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Chad West – How I grew Revolut to 20 Million customers.

August 2, 2024 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

In episode 190 of Fintech Chatter Dexter Cousins is joined by Chad West.

Dexter and Chad first met in 2018 when Chad was VP of Marketing for Revolut. Tune in as they talk about how Chad grew Revolut from 50K to 20 MILLION customers in 5 years

How Revolut Grew to 20 Million Customers

Chad and Dexter talk about the early days of Revolut. When Chad joined as their first marketing leader, he was employee no25. Revolut had amassed a fairly impressive 50,000 customers at this stage.

Chad shares some of the strategies and processes he implemented to take the company to 20 MILLION customers just 5 years later.

Dexter also talks to Chad about his career post Revolut. And Chad shares why he believes the world of digital assets has even more potential to fulfil the early promise of Fintech.

And as one of the most accomplished marketers on the planet, Chad shares his tips for founders and gives some career advice to marketeers concerned about the rapid shake up in the industry by AI.


About Chad West

Chad was an early employee and Director of Global Marketing & Communications at Revolut. He helped transform the company from a fintech app that no one had heard of, into one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the world.

Chad’s marketing philosophy is a little different. He doesn’t believe in blowing money on expensive Super Bowl ads, but instead by bringing customer’s as close to the business as possible, and scaling through advocacy.

From product marketing and community building, to referral campaigns and engagement, Chad has seen it all.

Chad began his career in Public Affairs supporting at the the time UK Prime Minister, David Cameron.

He then joined renowned Internet giant Rocket Internet, where he really cut his teeth in growth marketing, before joining Revolut as their first senior marketing hire in 2017.

Chad is now an advisor to startups across fintech, AI and digital assets.

You can connect with Chad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-west-3860a6121/

Links from this episode.

More Revolut on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where fintech leaders join me for a chat. I’m your host, Dexter Cousins, and today’s guest is Chad West from Argent. Argent has grown into one of the largest wallets on layer 2 blockchain, with over 2 million users, hundreds of millions in TVL and over $50 million raised in investment to date. Many of our Aussie listeners will be familiar with Chad from his days at Revolut. It’s there that I first met Chad and I was blown away by his talent, but what impressed me most is his personal journey. As an early Revolut employee, Chad helped grow the business to 10 million customers, and he’s here making his Fintech Chatter debut to share his insight.

Dexter Cousins
Chad, great to finally get you on Fintech Chatter. I’ve been hustling you for a couple of years now.

Chad West
I think it’s been about five years of “yeah, let’s do it next week”, and then something has come up.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome to have you here. I’m really excited for this one, because there’s a lot we’re going to cover that’s relevant. I’m sure everybody’s itching to hear about your Revolut experience, but it’s an interesting time for marketers — probably one of the disciplines that seems most under threat from AI and the promise of it. You’re hands down the pin-up for growth marketing whenever I talk to clients and they ask for examples. What you did at Revolut is incredible. We’ll hear more about that, but before we do — what have you been doing since Revolut?

Chad West
Good question. One thing that isn’t spoken about enough is that when you have the privilege of working for a company like Revolut, one of these rocket ship experiences that are few and far between, it’s really hard to think about what you do next. On one hand you want that same intensity and that same success you’ve had over the last five or six years, and you have to be a bit of a Houdini to guess what the next big thing is and which company will take off.

On the other side you’re often pressured to start your own thing, because a lot of people aren’t sure where to go next, or they’re fed up of working for someone. I found myself torn between the two. Very fortunately I had no shortage of companies seeing that I was leaving and saying let’s have a call — but I wasn’t really convinced by any of them. And on the other hand I really wanted to do my own thing, but without rushing it. I wanted to nail down the right idea and not become what I call a tourist in the tech industry, bouncing from buzz to buzz: fintech to AI to super-fast grocery delivery.

So I did a lot of advising and investing, which took up most of my time, across various companies and spaces. And then finally — blockchain was always an area I really wanted to go into. For me it was the next step, the next level of intensity in fintech. The reality is that while fintech has been amazing, it hasn’t really changed anything. I know that’s a bold thing to say, but the way banking operates is still the same. Most of these fintechs are just doing things faster, cheaper, slicker. The actual structures and systems remain the same.

