The Twenty Minute VC

Val Scholz: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics & Strategies | E1168

Val Scholz is the former Head of Growth @ Revolut, where he led the company to their first 10M users. Post Revolut, Val played a crucial role in scaling several high-growth companies including VEED, Simple & Busuu (exited for $400M). Today, Val is the Head of Growth at Kittl, an intuitive design platform empowering graphic designers. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (00:57) Journey into the World of Growth (02:24) Experience from Revolut (16:23) Why Traditional Marketing Methods Are Outdated (19:36) Content Marketing Lessons for Customer Acquisition (22:43) The Best Time to Hire a Head of Growth (25:21) Key Traits to Look for in a Growth Hire (28:06) Revolut's Hiring Successes & Mistakes (32:20) Interview Process (35:16) Good Culture Perspective & Revolut's Environment (42:38) What Breaks in Rapidly Scaling Companies? (46:37) Conventional Data Strategy Wisdom (50:34) Quick-Fire Round ----------------------------------------------- In Today’s Episode with Val Scholz We Discuss: 1. Lessons from Scaling Revolut to 10M Users: What were Val’s biggest takeaways during his time at Revolut? What does Val consider the secret sauce behind Revolut’s success? What did Val think Revolut understood about customers that no other bank did? 2. Behind Revolut’s Growth Playbook: What was Val’s best growth decision? What was his worst? Why does Val think most companies don’t do referrals well? What made Revolut’s signup strategy so successful? What are Val’s two ways to master content marketing? Does Val think it’s good to diversify growth channels? When should founders diversify? What are Val’s strategies to make Youtube influencers successful? 3. Product Marketing 101: Why does Val think traditional marketing methods are outdated? If traditional marketing methods are outdated, what should startups do instead? What does Val think is the most dangerous myth around product-led growth? What does Val believe are the most common mistakes founders make on optimizing products? 4. Growth Hires: Who, What, When & How When does Val think is the best time to hire a head of growth? What is the profile Val looks for in a growth hire? What traits does he look for? What are the most common reasons founders fail at hiring? How quick does Val know if a new hiring isn’t working out? What does Val think are the biggest red flags to look out for in a CV? How does Val define good culture? Did Revolut have a good culture? ----------------------------------------------- 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 Val Scholz on Twitter: https://twitter.com/valscholz Follow 20VC on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/20vchq 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 ----------------------------------------------- #20vc #harrystebbings #valscholz #revolut #venturecapital #banking #kittl #scaling #growth #monzo #tips #tactics #strategies

Val ScholzguestHarry Stebbingshost

Jun 20, 202458mWatch on YouTube ↗

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Inside Revolut’s Rocketship: Referral Loops, Relentless Hiring, Relentless Truth

Val Scholz, former Head of Growth at Revolut, explains how the company scaled from zero to 10 million users largely through product-led growth and an exceptionally efficient referral engine instead of paid marketing.
He details how shortening time-to-referral, clarifying everyday use cases, and cross-selling new financial products created powerful compounding loops and strong unit economics.
Scholz also dives deep into hiring and culture at Revolut: recruiting extremely driven generalists, using hard, realistic take-home tasks, and operating in a high-pressure, truth-seeking environment modeled on elite sports teams.
The conversation broadens into data strategy, content-led acquisition, when to hire growth leaders, and how underdog companies can win by entering markets with little competition and 10x better products.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Engineer for ultra-fast referral cycles, not just high invite rates.

Revolut focused on making it possible for a new user to sign up and complete a first payment within five minutes, so referrals could happen in real time during conversations—turning word-of-mouth into a high-speed, compounding loop.

Solve activation by clarifying everyday use cases, not just fixing UX.

When surveys revealed most users hadn’t ‘churned’ but simply saw Revolut as a travel-only card, the team repositioned it as an everyday banking product and removed specific technical blockers (e.g., ID verification issues, Italian top‑up constraints) to push activation from ~30% to ~90%.

Launch second and premium products earlier than you think.

Revolut introduced a paid premium tier only ~18 months after launch and saw instant success, proving that additional SKUs (e.g., metal cards, crypto, stocks) dramatically increase ARPU and help fund free acquisition features like zero‑FX.

Double down on one working channel before diversifying.

Rather than spreading resources thinly, Revolut concentrated on referrals and a few scalable loops (e.g., YouTube influencers) until they saturated them, then moved to the next channel, enabling them to reach massive volumes with clear attribution and learning.

Hire for speed of learning, raw drive, and real impact—not vanity metrics.

They optimized for young, ambitious people from strong universities or fast promotion tracks, tested with hard real-world tasks, and looked for concrete metric-based achievements instead of signals like ‘managed big budgets’ or ‘led large teams’.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

It's a lot better to do one thing really well than doing 10 or 100 things at the same time.

— Val Scholz

Ninety percent of the B2C customers that Revolut ever acquired came through referrals.

— Val Scholz

You build software that does marketing for you—it basically scales exponentially.

— Val Scholz

We’re like special forces. We go in, we don’t fuck up.

— Val Scholz (quoting Nick Storonsky’s mindset)

The best founders, they find these markets, they find these unique insights, where your product is 10x better than the status quo.

— Val Scholz

Revolut’s growth engine and referral loop designProduct strategy, cross-selling, and launching new products earlyHiring, training, and high-performance culture at RevolutGrowth channels: influencers, SEO, content, and why they avoided paid adsData infrastructure and cohort-based decision-makingWhen and how to hire a Head of GrowthCompeting as an underdog and choosing markets with low competition

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