Sep 24, 2023 · 1h 16m · lennys-podcast
How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this in-depth interview, Wise Chief Product Officer Nilan Peiris shares the product philosophies, organizational models, and first-principles infrastructure engineering that power Wise's 70% word-of-mouth acquisition engine.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 26.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 4.1 Guest teaching 4.2 Guest disagreement 0.4 Lenny pushing back 0.3
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 38:35 You can't split test your way to love
Nilan directly challenges the predominant growth mindset by telling a PM not to test everything and asserting that micro-optimization cannot replace true conviction.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 43:30 Lenny defends continuous experimentationLenny pushes back against moving away from experimentation by arguing that without testing, teams might introduce unseen regressions and struggle with performance measurement.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 26:30 Granular atomic cost allocation modelNilan gives Lenny a comprehensive breakdown of how attributing exact P&L costs down to individual transactions allowed Wise to profitably undercut legacy banking fees.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 23:49 Lenny illustrates Airbnb's working-backwards visionLenny brings his own deep product experience into the conversation by citing Airbnb's Pixar storyboards and the operational shift to instant booking.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hook: Going Beyond Conversion to Blow Users Away | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Monologue hook and introduction to Nilan Peiris and Wise's word-of-mouth growth along with an initial sponsor read. Host monologues require zero scores for interaction metrics. | |
| Sponsor Segment: Wix Studio Web Creation Platform | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Lenny finishes sponsor reads, introduces Nilan, and asks about Wise's core metrics, with Nilan explaining their $12B monthly volume and 70% word-of-mouth acquisition. | |
| Measuring Word of Mouth and User Attribution | 5 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Nilan explains how Wise measures word-of-mouth through attribution surveys and links NPS score jumps to exponential doubling in referral rates. Lenny compares this to Airbnb's attribution methods. | |
| Unpacking Product Pillars and Overcoming Trust Barriers | 5 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Lenny summarizes the key takeaways and pushes Nilan on what factors Wise realized were less essential, leading Nilan to explain why trust is solved better through peer recommendations than marketing copy. | |
| The 10x Product Standard and Creating Unprecedented Experiences | 4 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Nilan outlines why optimizing conversion rates only produces incremental gains whereas building a 10x superior experience that blows users away drives massive word-of-mouth advocacy. | |
| Working Backwards from Ideal Customer Outcomes | 6 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Lenny connects Nilan's philosophy of theoretical maximums to working backwards at Airbnb, sharing detailed examples of Airbnb's 11-star storyboards and instant booking transition. | |
| Granular Cost Allocation and Lowering Transfer Prices | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Nilan educates Lenny on Wise's atomic cost-allocation model where heavy-cost users are billed accurately to allow radical price reductions across the broader user base. | |
| Doing Unscalable Things and Mission-Driven Customer Advocacy | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Nilan shares the story of opening Singapore with unscalable in-person KYC verification to lobby the regulator, and explains how authentic mission-led branding sparks organic forwarding. | |
| Building Conviction Over Split-Testing Everything | 5 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Nilan challenges the conventional dogma of split-testing every detail, arguing that true customer love and systemic price drops require strategic conviction and qualitative insight rather than micro-experiments. | |
| Sponsor Segment: Masterworks Contemporary Art Investing | 6 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Lenny pushes back on abandoning experimentation by highlighting risks of unseen negative impacts and performance tracking challenges. Nilan clarifies the use of holdouts versus slowed releases. | |
| Expanding from Money Transfers to the Global Account | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Nilan explains the evolution from pure remittance to the multi-currency Wise Account, demonstrating how eliminating cross-border business banking friction unlocked 20-30% volume expansion. | |
| Cultural Tenacity and Pursuing Hard Problems | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Nilan describes Wise's organizational tenacity in pursuing hard institutional milestones like securing direct central bank settlement accounts and fostering management patience. | |
| Structuring Global and Local Autonomous Product Teams | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Nilan breaks down Wise's dual organizational architecture: a single global tech stack with weak product ownership paired with autonomous local squads submitting direct code changes. | |
| Closing the Perception Gap to Triple Referral Rates | 5 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Nilan reveals how transparently showing savings via an interactive competitor price comparison graph tripled referral rates by bridging customer perception and reality. | |
| Angel Investing and Supporting Market Failures | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Nilan discusses his angel investments in market failure solutions, favorite books, interview techniques, and concludes the podcast smoothly. |
Statements from this episode (30)
Wise moves $12B monthly and grows 30-40% year-over-year
“So today we're now moving about twelve billion dollars a month, growing at between 30 to 40% year on year.”
Wise charges an average take rate of about 0.65% across routes
“We take about .65% on average across all our routes as price.”
Wise has been profitable for over four years with 20% EBITDA margins
“And we've been profitable for about more than four years now with 20% EBITDA margins”
Wise attributes 70% of its new user acquisition to word of mouth
“We acquired 70% of the users that found out about Wise last month through word of mouth. So, contextually, we have sixteen million customers, and we're acquiring about a million a quarter about ten million actives, and yes, and a million that joined Wise the f…”
Wise measures word-of-mouth growth by overlaying survey responses onto traffic data
“So we have an attribution model, as you can imagine, and we've had one from the early days and it overlays all the kind of cookie the referrer data and cookie data you have on, on visits coming to the website. So you kind of know that. And then you obviously h…”
Airbnb measured word-of-mouth growth using an onboarding interstitial survey pop-up
“That's actually at Airbnb exactly how the team did that to understand what percentage of growth was right about. It's just a little interstitial pop-up when you visit, say, airbnb.com. How'd you hear about us?”