Dexter Cousins
If I look at Revolut, it’s one of the few examples where I think genuinely they’ve changed the product for a customer. Whereas 90% of what I’ve seen, the innovation might be in the back end, making a bank operate more efficiently, but as a customer I’m still getting the same crappy products.

Chad West
100%. Revolut’s sweet spot was the strapline we came up with before I left: one app, all things money. It was taking that Asian super-app model and bringing that experience to the West. Nothing really changed — it was still working behind the scenes pretty much like most financial companies — but it was the user experience, bringing everything into one.

Then I found myself wanting to go into blockchain, which is a whole other level of complexity. The entire system is different. It aligned with my views of being permissionless, being open, and people having a sense of financial freedom. For me it was truly exciting technology, still such an unknown space and in its early stages. It seemed like the right kind of mental challenge.

Dexter Cousins
I want to talk about a bit earlier in your career, because it’s interesting to see the journey you’ve gone on. One thing that struck me was your first gig, which was work in government and politics. Do you want to tell us about that first role, and how it helped shape some of the strategies you’d go on to use later in your career?

Chad West
Like most people in politics, I had a chip on my shoulder and I was over-opinionated, so politics was the right place to go. When I was younger I was always really interested in politics and assumed that was the route I wanted to go down. I enjoyed having arguments and fighting matches with people at college and university. Then I quickly realised it probably wasn’t for me.

The bulk of my role was quite boring. A lot of press and media relations, a lot of public outreach, focus groups, listening to people’s concerns and feeding that into consultation channels for legislation. I very quickly realised I’m quite a creative person, someone who thinks outside the box, and politics is not a place where people typically like to think outside the box. Everything was a bit slow-paced, a bit stale, very predictable — the playbooks of the 1950s. It hit me one day that actually I love technology, and coupled with that, I’m pretty good at this whole marketing thing.

My first break into the marketing world and the tech world was at Rocket Internet. For anyone who doesn’t know it, it’s a hundred-billion-dollar incubator that spins out copycat companies and scales them all over Europe and Asia. I worked on a couple of companies there. One notable one was called Helpling, which was basically like TaskRabbit — you could hire cleaners, handymen, gardeners from the app. The Uber for household services. We took that across Europe: UK, Germany, France, Italy. Then we took it to Australia, and then to Singapore.

Quite an exciting first gig, to be thrown straight into a growth marketing role and straight into an international company, taking the business into markets that were very strange to me, that I’d never had any experience with. I was very fortunate that Rocket Internet had a very similar culture to Revolut — a very data-driven, KPI environment. You get pushed into the deep end with a lot of responsibility from day one. It set me up pretty well for going into Revolut, especially in those early days.

Dexter Cousins
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Revolut was what, 25 people when you joined?

Chad West
Somewhere in that mid-20s range, yeah.

Dexter Cousins
What was it like? Take your mind back — what got you excited about going to a business that was 20-odd people and hadn’t really proven itself? How many customers did they have at that point?

Chad West
The first thing I’ll say is the word customers. Fintech has an issue with saying users, when what they actually mean is downloads and bots. In terms of genuine customers — people who ordered a card, made a payment, and were using it daily, weekly or monthly — it was probably in the region of 50,000. Not a bad amount. But it was still a very mishmash consumer group. Most people weren’t using it very frequently. It was being used by a niche of air stewards and people working in the aviation industry. That was a good learning about what the product-market fit was and who the target user was at that early stage.

Dexter Cousins
That’s really fascinating, that that was the core group of users. You would think from the marketing that it was all millennials travelling all the time.

Chad West
It’s funny, because when I joined Revolut one of the first questions I was asked was: what is the strategy? Which was fair enough, because there was no one doing it. Revolut was mostly interns at that point, fresh grads getting their hands dirty and trying many things. I was the first dedicated person to come in and lead that function.

For me the strategy was clear from day one, and I remember it not going down very well, because a lot of people internally had this view that Revolut was the Amazon of banking and we should be going after the banking user, competing with the likes of Monzo, Starling and N26. I had to make the point that, firstly, they all have bank licences and we don’t. Secondly, they all have bank-like features — direct debits, standing orders, things you need in banking — and we don’t. So why are we going to fight for this very small niche audience where we cannot compete with them on product, and we do not have the assurance of telling people we’re a legitimate bank and your money’s protected?

