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The no-BS podcast to scaling startups and growing revenue and businesses.
Speaker 1 (00:00.056)
How do you identify what's considered a good product?
start.
If you're bold enough to ask for money when there is nothing to sell, that's perfect.
From praising me to shaming me in two seconds. You're able to increase the company's revenue without gaining any new customers.
Everybody lies.
Speaker 2 (00:18.742)
Our bank lost the license, which is the worst thing that can happen. Before, don't know, loans were a thing. What was a thing?
Probably need new friends.
Speaker 1 (00:28.91)
Ma, you should know this your way. I mean, they're going to be assholes if they say this is shit, nobody needs this.
Get her.
Speaker 2 (00:35.384)
I'm not retaining a dead body of customers. I'm retaining very active, healthy customers.
I don't
Speaker 1 (00:52.012)
Welcome to the Growth Hour, the No BS podcast about growing startups and scaling businesses. I'm Blanka. And I'm Alex. And on today's episode, we are going to be talking about product, product role in growth, and a little bit about customer retention and customer loyalty programs. And on today's episode, we have a guest who went from being a teacher to being one of the best product experts in FinTech.
Ksenia Strelnikova, welcome!
Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
really excited to have you here. really today, we want to talk a little bit about your journey, but really want to focus and be as helpful as possible for other people who are maybe in the product area, maybe just getting started, but mainly for founders who are maybe certain that their product is already perfect, that their growth strategies are struggling and they're trying to understand that connection.
That's kind of the focus of why I really wanted to have you here with us today. So I wanna start with actually asking you, before we get into your background, I wanna ask you, why do you do what you do?
Speaker 2 (02:13.132)
You mean product in fintech. So to me,
You have to be fintech. Why in general? What attracted you to product? What do love about it?
It's actually a possibility to make the world better. They're doing really good products. To to use them and see like, wow, this actually made my life easier or like fintech specifically, I always wanted to be in startups, but I don't think I'm brave enough yet. But what I do helps thousands of thousands of thousands of businesses, especially smaller to medium businesses.
And then be neighborly
Speaker 2 (02:53.152)
do their jobs easier. And I'm like, okay, I'm not a founder yet, but I can do something meaningful for those people.
And how did you get here? Because obviously you now know each other for now for quite a bit. I found it really fascinating that you started as a teacher, which, you know, it is a profession that's supposed to like have this world impact. Can you talk a little bit kind of how do you make the decision? How did you decide to go into product and where did you start your career in product?
Okay, so I love teaching. I actually have two diplomas as a teacher, but when I started the salaries were so low and we're being honest here that it was impossible for me to actually survive. And then I went to the bank and then maybe two years in banking we decided to do the first banking app and back then...
So.
Speaker 1 (03:51.918)
And that was in Riefeisen.
So that's like a Russian bank. And back then nobody knew like the terms of like product managers or like quality assurance or like we just gathered in a room and started doing something and we thought it was not work. Like we had to work on our like normal eight-hour day and then we were like gathered together and like do the app because we thought it was like a hobby project.
Speaker 1 (04:20.735)
That was 2011 or so.
Yeah, like something like that. I think we were like the first bank in Russia to actually have the app.
We had no idea what we were doing. There's this smartphone and then somehow the app should be inside the smartphone, but we had no idea.
Did you want to have any developer experience or be able to build the app? Or were you more like, what was your actual role when it came to product development?
Well, I did the testing and I did the requirements. But basically, know, everybody did everything. Like if we needed to do something like to draw something, I'm still not good at drawing. Like I think I was born without this beautiful design, you know, gene in my head. I can take a piece of like paper and a pencil and draw something. So that was like the first product that I was actually, you know, a part of developing. But then
Speaker 2 (05:16.416)
And fast forward a few years and I was an account manager for bigger corporations like Bayer and Stada, who are major pharmaceutical companies. They would always complain how bad the product was. And I would be the person, a representative of their voices inside the company. And at some point it struck me, wow, but what if we did the product right in the first place?
Yes, then you don't have to complain about it.
I was like, how do you this?
Well, how do you do it? Because like, you know, again, I'm from the Urals, which is like the heart of Russia. So like not a lot of technologies was, you know, were there at that time. I found like the very first product management course. It was done by Misha Karpov, if somebody watching knows him. And I took the course and I felt like I knew everything.
And I
Speaker 1 (06:15.52)
Now you know everything, you can do everything.
Yes, it's so funny looking back at that. And so that's how I learned what product managers actually were supposed to do, how you actually were supposed to do the product.
And...
Speaker 1 (06:30.208)
And how is that? What you say is sort of the essence. What's the role of product manager besides like, know, a lot of times a lot of startups still don't have product managers. They have, you know, project managers, they have development, you know, leads and whatnot. What do you think is the role of a product manager?
I think it's someone who ties it all together. Like, a founder has a vision, then the investors have the vision, then your customers have a vision, and then your development team knows the resources. And your task is actually to go and talk to everybody involved, bring it into a cohesive description or picture, and then make it happen.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:17.518)
So it's like, it's an easy role in the sense that you don't need to code, you don't need to like do a lot of stuff. But I sometimes feel like it's the most challenging role because like you have to be able to communicate with the founders, the investors, the development team, the customers, and with other product managers who are doing something else on the same product and have like a cohesive vision.
