00:44:12 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:44:12] S1: easily. And on that note, I know... What I'm hearing is it's still a good a great time to join. There's a massive upside. So I know you guys are hiring. We'll just note that real quick. There's a... You're hiring product owners in a bunch of other roles, I imagine. [00:44:24] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We... Well, as someone who owns a product function, I'm especially interested in product owners, obviously. But we... Yeah. We hire a lot of roles, I think. We have maybe three or 400 open positions currently. [00:44:39] S1: Oh my god. Okay. I wanna talk a bit about new stuff that you work on. So new products that you decide to invest in. Is there anything that you've figured out about just like how to set up new products for success? Because a lot of the stuff we've been talking about is staying on top of stuff that you're iterating on and making better. What have you learned about just helping new products succeed?
00:45:02 · Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:45:02] S0: Yeah. So we launched quite a few products that you actually maybe wouldn't expect from a bank, starting with crypto that was insanely successful. But also, nonfinancial services like, booking a hotel through Revolut app, our loyalty program, RevPoints, which, which is sort of disrupting European market where people don't get great benefits from spending with card. In The US, you can easily get, like, what, 2% cashback with a credit card or in some sort of point. In Europe, they don't have it. And we are actually the first to build a program on card spend rewarding people with really meaningful monetary rewards. In the in the manner that I described, like, we we understood, okay, what's the recipe of this success to then scale it and reproduce? So we built a new bets framework, and essentially, everyone can come up with a new idea. It could be a product owner, but it could be anyone. Like, And they need to show some key important things which usually can expect from a startup, like market is there, business case is there. We know that we can do it way better than competitors leveraging, for example, some things that that that we have. Obviously, some concepts of product and then what customer problem we're solving and so on. And there is very little bureaucracy. Again, thanks to to having founder of hands on, we can easily get a green light on anything, start launching it quickly. What what we do is assemble same lean team with just a few people to build first version and then iterate and iterate. And the main thing here is to build first version very quickly to get feedback, but then not scale it before you polish the product. But then after after we make sure that, you know, all metrics are fine, retention is great, we start scaling it. And the good news is that it can be instantly multiplied by our 50,000,000 customer base and get great traction. So for example, one of the products that you mentioned, joint accounts, essentially an account that you could have with a significant other one, was one of the recently launched feature, and it grew significantly. And now it has over a million active users. I hear one
00:47:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:47:34] S1: of the ways you kind of approach these early products differently is you guys invest a lot in actually making it good and not just like a scrappy MVP. Does that ring a bell? Does that resonate? [00:47:45] S0: Indeed. That that... That's what I may be meant by, you know, keeping your first version narrowed down to a small user base. But even in this case, we still make sure that the product is well. So no one is excluded from this requirement of building a super polished product. It takes time, but it pays off. You know, the thing is that when you launch a scrappy version, and it's not getting traction, how do you know? Is it because the underlying idea is wrong? Or maybe your product just sucks and you need to to improve it? So by, you know, by by forcing everyone to build a product that people will love. We're building a Wow product. We kind of cut out this part of uncertainty. So bottom line, we can cut down the product in terms of functionality to to just most critical features, but we will never compromise on the quality and UX and the aesthetics.
00:48:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:48:55] S1: An interesting advantage you guys have that I'm realizing as you talk is, like, most of the stuff you launch is stuff that is clearly something people will want because it's stuff that, you know, they get other places, but they get the advantages of it being integrated into all the other features and products you have. So it's like, you know, cryptocurrency product. I could... It's kind of like, okay. Yeah. People would love a great cryptocurrency product built into this or joint accounts. So there's almost like a benefit of just like, okay. The people will want this now. Let's just make it work really well with everything else we got and not hurt. Like, you almost don't need to be the best at every product. Although, it sounds like you still try to be the best. [00:49:35] S0: But we must be the best. Yeah. 100%. [00:49:37] S1: But there's also, like... You know, like, if you don't have the best joint account, but all the other stuff is awesome, people are like, alright. It's fine. It just makes my life easier. But tell me what I might be missing because...
00:49:46 · Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:49:46] S0: So I think there are those kind of table stakes that we're building that anyone would expect from a bank. Like, for example, savings account. Right? It's just a basic thing that if a bank is not providing savings account, you wouldn't even consider it. But then we make sure that our rates are very competitive, if not the best. Then we make sure that there is no bad UX. Like, you know, some banks, they, for example, they don't allow you to withdraw instantly, and there are delays, or they don't pay interest on daily basis. We will never do that. We will allow you if you want to move money out, you will be able to do it. You won't lose any interest. And interest is being paid daily, and this is a fully flexible product. And then on top of it, what I would call maybe some delighters is we will allow you to open the savings account in many currencies. So we want to add, like, different currencies. So... Because now interest rates are going down, so people might find it valuable to open a savings account in... For example, I know. In Europe, like Swedish krona, interest rates are higher than Europe, but it could be even something like Brazilian real or with, what, 12% interest rate versus, like, two or 3% on euros. And then as a cherry on top, there is this all all that in an amazing UI, very smooth. You can set custom wallpapers. You can set goals. You can automate spare change towards your savings account and and all those features. So there is an underlying basic fundamental layer where you need to be just on par with competition. But then there are a lot of things on top that just make people love your product way more. And, obviously, there are a lot of synergies in between those things. So, yeah, thinking of crypto, you can just receive crypto on your wallet, and then you can just instantly convert it to to cash on your account, or just spend it with your card. How amazing can it be, right, to to just buy a coffee with with Ethereum?
00:52:09 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:52:09] S1: I love that. Okay. Let me take this opportunity to try to summarize what I've learned from you so far in terms of what you guys have figured out about creating incredible product leaders that go on to do wonderful things and basically one of the one of the top three most successful companies at this. So there's kind of these two buckets as I talk to you and the Palantir guy. There's kinda like the hiring piece, and then there's the... What you do to help incubate this kind of forge for incredible product leaders. So in the... What you do internally, kind of the four bullet points I've got here is give people a lot of ownership. They're essentially GMs of the product, the feature. There's a lot of focus on depth and complexity and getting really good at solving really gnarly problems. And then there's building... A focus on building wow products, amazing, lovable products that are very... That have a very high bar. And then there's kinda, like, a sub bullet point that I think is probably impactful here is just working closely with detail obsessed founders or product leaders like you and learning from you all and just, like, seeing the value and impact of being super detail oriented. On that bucket, is there anything else do you think is super core that I missed before we get to hiring?