So I made the call that whether we like it or not, until the product catches up, we are a travel company. We are going to say: travel abroad with no fees, transfer money abroad with no fees. Plain English, not sexy, because there’s a huge market to sweep up — particularly in Europe, with the issue of cross-borders and currencies, and being the biggest travellers in the world. There’s a big strategy behind it, but that’s how Revolut really did strive to take over those people in the early days. We were far more razor-focused on a clear target user, where we had a very minimal competitive landscape and a very good solution for their problems.

Dexter Cousins
It’s an example I use pretty much all the time when people ask what the best example of a growth business is. I’ll point at Revolut and Afterpay, because they both did two very similar things. Revolut said: if you’re a millennial and you go travelling every weekend and you’re getting stung for fees every time, use this card and you won’t get stung. Afterpay was similar — if you want to look like this on Saturday night and you don’t have a credit card, we can help. And to the merchants it was: if your sales are going like this on a Saturday and you want to see them do that, try this. The execution was critical, but it was the simplicity of the messaging and who it was targeted to. It was absolutely crystal clear. Whereas you’d see other buy now, pay laters at the time targeting the millennial market, and then shouting out, yay, we’ve won a new client — and it’s Bunnings. Which is where millennials go every weekend, because it’s a DIY shop. It’s like the B&Q of Australia. That doesn’t quite stack up. If you’re targeting millennials, that’s not something you want to be shouting about.

That’s one of the things that still stays with me about the Revolut journey — that simplicity in the early days of being so targeted.

Chad West
It’s so easy in the marketing world to get lost in needing to do a hundred things at once, competing with every single person out there. The best marketers, in my opinion, are the ones who take a breath, look at the market, look at the data, and think: what’s step one, and how will step one lead to step two? Too many go in with a messier strategic mindset, and that doesn’t serve them very well.

We knew our strengths, we knew our weaknesses, we knew who the right target user was, the right channels to acquire those people, the right positioning and messaging to resonate with them. Then we started to build from there.

So it wasn’t just about buzzy millennials in big cities who travel all the time. For me it was also thinking about the future — who are going to be the users that actually make you money? That’s typically an older demographic, the 35-plus market. And there are huge expat communities living in Spain, Dubai, Australia. We did a really good job of not just focusing on home turf, but thinking about all the Brits abroad who are sending money back home to pay for mortgages in the UK or their kids’ schools, or who are travelling frequently.

Dexter Cousins
All my family in the UK have got Revolut cards, but they didn’t have them until I had a Revolut card and said, you’ve got to check this out. It sounds so simple now, but five years ago my mum couldn’t send money — now she’ll send a text: here’s ten quid, kids are on school holidays, go buy them an ice cream. She couldn’t do that in the past. It’s those little things where you think, it kind of doesn’t matter, but it actually means a lot to my mum. And the amount of money I’ve saved on fees is literally in the thousands.

Chad West
I had a friend who saved thousands in fees. He lives abroad, he’s still got a place in London and a mortgage to pay, and he uses Revolut constantly. Then he complained to me about the price of his metal plan. I went through it with him and did the mental maths on roughly how much he’d saved in fees just that month, and it was about 10x the cost of what he was paying for the plan. Then he really saw the value.

It’s one thing I actually sent feedback to Revolut about recently. You really have to start sending a monthly summary that shows people in plain black and white how much you’ve saved them that month. It’s not good enough to make them figure it out for themselves, or to make high-level statements like “we save you money” — show them the value. When they see it in pounds and dollars and euros, they’re going to be far more incentivised to scream and shout about you, tell their friends and family, put a post out there. They’re still not doing it. It was a mistake of mine, I should have done it when I was at the helm, and they’re still not doing it.

Dexter Cousins
So, 50,000 customers when you joined, 10 million when you left. I want to talk about that journey to the first million, because that must have been one of those moments in life — like that movie The Social Network, when they get their millionth member and they’ve got the ticker going. That must have been unbelievable, to see that number hit.

Chad West
I’ll be entirely honest with you: it didn’t really have much of an impact on me or my emotions. Maybe that’s just because we are heartless robots and our emotions have been sucked out of us. But the reality is it was so ingrained at Revolut to be grounded — we’re still getting started, there wasn’t room to be complacent and say, great, we’ve made it, we’ve got 10 million users. Not all of those users were as active as we wanted them to be. Not all of them were making us any money. Not all of them were referring friends. I actually looked at that number and saw more problems than solutions.

