20Growth: How Transferwise Acquired Their First 5M Customers: The Two Types of Content All Companies Must Create, How to Crush Competition With Performance Marketing, What Growth Hacks Worked and Did Not with Nilan Peiris, CPO @ Wise

**Nilan Peiris** (0:00)
I define product marketing as closing this delta between the perceived value a customer has of the product and the actual value that you've delivered them. You have to be an order of magnitude better than the alternative to get word of mouth. You need to give customers an experience they did not know previously existed.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:19)
This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Growth is a show where once a month, we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to discuss their tips, tactics and strategies on how they scaled to their first a million plus users. Today, we're joined by Nilan Peiris, Chief Product Officer at Wise, with 10 million customers today. Now, Nilan has been at the forefront of all growth for the company and leads on growth across channels, including product and platform. But before we dive into the show's date, let me tell you about Canva. When I spoke to Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht on the podcast last year, he touched on how visual content is fast becoming the fuel that's driving the modern workplace. Your team needs to create an engaging visual pitch deck to sell in an idea. A product launch needs an inspiring video to excite investors and customers. Projects gather steam with visual whiteboards. That's where Canva can help. It's a game changer for visual communication at work. Canva turns your team into master visual communicators so they can get their point across with visual impact inside and outside your business, with no design experience needed. With Canva, any team member and any company, whether you're a startup or a global organization, can design compelling on-brand visual content quickly and easily. That's why 90% of the Fortune 500 use Canva. Start designing today at canva.com. Designed for work.

**Nilan Peiris** (1:45)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (1:48)
Nilan, this is such a joy to do. I've been really looking forward to this. So thank you so much for joining me.

**Nilan Peiris** (1:52)
Thanks for the invite, Harry.

**Harry Stebbings** (1:54)
Not at all, but I would love to start with some chronology. So how did you first make your way into the world of growth and product? And what was that real entry point for you?

**Nilan Peiris** (2:02)
Wow, going all the way back, I did maths at university, which I advise everybody to do out there, looking at problems and trying to find a completely different way to look at the problem that no one else had looked at before that enabled you to solve it in a way no one had done it before.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:17)
Sorry, I just have to ask that. You said they're kind of doing things differently and in ways that other people hadn't done before and why you like maths in that way. I always wonder, are playbooks good or bad?

**Nilan Peiris** (2:27)
In product and in growth, where this reaches its fortes, when the playbook becomes something that feels like a reproducible model and that is in two forms, usually there's a kind of a market expansion playbook. So we know this works, I want to keep doing this again and again and again. And in my experience, it's usually disappointingly not much. Like there's very few truly globally scalable products that you build once and they just kind of go everywhere.
Every country has a nuance usually then. That could be regulatory, could be financial systems, it could be cultural. And these are the things that get stuck in the way of the playbook.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:01)
Terribly annoying, much nicer if it was just repeatable. I actually find playbooks can be more applicable on channels. Like there's a playbook to creating good Twitter content. There's a playbook to creating short form video hooks.
Do you see what I mean?

**Nilan Peiris** (3:13)
Yeah, and that type of like growth hacky marketing side, you see this and you're quite successful at the podcast playbook. But the bit that the edge is usually in the creativity.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:26)
Telling the story, I completely agree.

**Nilan Peiris** (3:27)
Or when someone figures a different way, a different form of content that suddenly gets cut through, everyone will start copying that. But these kinds of bursts usually have a outsize outcome.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:38)
I agree. I always think actually to Seth Godin and the Purple Cow, which is kind of the power of being different, not better. And I think we get to that point when we look at like content landscapes today. Okay, we have that. How did you come to Wise then? Cause you were an advisor at Wise first, right?

**Nilan Peiris** (3:51)