Basically, you're kind of trying to figure out where do we need to get to? And how do we get there? How do we make sure that we actually build the product? Typically, in my experience, always been a product marketing team, like somehow mashed into that. Well, product marketing team promotes the product, but in terms of like, I think that in a lot of ways, but now we're getting into technical stuff, but I do, I like that description because...
I think that a lot of startups really miss this kind of role sometimes. Can you talk a little bit about sort of that sort of early stage? like at this first bank that you worked for, were, know, so you realized that product is important, you realized it's important to build this, you know, well from scratch.
How did you go about like what are some of the stages where you understand how to set it up for success? So that the company actually can grow Like how do you set it up to a point where the product is good enough that you can deliver on the business goals?
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (08:55.63)
Well, the number one thing is to be very good at analyzing what the customers want, what the market wants, if there's actually potential to go into that market and sell the product. But also it's like, I feel like the major part of success is having the founders or like the C level people. How do I say this? Yes, but also that they're realistic.
Like.
button.
Speaker 2 (09:25.26)
that they don't expect you to deliver in two weeks or they're open to hearing what you have to say because oftentimes, and I'm sure we've all been there, you're so in love with the idea that you have that you're like, I know everybody will buy it. And then you talk to hundred people and this has happened to me, you talk to a hundred people and nobody has this problem. And how you know this? Because they didn't try to solve it.
Like if they have a problem, they will always try and find a solution, you know, how they can solve it. Like if your shoelace is untied and like, you know, running a marathon, you will find a way to tie the shoe like no matter what. But then if you are not, you know, bothered by it, then you don't have a problem.
And you're
Speaker 1 (10:13.974)
The interesting thing is a lot of founders, think, are even the advice that's given is to just go with that minimal viable product, like to just go out with some, what do we call it, instances of life, like some type of indication there's life when it comes to that product in the market. But you're advocating to having a product that's done well from the start. So my question is, how do you identify what's considered a good product from the start?
start.
shouldn't be a product per se, but it should be something that... Yeah, like for example, we did a lot of things even in banking. Before we deliver something, like we have this notion of a fake door. So you have the app and you change this one screen, you add a button like, get this product. And then when a customer clicks this button, nothing happens. But we count the amount of clicks. Like if we get a hundred or so, like for example.
vision or ideas.
Speaker 3 (11:05.196)
And then.
Speaker 2 (11:08.78)
I don't know. So we track the funnel, like how many people saw the button, then how many clicked. If we see the traction, that's good enough. that's like still, we already have an existing product like the app and we just, you know, added the button. But you can do like a website that has done well and like, you know, make a pre-order or like do something, but you need to see like that there is traction basically. And also I think like 10 years.
traction you mean there are people who are clicking, people who are buying, how do you define traction in this sense?
Well, it depends if you have something to sell or like if you're bold enough to ask for money when there is nothing to sell, that's perfect. if you're not, if you don't have the legislation that forbids you to sell something, but necessarily like they should have the interest. mean, by the, the customer should have the interest and they should express it vividly, like by doing something.
you know, if
Speaker 3 (11:55.48)
But and.
Speaker 3 (12:01.642)
That is not right.
Speaker 2 (12:15.022)
Clicking normally is not enough. We always have a sign up form, for example, like leave your name, last name, your phone number, your company's details. They have to be invested enough to do that.
They also need to give you something to take some effort from them. It makes sense. Can you maybe talk about like in that process of like scaling something or growing something early on, maybe you can give us an example of like the most impossible situation where it was something that was very challenging in terms of figuring out a product or a growth problem for you.
Maybe what was something that you felt like, it's an impossible task, but you actually were able to do it when it comes to product and growth.
Hmm. like right now I work in fintech in Russia. And so we have a lot of restrictions.
and
Speaker 3 (13:13.56)
on banking and like.
for my bank especially.
So we are not allowed to do the loans, are not allowed to do the deposits, we are not allowed to do a lot of things like international payments. And this is the core of the product that we have because if you don't have the loans or like the credit cards, it's very challenging.
To make money.
I think the thing here is you can either sit and be sad and miserable, feel pity for yourself and give up, or you can come up with new ideas and new solutions. For us, was like, okay, we cannot do the loans, but we can do the guarantees, or we cannot do the deposits, but we can do overnight, which will provide the same amount of percentage for...
Speaker 2 (14:11.18)
you know, the customer who is doing that. Or like, okay, we cannot do the international payments, but we can still send rubles abroad and it will cover for a certain amount of our customers. And then, okay, we cannot do the international payments, but we can like find some company who can do it for us. And then we are not involved, but you know, they can help.
I can't.
Speaker 1 (14:34.004)
That's actually, I was going to talk about it a bit later, but if we're in this topic already, what's the mindset that you need to have when it comes to trying to build something that's in highly regulated area, something where you have a lot of restrictions? I mean, in this case, you're in a situation where literally there are so many sanctions on the file, the Rye-Fizen is trying to avoid.
mean, kudos for being able to do this for three years now. And sort of going on this fine line between being able to do business in Russia, yet following all the guidelines that Europe and US kind of placed on you. Is it more interesting or more frustrating for a product person?
Or what's the mindset you have in this? Because you said like, you can be sad and sit there, but what motivates you? What drives you? Is it just because you have to do it or like, can you talk a little bit more about this? Because I think not everyone is maybe in situations like this specifically, but there are areas that are highly regulated that you need to go into and you're not able like to do so many different things. How do you go about it?