It was definitely a moment where you have a drink that night and you all celebrate, but it’s very much a case of: tomorrow, forget about it, we’re moving on, there’s loads more to do.

I should say that was when I was leading the helm, when I was the one making the decisions — it was 10 million. I stayed at Revolut another year after that, where I sort of got to do what I wanted to do. Early retirement, shall we say. When I left, the company was 20 million users. That system we built — me and Val Shaw, my head of growth at the time, who’s incredible and you should speak to as well — we built a system that was automated and the cog was moving, and within just over a year there was nearly another 10 million users.

Dexter Cousins
I remember it, because I was actually helping the guys with a CEO role for Australia. At the time it was 4 million customers, and by the time we got Matt signed up — which was November, and this was April, I remember Easter, we were talking — by November it was 10 million customers. I was like, what is this? Is this a typo?

Chad West
It was stressful as well. It’s easy to sit there and talk about the highs and put out buzzwords and say 10 million, 20 million, but the reality behind the scenes is that it’s more stressful. On one hand you’re growing so rapidly that everyone’s watching you — the regulators are watching you, your partner banks, any partners you use, they’re all sat there thinking, God, can we handle this, do we still want to maintain this, do we need to keep a closer eye on them?

At the same time our other internal departments have to scale with that demand, whether it’s customer support, compliance, risk. And on the marketing side, any good marketer won’t get carried away with vanity metrics like user numbers. You’ve got to think about how they define a user — is it a real user, or is this just cheap acquisition they’ve been bringing in? Then you’ve got that whole other stress of, okay, now we need to think about activation, retention, revenue, and the journey those users go on.

So, definitely an amazing buzz and a great success, of course, but there’s so much that doesn’t get spoken about enough.

Dexter Cousins
I remember at the time there was the whole Revolut–Monzo thing, and there was a big love-in with Monzo and a big hate-in with Revolut. I couldn’t understand it, because everything I was seeing and hearing from Revolut was transparency and authenticity: this is who we are, we’re on a mission, you either like it or you don’t. Whereas with Monzo I felt it was trying to appease everybody, doing stuff to be cool, rather than the super focus Revolut had.

Chad West
You nail it. I obviously oversaw the communications team, so we had to deal with all the crisis and reputation stuff. There are many reasons. One, the UK media are probably among the worst in the world for building people up and tearing them down. It doesn’t matter whether it’s British companies or celebrities or whoever. Sadly that’s the toxicity that exists in our media industry.

Dexter Cousins
Did your very first job come in handy then, on the PR and comms side?

Chad West
Everyone at Revolut knows how hands-on I was on the PR and comms side, far more than I am today. It was needed, because every week there was a new fire to put out.

The other hand is that there aren’t many Revoluts in Europe, and especially in the UK. We don’t build big global tech companies the way the US does, and there are many reasons for it. Some will say regulation, some will say funding. For me one of the main reasons is that we just don’t work as hard as the US. We’re so overly obsessed with this idea of culture and being super nice.

Revolut made the point clear: we have a culture more akin to a football team, where the highest performers stay and the lowest ones move somewhere else, and the coach has to be tough and on top of you. Nik Storonsky created a culture where he wanted people to work hard but be highly rewarded, in terms of their position in the company, their remuneration, their shares. And he didn’t try to hide it. It was out there, plain to see, so you knew exactly whether it was for you or not.

I often meet a lot of these culture and HR type people trying to have these horrible playbooks implemented in every company everywhere — the Netflix playbook. It’s like, you’re not Netflix.

Dexter Cousins
The beauty of startups is that every company is different. I love the fact that the culture can be anything. There isn’t some prescribed set of rules for what your culture is. It’s organic — every person who comes in adds to and changes the dynamic. It’s almost like a living organism that feeds off things and evolves.

Chad West
100%. At the end of the day a lot of people can sit there and say, okay, that doesn’t align with me — and that’s absolutely fine. That’s good. It means it’s not the kind of environment for you. And then there are a lot of people out there who would completely attack it and say this is not the right way to run a company. Revolut is very profitable, the biggest success story in European tech. It’s prime evidence that yes, actually, that is a culture of success. You might not like it, and I’m not saying there aren’t other models that can work, but it doesn’t mean you get to shout it down and say it’s wrong just because it doesn’t fit your narrative.

