude, not just CV?
• Is your culture more sport or science?
• Are you really collecting and acting on deep product and funnel data?

This episode is a masterclass in modern fintech growth—worth both detailed study and repeat listening.

Transcript

[Val Schultz]

You want to go in a market where you don't have competition. So if you think about Revolut against Monza, right, like the markets we grew the fastest wasn't the uk, Romania, it was Poland. We went in a lot of markets where we just didn't have competition, which allowed us to raise more money, build better products, hire more people. There's always like a way you can see the market or you can segment the market where you basically build a product where essentially you don't have much competition, where Your product is 10x better than the status quo. The best founders, they find these markets, they find these unique insights.

[Harry Stebbings]

This is 20 growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 growth is the monthly show where we sit down with the best.

[Interviewer]

Growth leaders in the world to share.

[Harry Stebbings]

Their tips, tactics and strategies on scaling growth teams. Today we're joined by Val Schultz. Val was the head of growth at Revolut, one of the generational defining companies of our time. Val scaled the user base at Revolut from 0 to the first 10 million users. In this episode we reveal the tips, the the playbook, the strategies that Revolut used to scale to 10 million users. It is an incredible granular episode, really diving deep on growth strategy. But before we dive into the show today, short form video has never been more important for your business. Social media managers, growth marketers, this is the single biggest opportunity you have today. They say ad creative is king, but man is UGC creative a pain in the ass to pull together. Imagine if you didn't have to. Captions just launched AI creator ads so you can produce dozens of UGC style creatives instantly. Just cast your AI creator, paste in your product URL and drop in your product images. AI will take care of the rest. Captions will generate dozens of UGC style creatives in seconds, 10x your creative output and test more hooks than you ever thought possible. Because let's be honest, your current ad creative is fatiguing as we speak. UGC ads have never been so easy thanks to AI Save on the back and forth. Try AI creator ads on captions today. And speaking of amazing tools like captions, let me tell you about Canva. When I spoke to Canva co founder Cliff Obre on the podcast last year, he touched on how visual content is fast becoming the fuel that's driving the modern workplace. Your team needs to create an engaging visual pitch deck to sell in an idea. A product launch needs an inspiring video to excite investors and customers. Projects gather steam with visual whiteboards. That's where Canva can help. It's a game changer for visual communication at work. Canva turns your team into master visual communicators so they can get their point point across with visual impact inside and outside your business. With no design experience needed. With Canva, any team member and any company, whether you're a startup or a global organization, can design compelling on brand visual content quickly and easily. That's why 90% of the Fortune 500 use Canva. Start designing [e-mail] designed for work and finally, let me tell you about one schema one schema is the embeddable CSV importer that will save your team months of development time. While building a basic CSV importer may seem simple, product teams typically spend over three to six months building and rebuilding their CSV import experiences. Why Customer files are full of unexpected formats for dates, numbers and addresses and your first pass at building an importer never has all the edge cases handled. Failed imports lead to unhappy customers and endless emails and tickets. For your support and engineering teams, enter One Schema, the largest library of pre built validations and intelligent transforms. One Schema helps you launch a guided CSV import experience in just 30 minutes. Get your customers to the value of your product in minutes and say goodbye to frustrating messages like import error online 53 with over 4x faster performance compared with alternatives, it's clear why one schema is the choice for top startups like Ramp Scale AI and Pave to streamline their CSV import process. Importing clean customer data into your product is easier than ever. Learn more by visiting1schema.com 20. You have now arrived at your destination.

[Interviewer]

Val this is such a joy to do.

[Harry Stebbings]

I've wanted to make this one happen for a while, so thank you so.

[Interviewer]

Much for joining me.

[Val Schultz]

Thank you so much for having me Jeremy.

[Harry Stebbings]

Not at all.

[Interviewer]

But I want to start like growth is a weird world so to speak.

[Harry Stebbings]

How did you first make your way.

[Interviewer]

Into the world of growth?

[Val Schultz]

It's actually quite random. So I studied in software engineering when I was a kid selling websites and it's quite a lot of effort to build for clients. You know these websites especially back in the days there was like 2004 and so a friend of mine basically started building his own websites and then essentially made a lot of money. So I was quite curious and interested like what he does differently and he taught me basically the early signs of like search engine optimizations. And so then over the years I basically learned more and more about marketing which essentially moved me in this growth role.

[Interviewer]

What was the first growth role you had?

[Val Schultz]

There wasn't really growth back then. I was a software engineer at Mindmeister. There wasn't really anyone in the company that knew marketing or SEO. Basically, one of my projects was like, how can you share mind maps on external websites and essentially generate traffic? I guess that was the first time I really got exposure to growth.

[Interviewer]

You were then ahead of growth at Revolut, scaling from like 0 to 10 million in customers. What were the biggest lessons from that journey? That's quite an incredible experience to have.

[Val Schultz]

I think what I really learned at Revolut was that it's a lot better to do one thing, but do it really well than doing 10 or 100 things at the same time.

[Interviewer]

What one thing do you think you did at Revolut really well?

[Val Schultz]

So, for example, like, 90% of the B2C customers that Revolut ever acquired came through referrals.

[Interviewer]

Wow. How do you do a referral loop that's so effective?

[Val Schultz]

Couple of optimizations. Essentially, we thought about, like, okay, let's say I'm here at the podcast, right? I love Revolut. It helps me, you know, when I travel, I don't have to overspend. And so I'm basically telling you about the product, right? What you want to achieve is that while we're talking here, you can actually sign up and make your first payment, for example, order something on Deliveroo. And so we optimize the product to basically make sure that enough people can go through that whole journey in less than five minutes. And so, essentially, because it's so easy, so quick, we had so many people that just went to their friends, to the family, strangers on the street to just basically get people into Revolut.