Like from a mindset perspective.
First of all, I think that in every industry there are restrictions. And if you're an early stage startup or a first time founder, you tend to see a lot of restrictions like, I don't have the money, I don't have the team, I don't have the knowledge. So we're all in this together, it's just that the forms are kind of different.
Speaker 2 (16:24.396)
I think what helps me is I understand that no matter what happens, this day will pass anyhow.
like my life will pass in general.
And I can either try to do something and I think you have to be very like aware that failing is okay. And people around you, should, like I try to surround myself with the people who always tell me that it's okay to fail. Because like I'm telling you about the wonderful successes that we've had. Like we had a bunch of products that
But.
Speaker 2 (17:06.485)
Like we did for six months and then we got 300 signups out of like dozens of dozens of thousands of customers who have and so it was like a failure basically.
and
Like as a manager or as a founder, you have to be very supportive of your team because they struggle. Like everybody takes the blame and they feel like they didn't deliver. And well, you feel like you didn't deliver, but you have to be very mindful of the people who work with you and be like, hey guys, it's okay. We failed, but we learned. Let's discuss what we learned and then move forward and do something else.
I'm gonna ask as a product leader, I'm curious to know how would you go about in terms of prioritizing what product, so whether you're in fintech, whether you're advising another startup, how would you help them in terms of determining what products or features should be going out? Because going back to the initial idea of you wanna have as perfect as a product as possible, but then their personality or what they're taught is essentially the MVP, how do you kind of mend that to make sure that they're
putting the right products and the right features down? How do you test for those, I call them signs of life, I guess, like how do you know that they're working towards the right product development?
Speaker 2 (18:25.004)
You have to know your customer really, really well.
That was the answer I was hoping you were gonna give.
Speaker 2 (18:32.734)
Seriously, for every company I've worked for, I talk to customers every single day.
and
This is another prompt, talk to your customers every day. This is what we're talking about every podcast. It's super important and people still don't do it. So thank you for saying this. And if you don't mind, I would like for you to finish, but also to add in how you can actually get to your customers. What are ways in which you've seen in the, like if you're a founder, how can you actually speak to your customers in an effective way?
Well, the number one thing... So there's this book. If you don't get anything else...
Speaker 3 (19:07.438)
my dog but you can get the book.
It's like the mom test, is like, yeah. So, and it explains that, for example, you never ask questions about the future, like, will you buy the product? Or like, if there is such a thing on the market, will you? Because they will always say yes, because they want to look good in your eyes. But you always ask questions about the past, like, how did you try, did you try to solve the problem?
If you can explain it to your mom.
Speaker 1 (19:27.447)
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:38.914)
How did you try to solve the problem? And then it's really good if you ask the same questions but like formulated differently because a one-time answer is like can be politically or like socially, you know, correct or acceptable. Remember in Dr. House, I don't know if it was popular. lie. Yeah, everybody lies.
and
Speaker 3 (20:00.49)
And so you just have
I really want to talk about this a little bit because I have so many founders as well who are early stage who obviously they're in love with their product and they think that they're solving everyone's problem and they're like I have so many friends or I have so many people who said they love it that it's great I showed them and they think it's perfect. I'm like well if you go to any of your friends like I mean they're gonna be assholes if they say this is shit nobody needs this. I mean you know like
Probably you need new friends. But in this case, I totally agree that you need to find ways where people are not going to tell you what they think you want to hear. Because people really want to. People people pleasers oftentimes. They just want to give you the right answer. They want to hear from your encouragement that they guessed right. And I think that that's the issue for product people is that...
Sometimes how do you talk about it without mentioning the product, without telling you what it does, but trying to understand whether or not they would purchase a product like this, you know? So how would you go about reducing that bias in a way? Like what are some of the ways that you think that you can get the most honest or constructive advice, feedback?
Well, first of all, you never say, you never describe your product. So you come to the interview and you're like, I'm going to ask you a series of questions. You have no idea what I'm doing. So please, you know, so that they don't know what you're expecting to hear. That's the number one thing. Number two, like I said, never ask them about the future. And number three, if you're talking to your friends or family or like somebody who's close to you, ask for the money.
Speaker 3 (21:38.222)
Speaker 1 (21:48.13)
Yes.
Like, because it's nice to be able to smile and like... Yeah, not would you. No. Will you? Will you, like right now. me your money now. Yes, yes, like especially when the person is all like positive and like smiling like, you have such a wonderful idea. Would you invest a thousand dollars like right now? And then look at the face. Yeah. Even if they invest, look at their face. Like, you know, that micro facial expression.
Like would you invest in that space?
Speaker 1 (22:18.062)
Interesting, that's a good answer. I want to shift gears here a little bit as well. I noted most of your experience has been in sort of global companies, somewhere in like regional, in Russia and stuff, but did you have ever experience before the company really went global, so like this global expansion part of it and how do you go about...
Again, from a product perspective, how do you achieve growth? And yet you're building sort of a new product completely, right? Because if it's going globally, it's a new offering, right? So maybe you can end if you have any examples of that case in your experience and maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
So we did that in Panda Dog.
For those who don't know, PandaDoc is like a document signing out of the US.
Yes.