Wise found referral rates doubled at each step up the NPS scale
“When we overlaid the referral data over the NPS survey data, we saw something really interesting. Very low invite rates at one to six, and not just invite conversion rates of users that joined for invites. But when you've got people from six to the seven and e…”
Wise emailed customer NPS survey comments weekly to the entire company
“I remember in the first year we built the NPS survey and we emailed out every week, all the comments to the whole company, which was pretty small. And we kept doing that. I think up till about three or four years, everyone got the NPS comments.”
Wise needed an 8x to 10x price advantage to trigger organic advocacy
“When we entered markets, like when we entered the US for the first time, if we entered with a product that was priced at say, 5.9%, and the alternative was six, customers would use us, but they wouldn't talk about us. We only got the advocacy when we were eigh…”
Wise maintains a 70% Net Promoter Score, outperforming iPhone and Google
“So IPS is 70%. So it's really, really high. So it's kind of higher than the iPhone and Google, Google search.”
The average Net Promoter Score across traditional banking is negative 30
“So instead of in context, like banks and financial services, NPS is -30, right? So most people don't recommend their banks, right?”
Building 10x better products requires avoiding existing third-party infrastructure
“Like you gotta build a 10 X better product than what's there. And if it's 10 X product better, it basically, it doesn't exist already. Right? So if you're If you're plugging in something else, that that's kind of a misstep.”
Historically, hosts ignored or rejected 50% of early Airbnb booking requests
“Most of Airbnb back in the day was you request to book with a host. You're like, Hey, can I stay in your home? And turned out, 50% of the time the guest was ignored or rejected, and the host was just like, nah, no thank you.”
Over 80% of current Airbnb bookings are Instant Bookings
“Now, over 80%, as far as I know, of bookings or instant bookings, where you just book and it's done, just like every other place you book online.”
Wise maintains unit profitability on every single individual transaction it processes
“We've been profitable for five years. And then one of the magical things here was like we're actually profitable on every transaction.”
Allocating exact costs per transaction allows Wise to optimize pricing distributions
“Every single bill we got, we allocated the cost back to the customer or the transaction that generated it. And then we add our margin on top and that's our price. And when you look at this and you analyze it, you'll find obviously there are 20% of customers ge…”
Peiris views customer support headcount as the cost of poor product quality
“So the people costs are customer service team, operations teams, But I like to think of that as the cost of port quality. So you bring up customer support. If the product's not clear, you hire lots of people in the back office.”
Wise secured Singapore's first e-KYC license after a year of unscalable lobbying
“It took a year of lobbying and a year of like building, like doing something unscalable effectively before we got the world's first EKYC license in Singapore.”
Wise's most effective acquisition campaign was simply emailing customers its core mission
“And we wrote our mission and sent it to our customers. We got more new customers from that email being forwarded around than any other kind of marketing.”
Peiris argues product teams cannot split-test their way to customer love
“Like you can't split test your way to love, right? So this experiment led product management approach where you kind of throw a bunch of things on the wall and then you kind of see what sticks. And generally we don't advocate this. Obviously there's a bit of i…”
Product teams should skip split testing if they will not roll back
“But you just, in order to get, get an impact, if you know you're not gonna roll it back, then, okay, you should just roll it out and try to reduce the need for the validation.”
Launching the Wise Account feature drove 20% to 30% more cross-border volume
“And we found that that we got about, like, as we launched the accounting markets, it was about, you know, like a 20 to 30% more volume, cross-border volume coming through, coming into wise from that market.”
Wise currently holds approximately $12.5 billion in customer deposits
“Because we got like about 12 and a half billion dollars in deposits now, which is like a time.”
Wise pays 5% yield by dynamically liquidating government bonds at card spend
“So we now put customers' money in government bonds, US bonds, and when you pay with your card, it dynamically sells those bonds. And that's how we give you an interest rate in like around about five percent right now, given where bond rates are.”
Wise spent years lobbying to secure direct settlement accounts at central banks
“We now have a bank account at the Bank of England, the National Bank of Singapore, Bank of Australia. And each of these was like as hard as, you know, getting that face-to-face verification thing in Singapore. It took like years of lobbying and all kinds of st…”
Wise utilizes weak product ownership, allowing regional teams to commit global code
“And you end up with a global product team that owns overall KPIs around conversion rate, et cetera. And you have local regional teams that are the conversion rate and the cost to do KYC for their market. And they contribute to the global product code base. So …”
Wise maintains 70 global bank accounts to track competitor pricing daily
“So we now have, I think about 70 bank accounts around the world. So I think like the top three accounts, banks in the world where we log onto every day, and then we log the price and the quote for a bunch of different routes into a file. You can imagine how ha…”
Showing post-transfer fee comparison graphs tripled Wise's customer referral sharing rate
“Yeah. That's really the sharing rate. When, so we always had the share button after you completed a transfer, but putting that there with this graph.”
In-product marketing is the discipline of closing actual and perceived value gaps
“And closing this delta between what you've done and what you perceive to be done is what I call product marketing, like within the product and that in its own rights, a discipline I've learned.”
Asking candidates about current frustrations reveals their fundamental problem-solving limits
“What frustrates you the most about where you're working right now? And this is as people, people always tell you why they want to join Waze or join whatever company you're coming to, and that's not that interesting, but what's interesting trying to figure out …”