Dexter Cousins
I read some stats today that I might put the infographic up for, but they’re pretty impressive. I think it’s 20 million customers now, profit of £454 million or £500 million I think has just been announced, £2.2 billion in revenue. Just amazing stats for a business that’s not even 10 yet.

Chad West
Exactly, just turned 10. Revolut did a great job of diversifying its revenue. A lot of fintechs very much have one or two avenues of revenue, and if there’s ever an impact such as lockdown or a recession, they’re suddenly in the red and struggling. Revolut was very clever in having probably seven or eight different avenues of monetisation. And like most digital banks, it’s also highly benefited from high interest rates over the last couple of years, which I’ve noticed is why a lot of these guys have had a bigger surge than expected.

Dexter Cousins
Sometimes you’ve just got to make it through, to get to the point where all of a sudden you look like a genius because some external factors have come in and helped.

Chad West
Take the glory, exactly.

Dexter Cousins
I remember when Covid did happen and thinking, all right, well that’s Revolut gone — travel. And if anything the business actually grew, because what people started to do was invest. So you’ve got the investment and crypto side of the business making up for the loss in use of the travel card.

Chad West
Don’t get me wrong, Revolut did struggle big time during lockdown, because everything went down. Yes, people were investing and doing crypto and stock trading, but it still wasn’t making up for the loss of card transactions. What Revolut did that was clever was raise a really good war chest. There was money on the table, the market was good, the terms were fair, and Revolut did a big round that basically secured its future for the next few years.

Thank God they did, because they still would have been able, in my mind, to raise capital during that time, but it would have been a far worse deal on the table. I think a few other banks — I’m not saying they predicted Covid by any means, maybe it was just right time, right place — had that cash injection to keep them going.

Dexter Cousins
What was the point where you realised your time was done there?

Chad West
I hate this question, because I feel like I give a different answer every time. One thing I would say is that it was the hardest decision I’ve probably made in my life, to leave Revolut. I’d been there very early doors, I’d been there for over five years. Everyone knew me out of Revolut because I was so invested in this company. I worked 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week. I didn’t take holidays. The first thing I did when I woke up at 4 o’clock in the morning was go straight to Google, straight into my emails. That was not something I needed to do — that’s just how emotionally invested and attached I was to this company.

There came a point where I had to decide what kind of person I am at this stage in my career. Am I someone who’s going to reflect the new people coming in, where I’m going to be a bit of a bureaucrat, a bit of a face, moving slow? Or have I still got it in me, in my younger years, to go and do another one, move fast and break things and innovate?

The role became a little bit too big for me at one point. The expectations of the company were so much higher, the budgets were so much higher, there was regulation and red tape everywhere, and it just wasn’t the right environment for me any more. I knew that was the case. I’d done my bit, because the people you need in year one to four are very rarely the people you need in four to eight. So I was humble enough to think, do you know what, someone else does need to take this stick now and take it forward.

I danced around the company working on special projects for a year, working on expansion into new markets, working on some big brand and marketing deals with celebrities. But I realised it was a bank now. It was a big bank with five or six thousand employees, and that wasn’t the environment I wanted to be in any more. I was spending more time in meetings with guys who were coming from big banks. I was used to being in rooms with hyper-intelligent technical people coming up with crazy solutions to fix things, and suddenly that whole mindset changed.

This is no criticism of them, because they’re needed — I understand that a company gets to that size and it needs those kinds of people to keep regulators happy. But it was time for me to go. There wasn’t really much more I could offer the company at that stage, and the fire was no longer in my belly like it used to be. I’m someone who, if I don’t have that fire in my belly and I don’t wake up every day with a real sense of purpose, I just become a pretty shitty person where I’m not happy and not fulfilled.

Dexter Cousins
I talked in the intro about being really impressed by your talent, but as I got to know you, the thing I was even more impressed by was your work ethic, your values and the background you came from. I think it’s one of the reasons we’re connected, because we had similar upbringings and challenges to face in our earlier lives. Do you mind talking a little about your background, and how that gave you the principles and discipline to do what you did at Revolut — that real focus on making things happen?

Chad West
In a nutshell, I grew up in the foster care system. Growing up I was bouncing through homes, fighting my way through life. By the time I got to 15 or 16 I went into emergency homeless accommodation — you’ll know the old bedsits the council used to give you. I was completely estranged from family, spent my whole life never being in one place. And then suddenly at 15, 16, still at school studying my GCSEs, still in the Air Cadets wearing my little beret, I’m now cooking and cleaning for myself and topping up electric meters. It was pretty surreal.

