How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)

**Nilan Peiris** (0:00)
Some people focus on conversion rate, like, I'm going to make this really, really slick. And that's cool, you get a bit more growth. But to get to recommendation, you're going to blow your users' socks off. You have to give them an experience they didn't know was previously possible.
And when you're in that place of doing something that no one has ever done before, that's where you get it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:23)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Nilan Peiris. Nilan is Chief Product Officer at Wise, where he's been for over 11 years, basically from the beginning of the journey. If you're not familiar with Wise, you should be. They make it incredibly easy and cheap to send money internationally. I am a regular user and customer, and because the product is so great, they've grown primarily through word of mouth. About 70% of their growth comes through word of mouth.
And in our conversation, Nilan breaks down exactly how they made word of mouth so successful for their product. I don't know any founder who wouldn't wish to have more word of mouth growth, and Nilan's advice is the most tactical and useful advice I've ever heard for how to actually drive your word of mouth growth.
I am really excited for you to this episode and to learn from Nilan. And so with that, I bring you Nilan Peiris after a short word from our sponsors.
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Nilan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Nilan Peiris** (3:32)
Thanks for having me, Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:33)
So you're Chief Product Officer at Wise, which I don't know if you knew this, but I'm a very happy, weekly active user of. To give folks a little bit of context on Wise, could you just explain what does Wise do, and also share maybe a few stats to give people a sense of the scale that Wise has reached at this point.

**Nilan Peiris** (3:51)
We're looking to solve the problems associated with cross border money movement, which is that moving money across borders is pretty slow. It's actually really expensive, and it can be really hard to do. We solve it with three products. Our money transfer product teaches what we started with. Our account, which should be like to think of trying to solve the problems of international banking with our account for people and for businesses.
And then finally, we've also got an enterprise product where we take the underlying infrastructure that's powered those products that we've built and embed them in the banks and products that people use every day. And then zooming into the numbers, so we've got to come a little way on the journey. So today we're now moving about $12 billion a month, growing at between 30 to 40% year on year. We take about 0.65% on average across all our routes as price.