Speaker 2 (23:18.826)
Yes. So when I came, they were, they had the product offering in the US, a little bit of customers like in Australia and the UK because it's like English speaking markets. But then they decided that they really wanted to go to Europe and the product was very well established in America. And then we decided like, okay, so we'll be crazy successful in Europe as well, like really fast.
in like two weeks. And then. Yes, because you know, like, when you know what to do on a certain market.
next time.
Speaker 1 (23:59.138)
You assume that it's the same everywhere. fair, when they think about it, what is really stopping them? It's not like they're offering something, not like they're opening up a new bank.
Yeah, and then we started to analyze the market and we realized that okay, the laws are different like GDPR, you know
Oops.
I was like...
And then it's not just, you know, making some tweaks on your website to like be compliant, but then you need to have servers in the EU and then you need to have all the customer data in the EU and nothing should go outside. And then like, OK, that's a little more than two weeks. And then you're like, again, you can be sad and like miserable about it or you can try and find the ways like, OK, how can we work with it?
Speaker 1 (24:37.506)
company.
Speaker 2 (24:48.002)
to make it like the fastest as possible. Or like, okay, what other laws we should take into consideration before we can move forward? Or like, what do people actually need? Like, do they even sign documents electronically? Or is it in our heads that everybody does it and they need it? So you have to be really aware, back to your question, be very thorough with the market research if the market needs the product.
Because if it's very successful in the US, it doesn't mean it will be successful in the Middle East or anywhere. Number two, talk to the customers and see if they actually do it the way the law tells them to. Because for us, was my mistake, actually. So I saw the laws and I was like, OK, if the law is there, if the norm is there, then everybody does it. But then I went to talk to the customers and it turned out that...
they will never sign a document, a contract with a qualified electronic signature. And I asked them why, because the lawyers there... And the answer was so simple. I trust them. I trust my counterparts enough not to care if the signature is legally binding because my father did business with them, my grandfather did business with their grandfather.
And literally like maybe 50 to 60 people told me the same thing. we're... Well, we talked to the Germans, we talked to the Netherlands, we talked to the people in Portugal. And it was like, know, if the business was regional, basically, and, you know, I thought that the smaller to medium companies would, you know, benefit from our product. They're like, we don't have the need. Yeah.
Which market do you remember?
Speaker 2 (26:42.668)
So that was really interesting.
And in the end, what happened? Was it successful? Was the go-to market to Europe successful?
We did launch, but it took us longer than it could have been. But I think it was really good that we did all those steps because in the end, we offered the product that was successful. we got hundreds of not like dozens of thousands of customers from Europe. And so a lot of the customers that we had, they were happy with the offering that we did.
It was like, it was a cool thing.
Is this a big part of PandaDog's
Speaker 2 (27:24.622)
Yes, so we started with six countries and now I think the localization is for 20 countries.
But I mean, in terms of the grand scheme of things, are they still betting mostly on the US or is Europe now a big part of their business?
As far as I know, it's like one third of the revenues come from Europe, but I have not been part of the company for some time. So you have to double check.
Is it on the same service or did you have to adapt the service? Because you're saying if a lot of Europeans don't adopt digital signage, did you end up pivoting or did you just find the niche people who actually wanted that service?
We actually found the niche because there are a lot of companies that turned out that like they were bigger companies, but there are pretty many companies who do business internationally. And if they want to expand and then like many people try to expand nowadays because it's like European market is so small compared to the world's market that, you know, and the ambitions grow. you know, all of them founders, you know, startups, they want to expand.
Speaker 1 (28:14.934)
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:34.414)
And it's not enough to do the local kind of deal. They want to go somewhere worldwide.
But you're kind of showing the case study of whether to pivot or persevere. And you finally found that there was an issue to actually going to a new market. But you were able to find that small group that needed your service and that you were able to actually use the scale to the one third, which is super significant.
And also, we found instances, but so it took us to dig deeper. But for example, the HR documents, they have to be signed with the legally binding stuff or the medical records or hospitals and universities. But we didn't know that. We thought everybody needed us. It turned out that's not everybody, but...
certain industries verticals and so on. Super interesting. And in terms of like, so obviously that's lot about, we talked a lot today about using product for like growth and being able to sort of expand into new markets, launch new products, all this. But I know that you're a big advocate on also customer retention, loyalty, and you did a lot of cool stuff. So I want to make sure we talk about this.
Because this is something that people rarely think that they should focus that much on customer attention. That usually comes later. Once they're growing, growing, growing, and suddenly they realize, it's not enough to just win a customer. You want to make sure you keep them. But I feel like in a lot of your experience, it seems like you went even a beyond this where...
Speaker 1 (30:17.966)
you're using actually customer retention as the main driver of growing revenue. So I want to make sure that we talk a little bit about this because it's very unique, very interesting. And I want to make sure that our listeners also sort of hear about that. maybe you can start sort of telling like what's your first experience? When was your realization about customer retention and loyalty as the big driver?
Well, I want to say during the first product course.
wow, that was early. You're an early adopter of attention. We should share this product, of course, with all the founders probably.
cuz you know
Speaker 2 (31:02.442)
You should take the course.
Yes, please.
But basically, it's very easy even from the financial standpoint, like the cost of acquiring a new customer is so high. But then if they turn like three to four months into the product, then you never get your money back.
The butt kit is what they call it. Somebody comes in and they just fly out.
