00:54:27 · Nik Storonsky, David Senra
[00:54:27] S1: Yeah. Okay. [00:54:28] S0: You said something about helping them sell their product as well. Talk about like the the early days of like marketing. I heard you spent nothing on marketing for the first like five or seven years? [00:54:39] S1: Yes. First seven years it was completely organic. Plus COVID also hit. And 2021, I remember our company was six, seven years old. COVID hit and like our revenues went down, I think, 70%. And back then we were not in banking business. We were still kind of, you know, e money with travel card. So it was very heavily related to... Or correlated with travel business. And then as COVID hit, travel business completely gone. So we had to survive or somehow we kind of optimized a lot during that time. [00:55:17] S0: Okay. But explain you you... Why you decided to start to start spending money in marketing? Because, like, I go to Europe and it's just like, I feel like I'm blanketed with your ads. I see your stuff everywhere. Now it makes perfect sense after talking to you. It's not like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna do, like, a little bit here, little bit there. It's just like, once I find something I just, you know, essentially go skirt, skorch earth on it.
00:55:17 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[00:55:17] S0: Okay. But explain you you... Why you decided to start to start spending money in marketing? Because, like, I go to Europe and it's just like, I feel like I'm blanketed with your ads. I see your stuff everywhere. Now it makes perfect sense after talking to you. It's not like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna do, like, a little bit here, little bit there. It's just like, once I find something I just, you know, essentially go skirt, skorch earth on it. [00:55:36] S1: Yeah. Basically, the way I think about marketing, so I haven't done it for six years, seven years. I just didn't have time, plus we didn't have enough resources. But then when started doing it, I I went really, really deep. So basically, I started with who we need to hire to run a proper marketing machine. Not like here and there, but scientifically, Where we need to invest money in marketing with a proper return. And then my idea was very simple. Who are the companies with the largest marketing spend and who are extremely cautious with their marketing spend? Where is, you know, very low margin of error? And back then it was gaming companies. Right? Gaming companies had a lot of marketing spend, performance ads, or certain companies were also doing a lot of above the line campaigns. The gaming companies are doing well or not? Gaming companies were the largest spending companies in the world on marketing. So if you look at their budgets, it could easily be 1,000,000,000 plus on I
00:55:36 · Nik Storonsky, David Senra
[00:55:36] S1: Yeah. Basically, the way I think about marketing, so I haven't done it for six years, seven years. I just didn't have time, plus we didn't have enough resources. But then when started doing it, I I went really, really deep. So basically, I started with who we need to hire to run a proper marketing machine. Not like here and there, but scientifically, Where we need to invest money in marketing with a proper return. And then my idea was very simple. Who are the companies with the largest marketing spend and who are extremely cautious with their marketing spend? Where is, you know, very low margin of error? And back then it was gaming companies. Right? Gaming companies had a lot of marketing spend, performance ads, or certain companies were also doing a lot of above the line campaigns. The gaming companies are doing well or not? Gaming companies were the largest spending companies in the world on marketing. So if you look at their budgets, it could easily be 1,000,000,000 plus on I [00:56:34] S0: know a lot of them are going to Applovin. Applovin is going to print like 6,000,000,000 in profit this Yeah. Like amazing. Yeah. [00:56:43] S1: Yeah. Yeah. So I ended up hiring an extremely good person who started running marketing at Revolut. And then we also Before I [00:56:54] S0: let you go on, am I understanding you're so you're studying how gaming companies are advertising? Or you just wanna know what they were spending?
00:56:54 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[00:56:54] S0: let you go on, am I understanding you're so you're studying how gaming companies are advertising? Or you just wanna know what they were spending? [00:57:00] S1: The idea was who are the best professionals who know how to spend money in marketing. Right? And then the idea is that these professionals will work in gaming companies because they have the largest budgets. Got it. So that's how I got my first... Well, actually, second, first one. I fired. He wasn't for big gaming gaming. [00:57:18] S0: Probably VC's cousin asked you to hire him or something.
00:57:21 · Nik Storonsky
[00:57:21] S1: And anyway, we went went very deep into, you know, performance marketing, LTVs, payback. And then recently we also started doing because we got a banking license and then what we realized or what I realized quite early on is all about trust. Right? If you're a digital bank, you don't have branches, people don't see you physically. They trust you less by definition compared to HSBC, Lloyd's, JPMorgan Chase, and so on. Then... Okay. How you build trust? How you arbitrage effectively performance marketing spend? Because in performance marketing spend, you pay per impression. And then there are a lot of spaces in the physical world which you can buy, which will also produce impression, but at a much cheaper price compared to traditional world. So, for example, we bought probably now 50% of all airports in in Europe. Right? Like in almost 50% of airports in Europe will now have ads. Right? Again, because of a simple math. How many times a year people travel. Right? How many times a year they're in the airport? How many impressions we produce? How much will it cost us? Right? Now there is arbitrage to performance marketing. And then similar ideas to to other places in physical world. For example, we we started now doing equivalent of legacy branches, what we call called RevStore. Right? Rev experience. So we set up first first shop in Barcelona. Again, I'm trashing impressions of... In physical world versus the digital world. Because how many people pass every year our shop? I mean, it's more like Revolut experience. So it's not a real banking legacy branch. You come in and then you experience all our products. It's all done in a very modern way. Like, type of store bought for for for for Revolut. And then the idea is that we we just generate impressions for people who... Which pass the street who come come over as well.
00:59:14 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[00:59:14] S0: Like a lot of companies advertise in airports. And it's just like, oh, it's like, it's up on the screen maybe for thirty seconds or whatever. It might be one billboard. It's like, you walk, I'm walking for like two minutes and it's still, I'm like enclosed. There's like a huge, like I'm in a cocoon of Revolut ads. And how did you come up with that idea too though? [00:59:31] S1: Just buying full airports. [00:59:33] S0: I can't think of another company that I've seen do this. And I think like, it's actually a really smart move. More people should do that. It's like I I'm... There's... It's... I may not use your services, but like I definitely know you exist and what you do. Like you're essentially aiming for ubiquity is the way like I was thinking about that when I was walking to the airport. [00:59:48] S1: Yeah. In my mind, we're just in our paying for impressions much cheaper compared to... In physical world compared to digital world. [00:59:53] S0: It's not just like paying for impressions though, because like, you know [00:59:56] S1: I mean, building trust as well. Yeah. I