[Interviewer]

Do you think people do referral platforms or programs? Well, today we see so many. Invite a friend and get 20 pounds. Do people do it?

[Val Schultz]

Well, I don't think so. The interesting thing about referrals is that there isn't really a lot of information on the Internet about how it really works. And so it took me about nine months to figure out, you know, how to actually make it work, right? So the common knowledge is like, okay, one person needs to invite more than one person, right? And that gives you an exponential growth. So the problem is it really depends on how fast that invite happens. So, for example, if on average, I bring three people in, but it takes three years, it's really slow, the growth of the company. On the other hand, if you, let's say, get three people in every three minutes, you grow a lot Faster. Right. One thing we've done at Revolut was essentially engineer how fast or how short it takes for new people to invite their peers and their friends, which actually worked really well to a point where we had to cap how many people actually sign up.

[Interviewer]

How did you minimize that time from successful onboard to referring a friend because you don't want to shove it in someone's face straight away of like, hey, Val, you've just signed up, now refer friends. How did you minimize that time window?

[Val Schultz]

I think, I mean, first thing was the onboarding, right? And during onboarding, I mean, in the early days, like new users that actually make a payment, it was maybe like 30, 35%. Like, when I left, it was around 90%. Nine out of 10 people actually made a payment.

[Interviewer]

What was the reason that they weren't, and what did you change?

[Val Schultz]

Essentially, I didn't really know how to figure it out. So what I did was I sent an email to 4,000 people and was like, hey, why did you stop using Revolut? Right? And the interesting thing that came back was that the majority of people didn't stop using Revolut. They just didn't have a use case for it yet, because back in the days, it was known as a travel card. And so what we realized is, like, people don't see Revolut as an everyday banking card. So we started changing the way we market the product, you know, position it in the market, but also making sure that there's no technical issues. Like, for example, people try to verify their identity at night, and then you use a flash, and so suddenly the software can't detect the identity card. In Italy, we had a weird problem. People don't have MasterCards or Visa, so they can't do actually online payments, which we use traditionally to top up your account. But then also, like, Italy is a bit backwards in terms of their banking system. So you couldn't make international bank transfers from your bank account. So we had to figure out basically how we get users to actually get money onto their account.

[Interviewer]

Did you have lessons in terms of what referral kind of rewards were attractive to people? Like, does the size of the money matter if it's £10 or £50? Does it. Is a voucher better than cash? Were any lessons on what is attractive?

[Val Schultz]

Yeah, I mean, basically, the more money you pay, the more attractive it gets.

[Interviewer]

And you really see that clearly?

[Val Schultz]

Yeah, you can see that the problem is, like, you don't want to have a CPA of, you know, 200. Right. I think back in the days we had a CPA of around 9 pounds which was like compared to banks that had like 250, it was quite low.

[Interviewer]

It's pretty good. And then if you have a 30% at that time person who sends their first payment, essentially it's actually like a 27 pound CPA. No, if you think about it, if one in three actually converts to like a converted customer in that respect, it's like a 27.

[Val Schultz]

Also in the early days we didn't offer any money. So in the early, early days, basically we just gave away a free Revolut code. So it was basically like we were always quite cash stripped at Revolut. Right. I mean basically in banking you need to have a lot of cash actually on payment accounts.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Val Schultz]

To make sure, like let's say if customers go into negative that somebody can cover it or if there's fraud happening. So like a lot of the fundraising went directly back into product engineering. But also like in payment platforms we always had very aggressive acquisition targets but we never had really money to spend on things. So we had to become creative on like how can we still give value to people but still hit other targets.

[Interviewer]

You mentioned there the 30% going to 90% and that would be like. Because people thought it was travel cards. Oh, I don't know if I have a use case for it. Maybe I will do in time. How did you change that but not lose the original customers who like the travel cards?

[Val Schultz]

The interesting thing about Revolut is why it was created in the first place. Nick was a trader trading millions or hundreds of millions of currencies. So it's basically like, I don't know, I need to sell $100 million into euros. Right. And he would trade it for free against other big banks. When he went to Vegas and took some money to play poker, that took away around 10 to 15% because of the currency exchange and because he was like, look, I mean I trade hundreds of millions of dollars without paying any fees. He was like, hey, maybe there's an opportunity. Right. So he was a bit pissed about that. Banks basically ripped him off and then started Revolut. It was kind of like the engine that drove the company so fast. We were always based on a multi currency product which allowed us to add cryptocurrencies, commodities, but also like create new innovative products. Like for example, you're spending in pounds but saving in euros.

[Interviewer]

Did the new products make your life easier with growth or harder because you suddenly have more to sell? Different messaging. How did it change your role?

[Val Schultz]

I think a lot Easier. To be fair. I think it's actually the biggest mistake that founders do that they over optimize their product. Sounds quite counterintuitive, right? But it's a bit like if, let's say you're Apple, there's only so much revenue you can make with an iPhone because not everybody wants or needs an iPhone. If you have a second product, let's say AirPods, you can sell to one client, not just a thousand dollar phone, you can also sell $200 earphones. Right. And then if you also need a laptop, you can sell it for another 2000. Revolut was built in a similar way. We basically used FreeFX as an acquisition driver. I mean the value proposition of the product was so strong that like we didn't really have to pay a lot to get people into our product. Essentially what we needed to do is just accelerate already dynamics that are happening. For example, that friends tell their friends or making sure that people don't, you know, get somewhere stuck through the software. Right. And then basically what we did was like a lot of cross selling. Okay, you're already in. You use the product. Okay. Now you want to buy cryptos. Cool. 3% margin, you want to buy stocks, you have a spread there. You need business banking. At some point, you make some money there. That was always like the secret sauce, which I think for a long time competitors couldn't really figure out. I think Transwise couldn't really figure out, like how can we give it away for free and still make more money than them?