Yes, yes. But if you really work with your customer base, again, if you get to know your customers and you get to know why they use the product and then you offer something to them, then basically you have a customer who will never turn unless something happens with the business. like in my experience, we did the referral programs when...
Speaker 2 (31:54.446)
Like the normal customer acquisition cost for FinTech in Russia is about like 150 euros per customer. Yeah, I think for FinTech it's expensive everywhere, like it's more expensive then. But if they come through the loyalty or like referral program, it was like 7 euros. Wow. Like 20, well, 7 to 20 euros basically. And so that's
significant.
Speaker 1 (32:23.054)
don't even know what the percentage is. We need Zoya for this. lot. Zoya right here to us to calculate. Put it somewhere.
Even if, and of course we offered rewards if you bring a friend to the bank. But it's like, okay, so this is where you can save. And then with the referral, if you do it right, then again, like in my experience, normal lifetime for a customer would be like 24 to 26 months. And then if that person has friends in the bank and they do banking together, it was like,
46 months. So it's like almost like the MLM, know, like, know, bring friends and you're and then it's like, it's very hard to leave because, know, everybody, you know, is in that bank. It becomes like a society, like, you a social group.
stickiness as they stick together.
Speaker 1 (33:12.51)
scheme.
Speaker 1 (33:23.914)
Yeah, can we? actually, I know you have a lot of examples also on the customer retention and all this, but I wanted to say, in this particular case, it comes to sort of maybe creating a loyalty program, sounds very overwhelming for some people. It feels like, okay, expensive, I need to give expensive gifts, I need to...
I don't know, gamify it, I need to invest in this whole platform for this. People immediately think, that's what I think. When I think of loyalty, I'm thinking some cards or something. First of all, you need to print them, give them, that's how I think standard persons' brain thinks about. So can you walk us through a concrete example of the steps you took and what was part of the loyalty program and how do you get creative with it?
Okay, I love to talk about this because it's like, you it makes me so passionate.
Love to hear about somebody actually who cares about loyalty and retention.
Speaker 2 (34:28.398)
Well, first of all, it can be as expensive as you make it, just like with everything in life. If you want to buy an apartment, there's no limit to the price, But so to have a successful loyalty program, you need to have a very strong brand offering. And this is like nothing will work if you don't have the brand and you don't have the product. Like, you know, this is the foundation.
But okay, let's say you have that. You have very strong personal brand as a founder or as the CEO. And then like when I worked at a bank, and it was not a simple situation because like a few months prior to when we started doing this, our bank lost the license, which is the worst thing that can happen to you in a fintech world. But we were the first and I think the only bank in Russia who
gave every single ruble back to the customers. Like, according to the law, you're not supposed to do that. Like, you can, but if you don't, well. But we did that. And when we lost the license, we made it as public as possible. Like, this is what we're doing. This is what's happening. And then three months after the license, you know, happened, this is what, yes, we opened the new bank.
this.
Speaker 2 (35:57.038)
Three months, literally. And then like a month later, we had like a lot of the customer base back. Because, you know, again, this is like a very strong brand offering.
and
Speaker 1 (36:10.414)
was the brand based on? Because you mentioned it on the founder or is it on something else? Like in this case, what did they do right in terms of the brand offering? What was the pull?
Well, I'm a fan. think it was like the brand of the founder. So we had Boris Dyakanov, the person who is very media active, who talked to the people, like everybody he knew about the bank. And then he brought the spirit of like, you cannot fail if you try to do something good. Like, it was part of the culture to do everything new, innovative.
Okay, now.
Speaker 2 (36:51.128)
for the customer, so that was the cool thing. And also, it was very hard to be part of the team, because you had to have certain qualities. And so everybody on the team, even if it was a customer support specialist or a developer architect, they would all have the same personal qualities about them, that they would put the customer or the brand first. And so back to the loyalty.
When you say it can be expensive, it can be, but for us, the main, the two main offerings that we had was a meeting with buddies. Which costs nothing. Yeah. Well, you can count the... That was like the number one. If you do...
Wow.
Speaker 1 (37:35.672)
Wait, who's the number one?
So typically the most expensive one is the cost you nothing.
Yes, the second thing was an excursion in the bank because we had a very unique...
management system which is Holacracy. you don't know about it, the second book from me is Delivering Happiness, Zappos, which is a very unique company in my opinion and some of the employees went actually to Zappos to learn. So read the book, you have two books in case you have a lot of time on your hands.
hierarchy.
Speaker 2 (38:20.728)
So, and we did B2B, okay? So we had a lot of founders and many of them, you know, found it very valuable to learn. And so there's nothing more valuable than when you come to the environment and you see how people actually work and nobody told us that the customers would come. So when they came and we were in the middle of an argument or like, you know, a working problem. yeah. And they were like, that's how it works.
the principles.
Speaker 2 (38:50.254)
And we had a lot of other offerings on the menu. For example, if you did a certain amount of points, you could get an Apple Watch or an iPhone or a laptop, a fancy new laptop. But then at some point we had a problem that we had so many of them because customers were not claiming them because they were saving their points for the excursion or the meeting or something.
It was like, wow. back to the end, the number one thing that was always sold out was the merch.
Mmm.
That's crazy to me, honestly, because every company I've worked with, I started off when I loyalty and retentions in the big organizations, they all were obsessed with merch. But merch is so expensive to actually like the shipping, the prep for everything, like you should attempt to, sometimes it's like shitty merch. And it's, yeah, you just get like something that's not like all of it. how do you, let me ask you this, how do you, how did you make merch successful? How did you revive merch?