It wasn’t a pleasant life by any means, but it sounds crazy to say that I wouldn’t change it for the world, because it gave me everything I have. All the weaknesses I have today I would say I’ve developed since then, now that life’s become more comfortable. All my strengths are from before then. Nothing gets me down. Maybe that is a bad thing sometimes — people say to me, oh, you should talk about this and that — but I’m one of those people where it is what it is. Literally everything around me can come crumbling down and it won’t buckle me. I won’t get emotional. I’ll just sit there and think, I can rebuild.

That proved so worthy in my career, because in your career you’re always going to have ups and downs, and some people really get caught up in the downs and it affects them. For me it was just, it is what it is.

On the other hand, I knew I had to work harder and smarter than everyone around me, because the reality is the tech industry, and maybe even the banking industry, generally speaking consists of very privileged people. And good for them, by the way — no shade on those people. But they’ve had great families who put them through great schools, they’ve gone to great universities, and life’s been easier for them. They’ve also made it. But they get complacent and comfortable, and they don’t deal with the downs the same as me.

It kept me humble, which is: I need this more than anyone else. When I’m living in London paycheque to paycheque, and if I lose a job and can’t afford rent next month I’m all the way back to square one — whereas a lot of people have savings to fall back on, parents to fall back on. So it kept me very humble at every stage of my career. No matter how much money I’ve got in the bank account or what my job title is, I’m not better than anyone else. I’m still fighting for survival, the odds are still against me. That’s kept me constantly motivated and driven, which is easy to lose when life gets more comfortable.

Dexter Cousins
I was having a similar conversation with my wife the other day about how I’ve got this great life and I love it, but there’s always this thing deep inside where you’re like, it could all be gone tomorrow and I’ve just got to keep on it. I really get what you’re talking about there.

Funny that you mention the work ethic. I had an article out on LinkedIn last week about a previous guest, Richard Joffe, a two-times exited founder, really successful, who’s now launched an insurtech in Australia. He got a bit hammered by some elements of the press because he was equating a startup to a war — hey look, you’ve got to be honest with your people and let them select themselves out, say this is what you’re getting into. Which is absolutely the right approach.

What do you think, particularly when you’re looking at marketing? We’re at a point where AI is having an impact. If I look at the last 12 months, the most redundancies in my network are marketers or product marketers. If I look at the roles we’ve had, we’ve had no growth marketing opportunities and very few in product. What I’m hearing from clients is, our expectations have changed — we’re not going to pay 300 grand for a CMO who’s just going to farm the work out to agencies and play arbitrage with suppliers and service providers. What do you see as the way for marketers to make themselves relevant in this new era we’re starting to enter?

Chad West
There’s quite a lot to unpick there, and it’s a really good question that a lot of founders are queuing up to get answers for.

One mistake is that a lot of founders and companies don’t understand the difference between marketing and growth. They think it’s all the same, and that they just need someone to do growth. The reality is a marketer is someone at the top of the funnel — working on brand building, on customer acquisition, bringing people into your product. When you hire a growth team, they’re focused on the middle and the bottom of the funnel: activation, retention and revenue. The way to think of it is that marketing is the delivery company bringing all the food into the restaurant, and the growth team are the ones prepping the food, cooking it and getting it out. A lot of founders conflate those two things. There’s also an issue where a lot of marketers put growth in their title when in reality they’re very much marketers, and companies don’t have enough due diligence or good process in their hiring to root that out.

The second thing is that a lot of founders and companies don’t know what they need. They’re sat there saying, we need to grow, we’ve raised some money, let’s hire a head of marketing or a head of growth. What I would always advise is that if you haven’t hired your first big CMO or head of marketing yet, use someone smart internally — maybe from an ops or data background — to A/B test different marketing channels, to get a feel for what’s working and what’s not. What does the data say is moving the cogs? What is your target user? What are you actually trying to achieve? When you have a sense of what positioning and messaging is right, who the right user is, and what channels are bearing fruit, then you’re in a position to think, okay, now we need a head of marketing who can scale this and build a great team.