[Interviewer]

Do you think founders wait too long to release the second product?

[Val Schultz]

Yeah, Revolut, if you think about it like Nick and Fla launched 2015 and then we launched a premium product, basically the paid subscription like a year and a half from there, which basically went through the roof.

[Interviewer]

Was that immediately successful?

[Val Schultz]

Yeah, it was instant success.

[Interviewer]

Why do you think that was?

[Val Schultz]

People wanted a bank card that actually looked like an iPhone. Bank codes back in the days to look quite cheap. And you know, Revolut made them sexy. So people were actually proud to show off their bank card. And I guess it was like a ego thing. Right. If you go to a bar or restaurant and you pay with the card and then people are like, hey, what's this card? How did you get it? You know, it makes you feel good.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, for sure. The metal card. Everyone loves a metal card.

[Val Schultz]

Yeah. I mean that was amazing. Honestly, we didn't expect how much demand was there for that card. Yeah, we had like 10,000 cards pre ordered and was literally sold out. After an hour. And then basically we had like, I think four months of like waiting line where basically every day more people ordered than we could manufacture. I guess that went really well, but I guess we could have done even more.

[Interviewer]

What growth experiments didn't work?

[Val Schultz]

I think we tried a lot, but some experiments are hard to measure. For example, we went to all the big tech companies like Google, Uber in our lunch break to hand out cards in their cafeteria. Obviously it's hard to measure, like, okay, what's really the long term impact, right? So I think it was just like we tried a lot of things and once we saw something works, we just doubled down and just did it until you couldn't do it anymore. We saw, okay, YouTube influencers work really well. We saw a spike in one country, okay, let's just get every YouTube influence on the market. And then after a month there weren't any left and you basically find the next thing.

[Interviewer]

What are some lessons on how to make YouTube influencers successful? Everyone kind of has this idea, well, I'm going to do the influencer strategy. I don't think many people know how, and I think they just have an idea that I'm just going to pay them a wedge of cash. Others have the affiliate code. Any lessons from that?

[Val Schultz]

I think growth is actually quite simple. It doesn't really matter which channel you're using, but it's always basic math. Let's say an influencer you look at like, okay, on average, how many views will they generate per video? So you can expect roughly like how many people will see it and how many people do you think will click through from the video to actually your website or app store? You can take conservative market estimates, like 5% or something, and then essentially how many people actually convert from, you know, checking out your website to actually becoming a user after that? It's basically like you have your typical rates, like what's your subscription rate? And so you can calculate roughly like, okay, if I pay that person, like if I want to achieve a CPA of let's say $10, what's the maximum I can offer the influencer to do this? I mean, that's basically the starting point. And then essentially what you do is you test 3, 4 in different niches and see basically what works.

[Interviewer]

Is it quite difficult when you don't know your ltv lifetime value?

[Val Schultz]

Well, nobody really knows it.

[Interviewer]

This is the challenge. And so you don't know the ultimate value of a customer. And so it's like, God, your CPA could be one thing, but actually they don't stick around for very long. And they churn after a year. Not nearly. You don't have nearly that CAC elasticity that you would do if they stayed for seven years.

[Val Schultz]

Well, I think initially it's about getting data. Right?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Val Schultz]

So obviously like let's say in the first year you have no clue like how long people stay in five years. Right. You can look at cohorts, so month by month, cohorts. And you can look at the drop off of these cohorts. So let's say people that sign up in January versus people that sign up in February. How many people come back a month after? And so you can compare it. Do you improve things? Do you make things worse? That's A. And then B is basically. Do they ever flatten? Ideally what, for example, revolut. In the early days you could see, okay, maybe 35% of the people made the first payment in the first month. But then basically it flattened and then I think it settled around 20%. And so after three, four months it just didn't drop below 20%. So it always stayed there. And then essentially when we started to optimize the product, you actually saw more like a smiley curve. So it actually increased and got high again. So co it's that used to be at 20, suddenly we're at 30.

[Interviewer]

What were the core drivers of that?

[Val Schultz]

I think we probably had a more broader product portfolio. Equally, we focused more on everyday banking. So we built a product that was more useful for everyday banking. Right. Standing orders, direct deb, budgeting, savings accounts, essentially. I guess then the combination of all of them gave people more reasons to stay and use it other than the NatWest or Barclays card.

[Interviewer]

You know, people love to throw around PLG and it's like, it's been the hot word in our industry for years now. But you said to me before, there's traditional marketing methods that are outdated. And you were brilliant in when we chatted, like just dropping these one liners that I was like, great, thanks for expanding. Why are traditional marketing methods outdated?

[Val Schultz]

The market is so saturated. Oversaturated. Traditional marketing means like it's not scalable. Right. Essentially it only scales with human output. So essentially if I want to have twice as many people coming to my website, I need to hire twice as many people, which becomes, you know, as I, the company grows, it becomes more and more expensive and then typically teams would get less efficient. So I need even more people. If you look at growth, which is essentially, you know, you build software that does marketing for you, it basically Scales exponentially. So I need less and less people in the future to get bigger and bigger results.

[Interviewer]

Build software that does marketing for you is an interesting way of describing it. Referrals is one. What are other innovative cool methods that you think people should look at instead?

[Val Schultz]

You can do a paid marketing loop. I think Uber did it quite well where they offered money or actually like PayPal in the early days, you offer someone money to sign up and essentially like as long as they bring in more money, like the whole loop is working. We have content acquisitions. So for example, YouTube is a great example, right? Like somebody signs up to YouTube, uploads a video and then other people are going to watch it, they share it on other platforms. Or for example, if you build search, right? Let's say Canva, for example. It's really hard to get rid of Canva, right? Even if they don't spend anything anymore, even if they don't improve anything anymore. Because like for nearly everything you're going to search around marketing, graphic design, PowerPoint presentations, like Canva. Canva is the number one spot. Canva nowadays is much larger in terms of volume generated to the website than Adobe. So it's really hard to disrupt them.

