About This Episode
Damandeep Singh Soni is a startup growth consultant with extensive experience of over 20 years in the marketing domain. During his previous stints, he served as the Head of Marketing and Growth at MobiKwik, India Head at LINE messenger, Chief Marketing Officer (APAC) at Wecash – a Chinese Fin-Tech unicorn.
In this episode
We speak to Damandeep about his experience as a marketing and growth professional and discuss the nitty-gritties of growth marketing, which include:
i. The important aspects of a user journey map in Fin-Tech businesses.
ii. How difficult is it to get users to transact online?
iii. How to overcome user engagement and retention challenges faced in the Fin-Tech space?
iv. How to combine Tech and Marketing to form a rocketship of growth?
v. What route should today’s marketers take to build a full-funnel approach?
Here are our top 3 picks from this episode:
1. How to launch an app in India and what does it take to find a product-market fit
Avlesh: What does it take to launch an app in this country, which has a mass appeal? How do the founders and early teams should be thinking about this problem statement?
Daman: That’s a very interesting question! Let me give you an example; when we launched LINE messenger in India back in 2012, the challenge put forth to me was to get a million users in the first month. We got 3 million users in the first month using only one medium that was Google because there was hardly anyone bidding for this kind of inventory at that point in time. Today, if a founder comes to me and says if we can get a million users in the first 6 months, it’s going to break the bank. The number of apps in the AppStore has increased, the discovery has become an issue so while you are launching an app and thinking “how do I get my first set of users?” I think it’s very important to first focus on the Product-Market Fit before you go out and spend a lot of money. I think finding out what your user really needs and how far is it from your hypothesis, these are two important things that you really need to focus on. There is no easy answer to this; it’s a painstaking process. To start a business saying “I am gonna solve this problem” but the market responds in a very different way. Go out, find the product-market fit, do the pivot if need be but don’t burn money only on the hypothesis.
Avlesh: Understood!
2. The state of Fin-Tech adoption in India
Avlesh: On the basis of what you have seen, is it safe to say that in our journey of Fin-Tech adoption in the country we are at Fin-Tech 2.0 or that’s still further down the line?
Daman: So when it comes to wallets and transactions, I think given that we have UPI in place, India is by far one of the most advanced countries in creating the Fin-Tech infrastructure. In terms of user adoption, I think we still have a distance to go. It’s not only by the virtue of people coming on to the platform but we are also massively under bank country. If we take the denominator of 1.3 billion, everything will be in a single-digit with respect to percentages. The use cases are just going to evolve and the adoption in the coming years is going to go way beyond what we see in the current day. There is going to be a lot of P2P payments coming in, once WhatsApp lights up, we will see a whole new level of adoption flourishing. Google has played an important role in its own UPI app. We have to realize one thing, there are three major payment platforms in the game right now, barring Google; PayTm, Amazon and PhonePe; each one of them has a great product which a user can latch onto to transact on. So PayTm has PayTm Mall, Amazon has Amazon shopping, PhonePe has Flipkart, Myntra and Jabong so it is easy for them to direct the user to transact from their platform while shopping. Going forward, if you look at other use-cases such as buying a mutual fund, we are still lagging behind in comparison with other countries. So in a nutshell, it’s day 0 for us.
Avlesh: Sure!
3. Personalization should be deep-rooted in every aspect of the customer journey
Avlesh: One very specific question, Daman! It’s around personalization, I know that the word gets abused a lot, so in the context of payments and Fin-Tech app, how deep does personalization go in terms of user experience?
Daman: Personalization is not a feature per se, it’s a part of the core product, that’s the way I see it. Just because you have 2-3 million users doesn’t mean that you keep dropping them into 2 or 3 big segments, while segmenting the users is an important part but personalization also helps on multiple facets. For example, we could anticipate when a specific person’s next bill is due for an electricity payment; not only would you hit him/her with a notification but you would also prompt the API of the service provider and fetch the bill amount and re-populate it in the notification. All the person has to do is click two times and pay the bill instantly. Imagine instead of doing this, I sent them a notification saying pay your bill, they have to look at the bill, fetch the amount themselves, how time-consuming would it be! Besides this, there also a native personalization that plays an important role, I think PayTM does some of that pretty well. It kinds of pull up all the last transacted categories and it will be in front of you when you next open the app, so it reduces your search time. People think that personalization is required only for an e-commerce app or a content app like Netflix but there is an immense amount of personalization that goes on in the Fin-Tech arena too.
Avlesh: Sure. You have made a brilliant point there, Daman. I must say!
Closing notes
During the conversation with Daman, some very interesting topics were covered such as designing a customer journey in the Fin-Tech space, how to handle churn, if India is ready for Fin-Tech 2.0, why personalization is necessary and why is it necessary to build a customer-friendly service/product.
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