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

You want to go in a market where you don't have competition, so if you think about Revolut against Monzo, right? Like, the markets we grew the fastest wasn't the UK. It was Ireland, it was Romania, Poland. We went in a lot of markets where we just had... 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.

Ready to go? Val, this is such a joy to do. I've wanted to make this one happen for a while, so thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me,

Not at all. But I want to start, like, growth is a, a weird world, so to speak. How did you first make your way into the world of growth?

It's actually quite random. So I studied software engineering when I was a kid, selling websites, and it's quite a lot of effort to build for clients, you know, these websi- especially back in the days. That was like 2004. And so a friend of mine basically started, you know, 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, uh, growth role.

What was the first growth role you had?

I mean, there wasn't really growth back then. Um, I was a software engineer at, uh, MindMeister. There wasn't really anyone in the company that knew marketing or SEO, and so essentially, basically, one of my projects was, like, how can you, uh, share mind maps, uh, on external websites and essentially generate traffic? I mean, we... quite a few million people, and I guess, like, that was the first time I really got exposure to, to growth.

You were then Head of Growth at Revolut-

Yeah.

... scaling from, like, nought to 10 million in customers. What were the biggest lessons from that journey? That's quite an incredible experience to have.

I think what I really, like, 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.

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

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

How do you do a referral loop that's so effective (laughs) ?