[Interviewer]

It's brilliant SEO play.

[Val Schultz]

I mean, it's amazing, right? And I think it's, it's similar in other firms where, I don't know, let's say WhatsApp or Revolut. In a way, Revolut is very incentivizing for others to join because, you know, at some point it becomes you're basically uncool. If you don't have Revolut, you get the group pressure to get Revolut. So let's say you play paddle. One pays for the whole group. If one person doesn't have Revolut, everybody else will push him to get Revolut because it's more convenient to get paid.

[Interviewer]

Any lessons on content marketing as a customer acquisition channel?

[Val Schultz]

I think there's two ways to make it work. Either you have user generated content, Pinterest, YouTube, you can basically create content or topic clusters where you basically create hierarchy of how you create dynamic landing pages. Essentially software creates landing pages that match the keywords that people are searching for. Like if you have a lot of user generated content, often nowadays if you look for example at Canva, what they've done is they created content. You basically have crazy big in house teams that generate content for you so that you can create these topic clusters. Which I think is actually one of the most exciting things that I've learned in the last two years, because I've never seen that before, or probably I haven't understood it before.

[Interviewer]

In terms of the topic clusters created by internal teams.

[Val Schultz]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Is there anything that startup founders can learn from that?

[Val Schultz]

I think in the early days people built a two sided marketplace where essentially you had to control or grow both supply and demand. I think what a lot of companies nowadays do, they control both supply and demand. So essentially it's a lot easier because you can just, rather than having to convince people to basically use your software and be super engaged, you can just pay someone for it, they can generate content for you. And as you build more content, you generate more traffic, which then generates you more revenue. I think what's nowadays happening is that because people understand kind of like the tactics to grow their channels, whether it's SEO, referrals paid, they execute a lot faster, usually bring things first in house because you have more control and then as you grow, you shift it more towards user generated. So basically you cut your cost when.

[Interviewer]

You look across the channels. Most founders I speak to have one that really works. They're like, it's great we've got working, but we need to diversify and we need to make sure that we're not too concentrated. Do you agree that you need to diversify early or when you have one working, do you say just double the fuck down? It's hard enough to get one working.

[Val Schultz]

I would double down on the first.

[Interviewer]

One and just continue.

[Val Schultz]

I mean, I would still do some other channels, but it depends on the size of the company. Right. Pretty big mistake is to go too early in too many channels in the end of the day. Like you rely quite heavily on data to understand what works, what doesn't work. And you really need to understand it. Right, because otherwise you can replicate it. The problem is like the more channels you have, the harder it is to measure directly the impact of a specific channel because there's obviously a lot of noise coming in. And then essentially because you have more noise, your decisions get worse, which makes it then a lot harder and slower to actually really Nail1 channel, for example, to generate a million new users a month.

[Interviewer]

I totally get you said there about the importance of getting that early data. I'm always struck on the timing of hiring a growth head, a growth person, in terms of that timing. Before we get to the. I've had people on the show say before you need a head of growth to get the data in. And then I've had people say, that's ridiculous, you hire ahead of growth post product Market fit. When you have something to scale, which side of the table do you sit on and why?

[Val Schultz]

I think ahead of growth makes sense. Once you demonstrate a product market fit.

[Interviewer]

Do they not help you get the data to get to product market fit?

[Val Schultz]

I think it's really hard because once there's a head of growth, you expect it to grow. And that basically means you need to show month on month growth. I mean there's obviously a lot of tactics, right? It's one other big lesson I learned is like, even if you don't have product market fit, you can sell a business for 400 million, you know, because if you're just good enough to generate constantly more traffic and it's cheaper to generate or buy traffic than the money you're making, the business is still growing. Probably not the best business because you're losing the customers in six or nine months again, but it's still working, right? So if you just sell early enough, everybody or nearly everyone is happy. You know, the difference is like, if you look at really like companies that really nailed product market fit, whether it's like OpenAI with ChatGPT, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, they had very early proper product market fit. And my assumption is that similar to the story about Nick, is that the best founders, they have a very unique view on the market. They're very unique insights. They know something that just other people haven't seen yet or known yet. For example, Nick cases the basically that there's no fee on effects, which is basically what you needed to understand. You know, okay, people travel all the time, people send money all the time, right? So why does everybody pay 7, 8, 9% on this? And I think it's similar if you look at probably Apple, you know, that had unique insights around like electronics and like how people use these computers. Like one of the founders was a graphic designer selling his typefaces. And essentially what they realized is like people didn't want the typefaces, people wanted the assets that they used to market the typefaces. But then the softwares that were on the market, like they were either too complicated for the audience or they couldn't do it.

[Interviewer]

So if we agree then that it should be post product market fit because you expect it to grow when you have it, what's the right profile then? That you're an advisor advising me, a founder, an early stage founder who's just got kind of early signs of product market fit. Should I go for a super young person who hasn't been ahead of growth before and scale them into that role should I go for ahead of growth? What should that profile be?

[Val Schultz]

I personally always believe it's better to have someone that grows with the company. They're rough diamonds, but they're ambitious, they're hard working, they want to prove themselves. To be honest, there's not many growth people that want to do it again.

[Interviewer]

I think it's just like, why is that? Just because it's too hard.

[Val Schultz]

I think it's just super stressful.

[Interviewer]

What's the most stressful thing about being ahead of growth?

[Val Schultz]

You need to hit every week metrics. I mean, it's quite like black and white, right? Either the company is growing or it's not. It doesn't really matter why it's not growing, but it needs to grow.

