#HowTheyDidIt: Revolut – build the best product

Revolut was founded in 2015 in London as a free foreign exchange card. In just 3 years, the company has become one of the few UK fintechs to earn a unicorn status, with valuation of $1.7b. It has acquired more than 2m customers and has processed more than £15b-worth of transactions.

With Series C funding round now completed, Revolut has expanded its services offering to include cryptocurrency trading, property investment and insurance, and is now looking to enter new foreign markets and jurisdictions.

Customer is the KING

In comparison to other fintech startups, Revolut are aiming to be very transparent and open about their strategic moves and decisions. So, they are sharing a lot of company insights on their blog. This is a great marketing tactic, not only for boosting content and SEO, but also for increasing the brand’s trustworthiness and customer loyalty.

In one of their posts, Revolut are describing in much detail how they managed to get 16,000 business accounts in just 3 months with £0 marketing budget. And essentially, the secret to this enormous success is their unique product offering and customer-centric marketing approach.

According to Revolut, you don’t need big marketing budgets, but ‘a kick-ass app that has virality written all over it’. So, how did they do it?

Build the best product and solve a real user problem

For a start, Revolut organised a number of focus groups with small and medium businesses from across the UK and Europe (their targeted consumer segments) and identified 5 key flawed business banking areas, where they could potentially make a difference. One of the biggest issues facing SMEs was the inefficiency and slowness of the existing banking platforms in the market. So, that’s when they realised that the best way to make their product offering extremely attractive and marketable was to focus on building a state-of-the-art platform from the ground up with design, functionality and speed at its core.

Revolut’s main principle is that if they build products which are solving real customers’ problems while saving them time and money, signing them up to their offering would be simple.

Make the product attractive and sharable, and create unique buying experience

Revolut created unique buying experience for their customers by providing very distinctive and innovative product packaging. With its blue and pinkish colour and original sliding pack, their flagship card was designed to make a statement and get people sharing. Here is one of the first unpackaging videos by a customer on Twitter.

Following the success of their initial card, Revolut have taken the same approach to marketing their subsequent products - Revolut Premium Card and the most recent Revolut Metal Card. The Metal card, as you can probably imagine, is made by steel and weighs 3 times as much as a standard plastic card, creating exclusivity and targeting their premium client base. But the real appeal of Revolut’s new offering is again based on the unique functionality of the product which provides cashback in flat and crypto currencies....

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To read the whole story, please download our ebook "How they did it: Real-world growth marketing strategies from 15 leading fintech start-ups".

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