Stop pretending to eat your own dog food

Back when David Marcus was still President of PayPal, he famously sent an irate email to employees fuming that they refused to download the PayPal app to pay for lunch, and even more, that they didn’t feel passion for the company’s products overall. Clearly those employees didn’t see a need — when paying with credit card or cash is so simple, why change?

The disconnect between the employees and the products they build is a huge red flag. Either the employees are not the intended audience and are having difficulty empathizing, or the company is focused too much on “disruption” and not enough on solving real customer pain points. In consumer-focused tech companies, employees can be the easiest, best first barometer for products, but, as in the case at PayPal, they’re not being utilized enough or in the right way.

Last year, I moved from sunny Silicon Valley to not-as-sunny London to join an international money transfer startup called TransferWise. I had been passionate for a long time about international expansion: driving growth in markets around the world and building meaningful products for a dispersed customer base. I realized that I would never be any good at doing that if I stayed in the cozy Silicon Valley bubble.

TransferWise is a product designed for internationally-minded people, providing a seamless way to send money abroad without having to pay exorbitant bank fees. In moving to the UK, I unintentionally became TransferWise’s target customer. And here’s what I’ve discovered now that I’m a foreigner in a foreign land:

• Opening a bank account sucks. Immigrants well know that opening a bank account is one of the most difficult things to do upon arriving in the UK. Ultimately, it took me trips to 3 different banks, 5 different branches, and 6 different types of “proof of addresses,” before I was finally able to open a basic, no-frills-whatsoever bank account. It’s a circular process that has clearly never considered the customer. You can’t get paid until you open a bank account, you can’t open a bank account until you have a place to live and a utility bill, you can’t get a place to live until you get paid. You see the dilemma.
• Getting credit sucks. All the credit history built up over your life in another country means nothing (even when it’s the same credit company in both countries). As we speak, I don’t even have enough credit to get a credit card, sign up for a two-phone family plan at Vodafone, or even open an interest-bearing deposit account.
• Yes, money transfer really sucks. The well-known story of the founding of TransferWise is one in which our founders, Kristo and Taavet, realized just how big a cut banks were taking when they transferred money across borders. Yes that’s true, but think about the compound effect of the previous two challenges — I’m working in the UK but funding my life with my savings in the US. If TransferWise didn’t exist, I would be in a much worse place than I am now.

As the target customer, what I’ve discovered is that the financial system is broken, and the current solutions are not designed with the customer in mind. Now I get why London is a hub for fintech. Now I know why TransferWise was founded here and made an impact by trying to beat the banks. Now I feel it.

It’s from this understanding that passion, innovation, and urgency comes. Now that I have real money at stake, you can bet that I’ve checked all the possible options, and concluded that I should, in fact, be using TransferWise. Furthermore, it’s opened my eyes to just how much more work there is to be done for TransferWise’s country-hopping customers — all the areas that suck. In finance and banking, certainly, but also in immigration, in taxes, and so much more. And those problems needed solving yesterday.

The thing is, in so many places, using the company’s product is faked. Senior managers push you, guilt you into using the product, a la David Marcus. But passion is really difficult to develop artificially and impossible to fake. Creating artificial reasons to use the product may help you find bugs, but it doesn’t take you to the next level of growth. It doesn’t help employees internalize customer pain points, and it doesn’t lend urgency to the work they’re doing. If employees prefer to use a competitor’s product, let them, the competitor’s product is probably better… then give them the freedom to create.

From a company perspective, what does that mean? It means, where possible, facilitate opportunities for employees to become real customers of the product. For example, TransferWise could hire expats and also offer the opportunity and provide incentives for its employees to relocate to other offices in other countries. If you’re starting a new product, solve an area where you suffer, or if you don’t, create that opportunity to suffer. The adventure and the perspective will be worth it.