[Interviewer]

When we chatted, you said that most companies kind of fail at hiring. I did want to touch on this because this is like a universal process that every founder has to go through. Why do you think most founders or companies fail at hiring?

[Val Schultz]

Probably two things. Like a, you don't test people far enough. So, you know, you maybe have a conversation you don't dig deep into. Like, let's say they talk about a certain project or past incident, but you don't ask follow up questions really to understand context. Right? Like did they contribute towards it or did they lead it? Can they explain in detail what was the problem or not? So I think, you know, the best founders, they really dig deep in understanding, like, okay, what really happened? Do I believe that that person actually made that impact? Do they understand enough to make that impact? And then the second thing, which is essentially if you look at sports, for example, you know, Michael Jordan, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kobe Bryant, you don't have to motivate these people. Doesn't matter what they will do, they will always be the best. It's just their attitude. It's the mindset, right? And I think, you know, like, you want to see the same thing in the people you hire. You want people that are hungry, people that are passionate.

[Interviewer]

What do you think Revolut did? Well, when it came to hiring, I.

[Val Schultz]

Think that was the main thing. I mean, I think we mentioned before, like Alan or Chad, I think myself, I think Nick basically looked for very young people, very driven people and very smart people. That was basically the main requirements, right? The thinking was kind of like, you know, we can teach people skills, we can't teach them the right behaviors or attitudes or mindset. So either you want it or you don't.

[Interviewer]

What were the biggest mistakes you think.

[Val Schultz]

That you made in the hiring assuming too much. I mean, it sounds a bit harsh, but like, for example, not checking whether people want to work hard. Right. You talk about it, but not directly asking, like, hey, do you work weekends? Do you work evenings? People try to be too nice and.

[Interviewer]

Maybe politically, for those that don't and don't want to. Do you think they admit it?

[Val Schultz]

I think so. I think it's. I mean, if you present it in a way like, look, this is the culture of the company, right? So we're looking for these people. I think it also gives to the other person an opportunity to see whether it's the right thing for them. It's a bit like dating, right? Like me, at that point, I wanted to prove myself. For me, it was like, hey, I want to learn. I want to join a small company. It should become the next I own Facebook. I just wanted to see what's different. And so for me it was like, hey, yeah, I want to work weekends, I want to work long evenings. I really want to learn.

[Interviewer]

Did you find the majority of people said, yes, I do want to work.

[Val Schultz]

Weekends and evenings in interviews? Yeah, no, but we probably didn't hire them.

[Interviewer]

Do you think it's a game of just meeting as many people as possible?

[Val Schultz]

Part of it.

[Interviewer]

But how do you do sourcing? I suck at hiring Valley. How do you do sourcing?

[Val Schultz]

You probably have a gut feeling of what you're looking for. Maybe a benchmark of companies you find really attractive. Let's say operations, right? Okay. Uber has really excellent operations. So you would try to find people, maybe people that work two years, one year at Uber, people that maybe want to do the next step. You can target these people on LinkedIn and then essentially it's just basically message everyone. That basically fits that criteria. You didn't use recruiters? No, we use tech. We used recruiters to schedule, call, close contracts. But like sourcing screen calls. CV screening was usually done by hiring managers.

[Interviewer]

Anything on CVs that you'd be like, look for or be wary of if.

[Val Schultz]

People don't use metrics. So if you can't clearly see what the impact of someone was if people use vanity metrics, for example, a marketing manager or head of marketing that basically says, I managed 30 million budget. It's like, okay, maybe you generated $1 revenue, maybe 100 million. I mean, how does it matter? For us, it was trying to like looking for red flags or looking for the attributes we're looking for. We wanted to see that people learn very fast and learn faster than the average person. For example, I went to uni, but it dropped out. But like I still was kind of like, you know, progressing very quickly in my career.

[Interviewer]

What are the signs that someone is learning quickly? Especially when you have a preference for young people where there's just less data.

[Val Schultz]

Points, you can use benchmarks. So for example unis, top unis, if you go to lse, Stanford, Harvard, you're pre vetted, so you're quite smart, you're probably quite ambitious. So if you did the uni like in minimum term plus, I don't know, worked at a tier one company, you probably fit the bill. So that's one way to attract these people. Second thing is, let's say if you looking for someone more senior, like a product director, if you get promoted in 2, 3 years to product director, there's something different about you. Because other people, when somebody works as a product manager for let's say 10 years, you ask yourself, okay, why are they not a director? Why are they not leading a team? So we use these proxies to basically guess whether you know, it's the right fit or not. Typically in growth, we didn't look for people that studied marketing or stuff like that.

[Interviewer]

What did you look for?

[Val Schultz]

Computer science.

[Interviewer]

Did you do take home tasks in the interview process? What are some lessons on that? Because that's an interesting element.

[Val Schultz]

You want to make them as hard as possible and as close to reality as possible.

[Interviewer]

Are they on your company? So they're on Revolut.

[Val Schultz]

What we typically did was we took a past problem that it was really hard to solve. We basically messed up the data a bit. So essentially A we couldn't use it, but B, also that our clients didn't have our data and then essentially you would try to see how to solve it. So for example, at Revolut, like if you wanted to become a product manager or operations person, you had to analyze I think a million data sets and figure out like what's the problem in onboarding it took us three months to solve the problem. So it was a good test to.

[Interviewer]

See, you know, and so you give it to them and you give them the hardest possible. I doubt any of them solve it. Correct.

[Val Schultz]

Not completely. I mean that's not the point.

[Interviewer]

What are we looking for from it?