Well...
Speaker 2 (39:57.91)
Again, merch is useless if you don't have the brand that people want to promote. okay, let's look at your shoes, for example. But you wear them because they're comfortable, they stand for something. Or like house merch. I love house merch. I have a t-shirt and I have a shopper. Great quality.
Come on to me.
Speaker 1 (40:20.654)
The product base.
Now I should be like, there's a link to buy it, but there's no link to buy it. It's all Maybe.
Pre-order.
Wow, this is a... it went to shaming very quickly from praising me to shaming me in two seconds.
You
Speaker 2 (40:43.956)
That's how we do. Okay, so assuming you have the brand, you should know what your customers stand for. Like, for example, one of the most successful merch that we had, so we had an advertisement campaign that Tochka's customers, were for like, it's a really cool advertisement, but basically, so it showed our customers in their work environment and was like, we stand for clean streets.
and like no bureaucracy and like honest communication or like I don't know paying taxes and like whatever and then we printed like you know sweatshirts with this like I stand for like honesty and openness and like all that and was like
I know, especially like I feel like in Russia that's a particular thing of like, sort of voicing what you stand for and what you don't stand for, right?
And then somewhere here it was like a Toshika's logo. And then everybody wanted to have this t-shirt or sweatshirt because it was like, this represents me, not the brand, but me. But then also I'm associated with the brand that stands for that.
You created like a lifestyle brand on my side.
Speaker 1 (42:04.27)
It's like Harley-Davidson, like Red Bull, like the rebel, know, their whole idea is like you're what? You'll wear their merch, but their merch means so much more than the specific brand that you're wearing.
And now they have really cool bracelets and I have one of those even though I'm not part of the team anymore. And they're silver, they're tiny, but for some reason people always comment on that and they have different motivational quotes like, brave, stand for something. And it's a jewelry piece, but yet even on the jewelry it says, be brave, for example, and you see it every single day, like, okay, be brave.
And you know that Toczka did it and you want to belong to that.
One of the last things I want to definitely talk about today is what are the metrics that for you personally, for the business, as a product manager, what do you look for? How do you measure success? mean, you've talked about some really cool examples with PandaDoc, with Rifeizen, with Tocca. In all of those, whether it's for retention campaigns or anything else, but how do you measure?
success and especially of retention campaigns I'm also trying obviously look at the turn rate but maybe something else is there something else for you that you look at?
Speaker 2 (43:27.318)
Well, if we talk about retention, then of course it's retention rate, okay? So we had instances when out of, you know, again, like tens of thousands of customers, we had only 200 people that churned that month. Like that was crazy. But that meant that we did something very, very right, that, you know, nobody would go. But so retention is number one.
But then you don't want to, I hope you do not want to retain dead customers. you know, they don't churn because they don't use your product. They forgot that they have your product. So the number two, would say, track the, you know, if the customers you have are active and you define what active is to you. For example, I don't believe in like the most common, I would say metric for mobile apps or like, you know, desktop applications as monthly active users.
Because generally, yes, it means that they logged in and they logged out. But instead, you can have the active monthly active users. And for me, it means like, OK, I'm in FinTech, an active user would transfer the money, get the money, change the requisites of the company, add something new, activate a product, deactivate the product.
indicate anything.
Speaker 1 (44:33.228)
A really good point.
Speaker 2 (44:54.68)
does something meaningful in the app. And that's what I track when, you know, like, and I don't believe in the, you know, just the monthly active users, because especially if you have salespeople, it's very easy to hack. you know, your company is behind, your investors want to see that you're doing something, and you just tell your customer, customer success or sales or, you know, an outsourced call center in India, please call my customers and make them log in. And then...
That's true. Please don't do that.
But now you know the hack. I can tell you all about hacks, but that's a different podcast. But then it's very hard to hack a payment. And we went even further. For example, I know that for a certain profile of customers... So we separated the customers into many, groups. Like literally many, many groups.
you
Speaker 3 (45:50.126)
segmentation which I was hoping that you were going to talk a little bit about more.
We can do, but... So... And I know what each group is supposed to do in terms of payments. For example, if I'm the... An entrepreneur. An entrepreneur, yes. I probably have... Well, in Russia, I will every month transfer the money from my entrepreneurial account to my personal account. I will do it no matter what. I will probably get the money and then I'll probably do like some payments.
So these are the three categories of payments that a company with this profile will have. Or if I have employees, then I will pay salaries, I will pay taxes, and then I'll do something else. And so I track if all those groups of customers do what they're supposed to do. So I'm not retaining a dead body of customers. I'm retaining very active, healthy customers. And then if something goes wrong and I can see that the number of customers doing those things,
is getting not as... How do I say this? Well, basically... You preferred? Yeah, it's going down. was looking for a fancy word, didn't find it, sorry.
Speaker 3 (47:02.446)
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:12.654)
Then we started working with that specific group of customers, like, see what they don't like. And in the end of the day, it all comes down to the North Star metric of the company. For me personally, it's always money because, I've always worked for companies where money is the number one. But I know...
and syntax with me.
But for companies like Uber, for example, or we had a company in Russia, Yedadil, for them, the number one thing was the amount of customers they had. you tie the metrics that you have with that North Star. So for me, OK, I retain the customers that are active. Means they're using the product means I have to have more revenue, right? It's only logical.