The best way to solve this, if you’re a founder or someone in the C-suite responsible for starting a new function or changing the growth mindset, is to find someone who knows what they’re talking about, who’s been there and done it at different stages of a company’s journey, and just pick their brain. You’d be amazed how many of them will be happy to have a chat, or they’ll know someone. I get asked all the time from VCs. I’ve got friends at Sequoia and Index and other funds who are always like, Chad, can you speak to this guy for 10 minutes and get him on the right track. I always make time for it.

The other one is that they don’t do enough testing to know if this person is right. What’s crazy to me is I meet a lot of founders who will speak to a candidate for about 45 minutes and then make a call and say, yeah, I’m going to outsource the entire growth of this company to this one person I spent 45 minutes talking to.

Dexter Cousins
What’s really interesting — I remember reading this about 12 years ago — a guy called Laszlo Bock, the first HR director for Google, wrote a book about the Google way, about coming in and implementing processes. Something he said really struck a chord with me and helped me develop the recruitment process I’ve got today: the way competency-based interviews are set up, you’re basically hiring the best storyteller. Because the skills required to do well in the job usually aren’t the ones required to do well in an interview. And if you think about marketing — what are they there to do? Tell a story. So you literally are hiring the best storyteller for the job.

Chad West
You’ve got to be an amazing storyteller. You’ve got to be creative, you’ve got to understand human psychology and how humans think and what they do. Sadly we are moving into a very dangerous place in the tech industry where there’s an overabundance of growth mindset over marketing mindset. What happens is you have these droids come into the company — Star Wars droids who only know how to follow a piece of data and put an ad out — and we wonder why no one’s really growing, no one’s really building a lovable brand, users aren’t sticking around, and companies are fighting for survival every year because they’re not doing anything sustainable or meaningful. What they’re basically doing is saying, okay, we have a budget, the data says put money here, here and here, let’s change some things and try to squeeze this channel 5%.

I’m not saying growth doesn’t have a place — it’s very important, particularly post Series A, maybe B. But what we forget is that the best person you will ever have in the company, who will not only reflect your brand and your marketing function but have a big impact on your customer service, your communications and your product, is a storyteller. A very creative storyteller. What I find is there’s an ever-growing increase of very technical, analytical, least creative people in the world going into these heads of growth positions, where they’re suddenly in charge of storytelling and selling. It’s concerning. I hope we realise you need both, equally. They’re both equally important and one shouldn’t be trampling on the other. They’ve got very different objectives.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome advice there, Chad. We’re coming to a close, but before we do — you’ve been in fintech since 2016, and I’ve been around quite a while as well. The halcyon days, 2016 to 2020, were super exciting, innovative. You really felt like you were doing something special. I’ve got to say it feels like it’s gone a bit stagnant the last year or two. You’re in a slightly different space now with digital assets and the digital wallet space. What are you seeing, and what are you clinging to that’s got you excited and gets you out of bed in the morning?

Chad West
There’s no denying that in the crypto industry there have been a lot of dodgy characters and a lot of negative things, and sadly that has truly outshone all of the amazing things that happen within this ecosystem. As you might expect, the press play a very big role in that.

I joined Argent because they’re one of the few companies doing it right. It’s not about making money and getting quick bucks and launching tokens. They’ve tried to build meaningful products that actually solve real problems, and they’re achieving it. One thing we spoke a lot about in fintech was this idea of, we’ll do good for the world, we will bank the unbanked, we will help democratise finance. It’s like, no — you’re building a neobank and you’re going to make some money, and you’re also not democratising it, because you’re centralised in a massive regulated industry. What are you talking about?

Whereas DeFi in particular — if I look at Argent, we’ve had huge growth in developing parts of the world, or parts of the world where the economy is not doing so well. A good example is our growth in Argentina. What we are is a self-custody wallet, which means we never have access to your assets as a company, and nor can any regulator, central bank or government. So you truly have economic freedom.

On top of that, the wider issue is that people succumb to issues locally such as high inflation or corruption. Corruption can mean they tweet the wrong thing, or attend a political rally, and have all their assets frozen. They may be experiencing inflation upwards of 30%, so they’re never going to break free financially.

Then we came along, where they can store their assets in stablecoins like USDC or DAI — very secure, trusted stablecoins pegged to the dollar. They can hold it there knowing no one’s going to take it away, and they escape inflation that way, because it’s pegged to the US dollar rather than the peso or the local currency. On top of that they’re able to off-ramp it if they want to. If they need a card where they can spend daily at the shops and grocery stores, their crypto works out way better for them than using their local bank card or local currency.