[Val Schultz]

You want to look for the people have a structured approach at solving problems. Realistically speaking, just from analyzing some data, you will never know for sure whether it's the right or wrong path. Right. But you want someone that is very structured like thinks about like, okay, what could be the root cause? How Can I get insights about that? Ultimately, like, you want someone that has an approach on how to solve and identify a problem, you can replicate it, right? Like it doesn't matter which problem I give you, you can basically use the same approach to solve the problem again. If someone maybe just solved it in the past, but has no clue about how to do it again, it's a bit useless.

[Interviewer]

How quickly do you know if you've made a good hire or a bad hire?

[Val Schultz]

I think you have a gut feeling pretty quickly, probably a few days. Majority of people after week you basically like, okay, that's not going to work.

[Interviewer]

Do you get rid in the first two weeks?

[Val Schultz]

And I usually try to make it work for like three, four weeks, but if I can't make it work after four weeks. Yes.

[Interviewer]

What were the signs that it wasn't working?

[Val Schultz]

I guess it's because either people didn't clearly listen or pay attention, so they didn't fully understand what you expect of them when you give them feedback, for example, give them a task and then ultimately as a result they didn't really progress quickly or learn quickly. You know, if you would see, like, okay, maybe the person is not perfect right now, but he's picking up pace really quickly. So in like two months he will be there. I think you're fine because it will take you longer to hire replacement. But if you feel like, you know, you give him a lot of feedback and it's just not getting better, it's not going to get better than in two months or three months, right? So that's kind of like what I'm looking for.

[Interviewer]

Do you think you had a good culture at Revolut?

[Val Schultz]

It depends how you define a good culture. I think what a lot of people forget is that Revolut is like that company that's at the 0.01%. You know, it's like a SpaceX, a Facebook, a meta. I think all these companies are very similar. Even if you look at like something like sports, right? Top clubs like Real Madrid or Bayern Munich or Manchester City, they just expect more of you. It's more cut through environment. Like either you perform or you're out. There's a reason why they are like the elite clubs. I think it's similar in startups, right? If you like Facebook in the early days, Apple, Microsoft, you have to win. It's the mentality of the founder. You want to be the fastest growing company, you want to be the dominant force in your market. So if people don't fit that environment, if they can't Contribute. It's not that people are necessarily bad or that in general they wouldn't be successful somewhere else. It just means in that environment they're not a good fit.

[Interviewer]

What are your biggest lessons on how to train people effectively?

[Val Schultz]

It's hard to do well, sounds very counterintuitive, but essentially spending more time with them. So I have like Oleg, he's a good friend nowadays. He was the lead product designer at my team at Revolut. Very creative designer, but like very unstructured, unfocused. And so Revolut expected you. Like every week you need to show progress. So every week we have a design sync with Nick. You just had to show like, hey, we're making progress, right? Like that's basically what you work on the whole week. And Oleg basically, like he spent so much time just optimizing one screen. So basically we had 20, 30 variations of one screen, but we didn't have like a user journey. So when we had the review, there wasn't much progress to be seen, right? We didn't really understand how the solution would solve the problem of the customer. Customer. Then the second week happened, right? Same problem. And I was like, okay, this is not going to work. You know, I need new user flows in like maximum 2, 3 weeks. Because otherwise, like engineering doesn't have anything to do. Ultimately I have a choice, right? I can try to do it on my own, but it's probably putting more load on me. It's not a sustainable solution or I need to try to make it work with him, right? And so basically what we did was like I had four ketchups a day, so he had to give me an update every two hours and he got tasks on what he needs to change in the next two hours. After three weeks it was just, I don't know, somehow he figured it out and he knew kind of like, what do you expect of him? Which then essentially we could also just have once, so a week, a catch up about what's going on in product design.

[Interviewer]

How important do you think it is to have the reviews? You said there about design reviews, but in growth maybe in particular, how do you think about growth reviews? Thinking as a team on progress, how often? What should be involved?

[Val Schultz]

You need a feedback cycle, right? You need to kind of see like, okay, I try a. Is it good? Is bad? What's good? What's bad? What could I improve? I think the more frequent you have these things, the better because essentially you learn faster. Imagine like every cycle, every time you get feedback is a cycle. Every time you Basically complete a cycle, you learn. So the more cycles you have, the faster you learn. And so often what managers do is basically your performance review every three months. Right. It's not okay. Like, basically that means like it's very slow that you develop because if you do something wrong, if you don't think the right way, you know, if you focus on the wrong things, like you get feedback after three months. So I think probably doing it daily is too extreme. I think once a week was kind of like what we found optimal to move really fast, but equally like for the whole team. Yeah. So we had like in every function we had once a week an update.

[Interviewer]

And so for example, is Nick there in everyone?

[Val Schultz]

Not in everyone, but like Nick, for example had 70, 81 on ones a week. So basically like every product team sync Nick was in it. Every design team sync Nick was in it.

[Interviewer]

Did that make it better or worse?

[Val Schultz]

I think it's the reason why there's so many talented people coming out of Revolut.

[Interviewer]

Why?

[Val Schultz]

Because they benefited from his work with Nick intensely. I mean, it's kind of like it's his way of thinking, right? Imagine you're spending every week with Elon Musk, half an hour, right? And every week you get feedback from Elon Musk about, you know, what you could do better. Right. How he thinks, how he sees things, you know, what you didn't consider what you could do better. You know, obviously, you know, you're going to learn a lot from that.

[Interviewer]

Does he lead through fair?

[Val Schultz]

He read a book called Principles, which he really likes.

[Interviewer]

I know he said it on the show. He said, he goes, I got PDF quicker than book.

[Val Schultz]

Yeah, it was more direct, I guess.

[Interviewer]

I thought it was such a neck.