And you just make sure that you don't track metrics for the sake of metrics.
I would also add that looking at those adoption reports to see the user and feature adoption based on those different segments is super important because it tells you how you need to be building your product for each one of those segments as well. Because I've had in the past when I worked in FinTech, was literally we were creating products and features that weren't even being used.
Speaker 1 (48:26.178)
which then you have more churn later on because they're like, well, I'm paying you all this money. I'm not even using a quarter of the actual products, the features that I actually need. I think that it's also one thing that I find super fascinating, obviously, since I know you, I know the story a little bit. But what surprised me is not just when you talk about retention and loyalty and working with your current base of customers.
That's true.
Speaker 1 (48:53.966)
that you're actually able not just to retain them, but to grow revenue from this. And I know that this is sort of what you were currently working on at Rifeisen. I don't know if you're able to talk to us, a little bit kind of, it's super fascinating to me that you're able to increase the company's revenue without gaining any new customers. That's something that I think to me was unheard of.
So I know people talk about upsell and all of that, but in your case, there's also additional restrictions placed where you're not able to do a lot. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it's to me probably the most fascinating thing I heard in the last year.
Okay. So the situation basically is that because of the restrictions, we are not allowed to open new accounts. So we're limited to like 50 accounts per month. But then we still have the financial goals and we still have like, you know, customer retention and, you know, upsell and everything, because we still have the sales people, the sales team, and they need to do something, right? And we need to give them new products.
Speaker 3 (49:52.057)
Speaker 2 (50:07.82)
But it was like, how do I say this? It was a very ambitious goal to increase the revenue. And you start thinking, okay, how can you do it? And for us, the number one thing, since the,
He interests rate down in Russia. It's pretty high. Okay, the number one thing is we need to somehow help the people or make the customers keep the money in the bank so that we could, you know, each bank does that, invest that overnight as a bank, and then get percentage on that. But how do you do that when in every other bank they can get 25 % on their deposit easily and for us it was 0 %?
So, when people tell me like, well, it was easy for you to double the revenue because the interest rate is so high. Well, it is in a sense, but then how do you keep the money? How do you make customers keep the money so that we could profit off of the rate?
And again, that's about the segmentation, that's about giving the customers what they really, really need so that they feel loyalty to the brand, loyalty to the bank to keep the money. And then the number two thing is that, again, what we did, we did a lot of segmentation.
Speaker 1 (51:40.28)
Thank you. The word of today, segmentation.
And for example, some customers, they got their personal managers. And usually how it's done is like only if you're very, very rich or you have a very big brand, you get a personal manager. And we went beyond that and even the smaller companies got their own personal managers. And they felt like, know, special, like very special because they would not get it in any other bank.
And they were like, okay, now I feel important, I can do it. I can stay. Or for other customers, would be like, so we identified the products with the highest stickiness rate, and they offered those for a fraction of the price. But then we knew that once you have the product, for example, like acquiring, it's a nightmare to change the provider.
especially if you have several stores, your accountant will never let you switch. And so we were like, okay, we're offering this for basically nothing. But then you cannot go anywhere. Sneaky. And then, again, and it was a smart move because once you get the money from the acquiring, they come to your account at the bank, which we can later reinvest. then, you know, like...
Speaker 2 (53:07.734)
And so you do little tweaks like that in the product. But when I say this, it sounds very easy, almost like why didn't you think of that before? But then it takes a lot of time, and then it takes lot of sitting together with the team to identify, what haven't we thought about before? And going through a lot, a lot, a lot of competitors, a lot of history books are like,
He doesn't, but okay.
Speaker 2 (53:36.746)
Okay, if you don't, before like, I don't know, loans were a thing, what was a thing? Or like...
I don't think anyone I've ever heard has ever done something like that.
But.
know, situations like this, they aren't precedent. Like, I could not go to the market and find a mentor who would mentor me how to be a good manager. like, you know, for a founder, for example, like, you cannot go and find somebody who's been there.
this problem before because it's a problem. So what was there before the loans?
Speaker 1 (54:10.254)
What did you find out?
Nothing
But that was a good example.
But I mean, was there something that you find that you were not thinking about before?
But like, yeah, the stickiness rates and, you know, the rubles thing that I told you, like each company needs to pay and needs to get money from certain sources. And as far as I know, not a lot of banks track this. Like they track the payments, but they don't track the categories of payments or like how regularly they are used based again. And it's very easy. Like if you have like a...
Speaker 2 (54:48.396)
Again, like the entrepreneurship kind of situation, you don't pay taxes every month. But then if you have like what in Serbia you call do. Yeah, then you have to pay taxes every month. And if you're not paying taxes with our bank and they're considered to be a core payment. So if you're not doing this with our bank, then the customer probably does not think of us as their main bank. And then
operation.
I will see.
Speaker 2 (55:18.326)
We need to do something to make them switch. But again, the word of the day is not probably segmentation, but like know your customers. You have to know... Because before you learn their business, I didn't know that you have to pay taxes every month because I have an individual entrepreneurship and I do my taxes like once a year.
thy customer.
