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Ryan Wiggins: Scaling WhatsApp from 0-100M; How to Build a Growth Team; Mercury Neobank | E1016

Ryan Wiggins is the VP of Growth and Analytics at Mercury where he oversees a Growth team and founded the Analytics function. Prior to this, Ryan built Growth teams at WhatsApp, where he helped grow WhatsApp Business from 0 to 100M users, Workplace, and Facebook Ads. If that was not enough, Ryan is also an active angel investor. ------------------------------- Timestamps: 0:00 Who is Ryan Wiggins? 3:47 Biggest Takeaways from Working at WhatsApp 8:47 What is an excellent growth loop? 11:49 What do Growth People Get Wrong about Growth? 13:43 The Metrics To Follow For Growth 18:07 When to Hire a Growth Team 20:11 How to Hire Your First Head of Growth 28:23 How to Structure a Growth Hire 33:47 How Much to Pay a Growth Hire 36:08 How to Onboard Growth Talent 40:45 Why I Don’t Do Post Mortums 43:48 A/B Testing at WhatsApp 45:18 Quick-Fire Round ------------------------------- In Today's Episode with Ryan Wiggins We Discuss: 1.) From US Department of Commerce to Leading Growth Teams: How Ryan made his initial foray into the world of growth with Facebook and Whatsapp? What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known when he made the entry into growth? What advice does Ryan have for people who want to change their career but are not sure what they want to do? 2. ) Who and When: Building the Team: Should we hire a Head of Growth or a more junior growth hire first? What are the different profiles of growth hires? How do they change with business model? When is the right time to hire your first growth hire? What are the single biggest mistakes founders make on the timing of growth hires? 3.) How to Hire: The Process: Structurally, what is the right way to hire for a growth team? What does the interview process look like? What do you want to get out of each meeting? Should case studies be used, if so, should they be used for the company hiring or of the company where the candidate is from? What does the comp package look like for different growth hires? Who should be brought into the growth hiring process? What stage should they be involved? 4.) Onboarding: Setting Growth Up for Success: What is the ideal first 30,60 and 90 days for new growth hires? What can leaders do to ensure they are set up for the maximum chance of success? What are three of the biggest red flags bad growth hires show in the first 30 days? What are the biggest mistakes founders make in the onboarding process of growth hires? ------------------------------- Subscribe on Spotify: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466⁠ Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465⁠ Follow Harry Stebbings on Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/HarryStebbings⁠ Follow Ryan Wiggins on Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/rywiggs⁠ Follow 20VC on Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/20vc_reels⁠ Follow 20VC on TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok⁠ Visit our Website: ⁠https://www.20vc.com⁠ Subscribe to our Newsletter: ⁠https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/contact⁠ ------------------------------- #RyanWiggins #Mercury #HarryStebbings

Ryan WigginsguestHarry Stebbingshost
May 18, 202350mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

From WhatsApp’s Billion Users To Mercury: Building Real Growth Systems

  1. Ryan Wiggins, former Facebook/WhatsApp growth leader and current Head of Growth at Mercury, explains how true growth comes from systems, not hacks or channels. He contrasts Facebook’s data-heavy approach with WhatsApp’s billion‑user, almost no‑experimentation journey, extracting principles around product‑market fit, simplicity, and reliability. Wiggins then dives into how to build and sequence a growth function: when to hire, what that first hire should do, how to structure experiments, and how to organize a lean, high‑impact team. Throughout, he emphasizes retention over acquisition, strong product experiences over spammy tactics, and hiring ‘change agents’ who can understand systems and ship impact from unglamorous roles.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Fix retention and activation before pouring money into acquisition.

Most founders ask for ‘more users’ when they actually have conversion or retention leaks; plugging those first (e.g., WhatsApp Business migration bugs) can double retention and change the growth trajectory before adding acquisition spend.

Treat growth as a cross‑functional system, not a single channel.

Winning growth comes from the coordinated interplay of product experiences, marketing, and partnerships/sales sitting on top of a truly valuable, retentive product—think WhatsApp’s core messaging + carrier deals + simple virality.

Aim for big, fast bets and clear signals, not tiny incremental ‘wins.’

Early‑stage growth work should prioritize tightly scoped experiments that can deliver 50–100% improvements and be read in days or weeks; chasing 1–10% uplifts with limited traffic leads to noise and wasted cycles.

Define a ‘successful user’ by behaviors that predict long‑term retention.

Analyze retention curves and correlate them with early actions to find your equivalent of ‘10 friends in 14 days’ or ‘having at least one key contact on WhatsApp,’ then design onboarding and product flows to maximize that action.

Hire growth leaders early once you see repeatable pull from at least one channel.

You can’t hire your way into product‑market fit; once a product and a channel show consistent, non‑founder‑dependent traction, bring in a generalist growth leader to architect the system and then build the team around them.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

WhatsApp got to a billion and a half users without running any A/B test.

— Ryan Wiggins

Most people asking me for growth actually have a conversion and retention problem, not an acquisition problem.

— Ryan Wiggins

Growth is a system of optimization—understanding a system and changing it toward positive outcomes.

— Ryan Wiggins

If you just sail with the wind behind your back, you're not a great sailor.

— Ryan Wiggins

You can't bring in a growth team to create growth out of nothing.

— Ryan Wiggins

Lessons from Facebook and WhatsApp’s hypergrowth, including low‑AB‑test WhatsAppDefining and building an effective growth system (product, marketing, partnerships)Sequencing growth work: retention, activation, then acquisitionWhen and how to hire your first growth leader and build the teamHow to evaluate, interview, compensate, and onboard growth talentDesigning high‑leverage experiments, metrics, and execution speedProduct‑led growth and examples from Mercury and markets like France

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