[Val Schultz]

Thing there, like PDF pedal on book. I mean, he comes from a scientific background, so he ultimately believes in truth. And one thing that Ray Dalio says in the book is that truth sometimes hurts. But if you find an environment that's more scientific and ultimately truth seeking, it gives more an environment where you basically thrive, right. And really get results. And so I think what Nick created was ultimately like an environment where truth matters. I could go always to Nick and basically say, look, that's wrong. Here's the data that proves you wrong. Right. And he would always listen and consider it. And if he agrees with it or if I give him new data, he would change his mind. So ultimately, yes, there's probably some element of fear, but maybe that you put on yourself because you might feel, okay, you're not good enough, or other people are smarter than you or, you know, you're not prepared enough or ultimately, people don't want to be wrong. So there was always this element of like, okay, maybe I didn't think about something, maybe I forgot something, maybe I'm missing something. Right. Which keeps people a bit on the toes. Or it's the main reason why Revolut builds such an amazing company. Right. Because it didn't really matter, like, you know, whose ideas it is. It ultimately mattered, like, what's the best we can do, right?

[Interviewer]

What breaks with scale that fast? When you're scaling that fast, where it's like, you know, metal cards are going out faster than you can make them. Literally, what breaks everything?

[Val Schultz]

Rebuild everything in house every few months. For example, I went there when we were like 80 people. I left when it was two and a half thousand. That's two and a half years. My team went from two people to over 150 in like nine months. Everything breaks. The way you communicate doesn't work anymore. The way you. We couldn't upgrade to a bigger database anymore. Right. Basically, Google didn't have bigger database, so we had to split the databases and sync them somehow. 7,800 million transactions that we processed in one single month at the end before I left. And we're just growing every month with hundreds of millions of new transactions. It was just mad when we did referrals, for example, when we launched it, we went from 15,000 new users a day, and we only launched in one market.

[Interviewer]

15,000 new users a day.

[Val Schultz]

Yeah. When we launched it, we went in one market, Romania, from 2000. And after three days, we won 64,000 just in Romania. We just launched in one market because we didn't want to break the whole system. We then had to turn it off because we grew too fast. And suddenly.

[Interviewer]

And that was just with referrals.

[Val Schultz]

Yeah. And so basically what happened was like suddenly KYC times, right, went from three minutes to. Or a minute, right. To suddenly, like two weeks. Customer support, waiting lines went from, I don't know, 10 minutes to four weeks. So, you know, that was the challenging part, right? That it's just not one system that you have to scale up. You have to scale up every system internally in the company with rapid pace.

[Interviewer]

There was always a big thing. I remember Tom at Monzo being on the show and he was like, the big thing everyone said was, ha, but you'll never be able to be the primary bank account. And that was always the thing like, oh, Revolut or Monzo, it's great, but I'll never Be the primary bank account. When and how do you feel you crack that?

[Val Schultz]

I mean, I use it as my main bank account, so already for like seven, eight years.

[Interviewer]

But did that impact your product marketing?

[Val Schultz]

I think that was the interesting thing. Like we never thought about it that way. Right from the early days it was always like, we don't want to build a bank. I mean we even had on a website, right? Better than a bank account and bank was crossed out. Like I think it was always like the clear message, like, look, banks are broken, banks rip you off. We don't want to be a bank. We want to rebuild and build something better than before. For a long time we really wanted to distance ourselves from the entire banking system, right? We didn't want to rip off our customers the same way. We want to build better services, faster services, new innovative products. And I think it helped us to basically build something that the competition like Monzo and 26 never done.

[Interviewer]

We've mentioned data so many times, so final topic before a quick fire. But you've said before that there's conventional wisdom around data strategy. What is the conventional wisdom and how do you think about it?

[Val Schultz]

I think typically companies use event driven data infrastructure, mixed panel amplitude didn't really change for like probably 15, 20 years, which usually creates most of the issues in a company. I actually think that if you look at Uber, Airbnb, Meta, they don't use events or at least not in the early days. We didn't use events at Revolut. I think the problem is often that engineering doesn't really have access to data or doesn't use data much. They may be a bit scared of the topic. Traditionally, data people weren't very technical. Usually companies that had a data team had data analysts, not data scientists or the data engineering. And then essentially like product managers or business people wanted certain insights. So people went to Mixpanel, went to amplitude because it was easy, right? Just one line of code. I think then over the years with people, some companies realized is that actually you don't get a lot of insights because you know, you have some payment data in stripe, right? Some people churn, never come back, right? You have payment issues, so you should generate revenue. You don't, right? Because some weird authorization issue in, I don't know, Brazil, you have different campaigns that cost you different money, right? And so you want to understand, okay, which campaign actually generates how much revenue, like how efficient are they? So how do you connect suddenly, like Google Analytics data with Stripe data and like Mixpanel data. And then I think in certain industries like banking, it gets even harder. Right. Because we can't just expose every transaction of a customer and their details to like a third party tool. What happens if they get hacked? I think for us it was like, okay, every software that's built and even like any third party software you use has a database and the database contains all the valuable information and that's your source of truth. Because if the database is wrong, I mean the whole application is wrong. And so basically what we started doing is combining the various data sources in a centralized data warehouse, connecting everything through a user id, we could then segment the audience the way we wanted. If we wanted to look at only people in Austria at a certain age, we could do this and we could see how much they cost us, how much money they generate us. What's the unit economics.

[Interviewer]

What was the single best growth decision you made?

[Val Schultz]

I think it was a Monday afternoon. Chad, me and Tom and I think Alan basically set up a referral campaign, wrote an email and enabled free cards to revolut customers. And that generated like 180,000 signups in a week. And I think back then revolut grew around 10,000 signups a week.

[Interviewer]

What was the worst growth decision you made?

[Val Schultz]

For whatever reason, I thought that you can acquire a lot of customers with P2P payments. And so I spent four weeks trying to make it work that people can pay someone. That's not on Revolut didn't do anything.

[Interviewer]

I want to do a quick fire. So I say a short statement and then you give me your thoughts. Does that sound okay?

