Wise had zero customers when CPO Nilan Peiris first joined as advisor
Nilan Peiris · Nilan Peiris: What Growth Hacks Worked and What Did Not, from Wise CPO | E1182 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 26, 2024 · at 4:04
Nilan Peiris is the Chief Product Officer at Wise. He recounts meeting co-founders Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus roughly 12 years prior before joining as an advisor and later going full-time.
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“Yeah, so I met them, you'll enjoy this. I got introduced to them by an angel who I had helped previously, and he said, you gotta meet these guys. They're just two of them. They have a great product. They have no customers and they definitely need someone like you. And so I met them and they had a great product. They had no customers. And I started working with them, helping launch their first marketing campaigns, helping start to build a product part-time. And then after a couple of years went full-time and started building the team.”
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More from Nilan Peiris
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“The kind of strategic thesis at the heart of wise is whoever has the lowest cost, highest quality product, will take the whole cross-border market.”
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“If a neobank starts, like using that money to subsidize another product, it becomes unfeasible because then people would churn.”
Western Union's high margins allow them to outspend Wise on search marketing
“Western Union is like seven to eight times more expensive than WISE. So they could spend seven to eight times more than us on marketing. And therefore there's no way we would ever be able to compete on those SEM key head terms.”
Peiris: Wise halved marketing spend and lost only 1% of revenue
“We became profitable in about six to nine months, and there was only one cost we changed to get there, Which was our marketing spend. And I think I've shared this publicly before, and this is about four years ago. We halved our marketing spend. We dropped 10% …”
Wise periodically halves marketing spend to flush out accumulated budget inefficiency
“This kind of inefficiency will build up all the time in marketing. So about two or three years later, we kind of ran the same drill without a need to do it. Say, we're going to halve the marketing spend. Tell me how much we're going to drop revenue, and we bar…”