You
Speaker 3 (55:45.934)
And you have to be very in. And at some of my jobs, I spend like up to four hours every single day just talking to customers. I had some customers and I'm not joking when I knew the names of their like children. I knew who the children wanted to be when they grew up. And it was exhausting at some point because if something happened, they would call and they could call me in the middle of the night. was like, no, no, I'm not solving this. But then
On the other hand, they trusted me with a lot of company secrets and they would ask for advice and many of the products that we ended up having came from those conversations. Like, how do I make this happen? And I'm like, I didn't even know this problem existed. So know thy customer.
That's why customer support, customer success, sales teams are super, super important. And having that, I think they call it all in all like a revenue operations or something like that, where it's basically sales, marketing, customer success, support. Everybody's kind of speaking to each other because in order to actually deliver a product, you need to have sales giving that feedback. So if it's your dedicated rep in your case, giving that feedback back to the product team. And the same thing with support. If they're calling in and they're saying, hey, I'm about to leave you like this, this isn't working.
you know, this is like the 10th time this has happened, you need to be actually logging that information so that information goes back into building the product or having better segmentation.
Speaker 2 (57:18.316)
And this is something that I'm very passionate about and I have like an opinion. So first of all, I think that the worst thing you can do is to have like a customer support center somewhere outstaffed in a third world country. Nothing wrong with the third world countries, but you will never have the insights.
you
Speaker 1 (57:33.07)
I with you.
Speaker 2 (57:42.878)
they will never give them to you because they're not a part of your brand, they're not a part of your identity, they don't care basically, you know, if you develop or if you don't develop as soon as, you know, like as soon as your company dies somebody else will hire.
I also don't understand if it's fintech. Those are really important problems that businesses are having. can't talk to a US-based business from somebody from India who doesn't understand to the level of the root cause of the problem to be able to escalate it if it's a huge issue.
Yes. Number two is very often customer success or like, you know, those technical support, however you call them, they're not part of the conversation. They're not part of the product conversation. And they should be. Because once we started incorporating them and their insights into our product backlog meetings, we were amazed.
at how much information they had and it was all gathered there for free. No fancy researches, no spending time because they talk to your customers and it actually made us make our product a lot better than it was. And also I think, and I know this is very controversial, maybe you'll talk to somebody about it, that they're very underrated and underpaid and they have like this switch.
the entry level.
Speaker 2 (59:04.62)
And then, you know, like, they don't last long, basically. They leave the company, but, and nobody pays attention to how they can actually benefit you. And they can become gradually with education, with training, a very good, you know, part of the product team in quality assurance, for example, because they know the product better than sometimes I know the product, because they've heard every single way of how the product could break.
They're essentially the voice of the market and the voice of the...
Yes. And so I think that more companies, and I know we're talking to startups, but let's hope that every startup grows into like a Salesforce kind of situation or like, you know, Elon Musk kind of corporate.
first in this podcast.
But when you do, remember that those people are the most important people who do a lot of work talking to the customer when you don't have the time or desire or...
Speaker 3 (59:53.934)
you
Speaker 1 (01:00:06.222)
which is an organic way to grow without having to focus on spending money too. I want to wrap this up and we're going to do sort of the rapid fire questions that we always do. Before that, one quick thing. What would be the one advice you would give to a founder that he has to like...
totally nailed down when it comes to product. Let's assume that he doesn't have a product or a person or a CPO. What is the first thing, like right now he goes, what should he do? What should he check? What should he pay attention to?
earlier stage.
early stage. Set up calls with the customers.
Talk to your customer. Thank you. Let's do the rapid fire questions. So we're going to run through these. If you feel like you need to give a quick like explanation, context, you can do it. But it's just one or the other. You just have to gut reaction. Product led growth versus sales led growth. OK, thank you. One more time, product led. I mean, she's a product team. LTV or CAC driven marketing.
Speaker 2 (01:01:07.342)
Okay.
product.
Speaker 3 (01:01:19.263)
Hey!
Speaker 1 (01:01:26.23)
Early adopter feedback or market research? Interesting. thank you. I had my own bias in these questions clearly. Feel fast or play it safe?
both.
Speaker 2 (01:01:39.224)
I think it depends. My personality is fail fast.
Cool. You talked a lot about feeling positive.
Because if you don't fail, you don't learn.
Agreed. And then the last one is work-life balance or hustle culture, since you're kind of in both worlds, you know, a little bit.
I wanted like in the ideal world work-life balance but I get bored pretty easily so I would say go for hustling.
Speaker 1 (01:02:10.988)
I was actually going ask one final question. just realized this, If you were a founder, would you focus first on bringing in a sales team or a customer support team?
Speaker 3 (01:02:24.427)
Huh?
you
Speaker 3 (01:02:33.085)
huh.
Okay, I think I would do the sales myself as a founder. And then I would bring in the support. That's what I would do. If I'm an early stage, so my goal is to sell and I need to be able to know how to sell because I don't have as many customers to support. That's my idea.
as a founder.
Speaker 1 (01:02:55.798)
Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you. This was amazing. And I am really glad we were able to have more of a product conversation because it's always, know, products and marketing kind of have to work together. And for growth, you need both. And, you know, of course you need sales, but sales everyone sort of has. But I think in this particular thing, you
Reel
Speaker 1 (01:03:20.91)
You mentioned so many cool things that I think both early stage and later stage founders can really find useful. thank you so much for Thank you. think you showed that product can also be very strategic as opposed to just like developer side, which I a lot of people don't realize. Let's drink to product led growth. Thank you. And with that, we end our growth hour.