[Val Schultz]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

So what's the most common irreversible mistake you see founders make?

[Val Schultz]

They get too hands off. They don't use their product on a daily basis.

[Interviewer]

Astonishing. What's the most dangerous myth floating around about growth?

[Val Schultz]

It's really hard to build a product led business if you start with paid marketing happening.

[Interviewer]

How does growth change in the world of AI?

[Val Schultz]

I think in the short term you get spammed even more. Automated partnerships managers outbound becomes infinite. Yeah, I mean we are looking into like automating partnership manager negotiations and because suddenly you can scale it up to million partnerships managers, I think more spamming I think at some point probably goes back to first principles like who really offers value and what's old school traditional ways to reach people.

[Interviewer]

What would you most like to change about the world of growth?

[Val Schultz]

Getting founders to build better products or generally building better products? I think it's really hard to sell a product that doesn't really add value to people.

[Interviewer]

Do you think Revolut is a better product than Monzo? Yeah, Why?

[Val Schultz]

I think Monzo is just a. It's a. It's a more modern bank. Revolut is a financial ecosystem if you think about it, right? Like you have 50 million B2C customers, I don't know how many million businesses. So suddenly you can just stay in the Revolut world. No more visa, no more MasterCard, something completely new.

[Interviewer]

What was the biggest lesson from working with Nick?

[Val Schultz]

That you can be very creative, very analytical and very logical at the same time.

[Interviewer]

What was the hardest thing about working at Revolut?

[Val Schultz]

To put it, as Nick put it, we're like special forces. We go in, we don't fuck up. That mentality that every meeting, every design, catch up, every marketing campaign, essentially anything you do is perfectly executed at all times at the maximum speed. So if you have a typo in a design review, not good. If a screenshot somewhere is missing, not good. If FAQ is missing, you know, like everything had to be kind of like Apple, you know, everything had to be perfectly executed at all times.

[Interviewer]

What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

[Val Schultz]

So it's more like a thought experiment. But I'm wondering if there's really the need for the Internet, the way we know it nowadays in like 15 to 20 years at the moment, you always have a phone or like a screen that connects you to a virtual world, right? And in that virtual world, it's going completely crazy. You have, I don't know, crypto and you have autonomous AI agents and like all kinds of weird things, right? But what happens if, let's say in a few years, probably four or five years, you will have a lot of robots in the real world. You have Tesla's robots and I think Boston Dynamics. And these robots basically can speak to you like a human. They can do tasks like a human. Do you really need to go in that virtual world anymore? Does it become more like a Star wars where, you know, you interact with the virtual world in a physical world?

[Interviewer]

What are the biggest lessons from being an underdog? You know, you advise Kittel today, It's against the 800 pound gorilla that is Canva, which has an 800 pound gorilla, which is Adobe. What are the biggest lessons in that experience?

[Val Schultz]

The bigger you get, the easier you get disrupted, right? Let's say a market that's worth 10 million is nothing for a company like Canva, that makes, I don't know, I think nowadays 3 billion, something like that. They don't even go after that Market because it's just not big enough, right? But it also allows you to basically disrupt from that market and a bigger market and then a slightly bigger market. I mean, in the end of the day, like, you don't have, you have high conviction that there's need for a software like this because you already have proof points. You also have a lot of feedback around what's not so good with the tools, which allows you to navigate through it. But equally, it's obviously very hard because you have a huge competitor that is quite strong at what you do. Probably the easier way to see it is you want to go in a market where you don't have competition. So if you think about Revolut against Monza, right, like the markets we grew the fastest wasn't the uk, it was Ireland, it was Romania, it was Poland. While we still competed here and there with, you know, different banks, we went in a lot of markets where we just didn't have competition, which allowed us to raise more money, build better products, hire more people. There's always like a way you can see the market or you can segment the market where you basically can build a product where essentially you don't have much competition, where Your product is 10x better than the status quo. And I think, you know, the best founders, they find these markets, they find these unique insights to grow through that. Right. Rather than where everybody else goes.

[Interviewer]

Final one for you. When you look across the landscape today, which company growth strategy have you been most impressed by?

[Val Schultz]

The most impressive thing I've seen was Nubank. I mean, they have like a 90% retention rate, like over 24 months. It's ridiculous. It's like they just figured out something in the Brazilian market that just. I don't know, it's magic. It's basically like from what I understood is in Brazil, because of the financial crisis, they made it illegal to not allow installment payments when you pay for, let's say, a laptop or food, because a lot of people are so poor that they wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise. So essentially everybody has to offer them a B. It was illegal to put interest on it. So obviously everybody chose to pay in installments because why not? There's no downside. What Nubank did was basically saying, okay, we're offering a credit card, so you can pay with Nubank, you go to the merchant, split it into free payments, but then in Nubank, you can pay it in one go and you get a 5% discount. And then they took the money to basically lend it to others. Their product. I mean, it's so sticky, it's insane. You know, they didn't have competition. I think they have like 100 million active users nowadays.

[Interviewer]

I think going back to your point on competition, it's like they were competing against legacy Brazilian banks which had incredible fees. Like we thought our fee structures were high. I mean that's what insane. And so the combination of like product innovation, that which is super cool, I didn't actually know that, combined with the low competition, that's a very good one.

[Val Schultz]

Yeah. I mean also the finances are impressive. I mean, I think they made nearly a billion profit last year or something. It's just. And I mean they're growing like hell. I mean, Revolut is growing fast, but nubank is growing even faster.

[Interviewer]

Val, listen, I've loved doing this. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for letting me just pepper you with questions. And this has been fantastic.

[Val Schultz]

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

[Harry Stebbings]

I absolutely love doing that. Revolut is one of the generational defining.

[Interviewer]

Companies of our time.

[Harry Stebbings]

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