Every day I see messages from South America, from parts of Asia, where people say: thanks to you guys I still have a roof over my head, I’m still able to pay for my kids to go to school, I’m still able to take vacations. Because we’ve genuinely solved the problem.

And like Revolut, design-wise it’s a beautiful wallet. You can fund it, you can unfund it, it will come with a card soon, and you can start making payments when you want to — not just invest and hold and earn and stake it, but make payments as well. What we’ve been trying to do is build the Revolut of DeFi. This one app. Because DeFi and crypto is a very complicated industry — trying to understand where everything is and how it works — so we’ve brought it all into one and simplified it. We’re probably the most secure wallet in the world. We have fraud monitoring, we have 2FA, we’re fully self-custodial. So we have all the things that put people’s alarms away in terms of, oh, could this be another FTX? It’s not possible.

I’m ranting, but for me, we’re solving real problems for real people. We’re using the best of blockchain technology, not the gimmicky memes and crap you see online. And I’m proud to say our users are real people, ordinary people. They’re not bots or people with JPEG images everywhere. It’s a sustainable, great company, and there’s no slowing down. While the industry is maybe in a long winter, it’s not booming — but it will bounce back, and fortunately we’re at the helm of the innovation in the space.

Dexter Cousins
It’s fantastic to hear, and I share your frustration. I’ve got a lot of friends and network in the digital asset space, and the biggest frustration for me was having been a recruiter in the GFC with investment banks as my clients — this was meant to be the antidote to what I saw back then, and unfortunately we’re seeing the same behaviours again and again. To see that it’s actually being used in the right way, with the right intent, to truly help people, is awesome to hear.

Chad West
Agreed. One thing you did say as well — I’ve very much fallen out of love with fintech. I don’t see anything that interests me any more. Like I said, I think we were very lucky, we were in the heyday, we experienced the highs, we got the dopamine hit. Now it’s just sustaining the companies that made it, or you’re seeing little spin-offs here and there.

Dexter Cousins
I think it’s that part of the cycle. It’s very similar to where Australia was in 2017, where we were just trying to get the industry off the ground, and a lot of it was being subservient to the banks and building with their infrastructure and pipes and plumbing. Then Afterpay and Zip came along and changed everything, and then you guys came to us and that changed everything again. We’re just at that part of the cycle. As a small country, we’ve got to go where the money is — and the money is helping keep bank executives out of jail with regulatory tech. That’s the reality.

It’s been fantastic to have you on. Before we wrap up — where do you go podcast-wise for stuff on marketing and tech? What are your favourite podcasts?

Chad West
I’d be honest and say I’m yet to find a good marketing or growth podcast. Controversial. I’ve listened to many.

Dexter Cousins
So you need to start your own podcast.

Chad West
Definitely. It’s like, the world does not need another podcast right now.

Dexter Cousins
If you’re doing it, it definitely does.

Chad West
People keep saying that and I keep finding a way not to do it, but I think you might be right. The one I am enjoying, if I were to give one besides yours of course, is — it sounds cliché — the 20VC podcast. Some of it’s not for me, but they do have a growth series at the minute where they speak to different growth and marketing execs across the tech industry, and you’ll get some really amazing insights. They’re now moving into product as well. So if you want to dive deeper in that area from reliable people, definitely give that series a shot.

Dexter Cousins
We get amazing talent listening to the show in over 40 countries. If anybody’s interested in Argent and careers at Argent, where’s the best place for them to go?

Chad West
We are still hiring. The best place to go is our careers page, funnily enough. Or you can go on LinkedIn. Equally, never be afraid to reach out to people like myself, or our CEO, on LinkedIn. I think we’ve got a bunch of engineering roles out at the minute, we’ve got one or two marketing roles, and an ops role.

Dexter Cousins
And where can people download the digital wallet?

Chad West
You’ve got options. We’re available on mobile and extension. Either go to the likes of the Chrome store and you can have the browser extension wallet, which some people prefer, or just go on the App Store or Android and download the app there.

Dexter Cousins
It’s been awesome to catch up with you again. I’ve really loved this chat, and thanks for all your insights. As always, folks, you can catch me on LinkedIn. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support. And if you’re new to the show, please follow us and share on your socials — it really helps me get great guests like Chad onto the show. Until the next episode, keep well.

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