We’re definitely scaling up events, both in London and around the country, so you can expect a lot more of them in various formats! @naji and @yen are doing incredible work in that area.
We’re also seeing noticeable growth here on the forum for the first time in a while. I have various theories about this. One of them is basically that I think the “early adopters” are the people that contribute most to forums, but then you have different types of groups that each have their own “early adopter” sub-groups. So for a long time Monzo was a product mostly used by folks into tech and folks into finance, and what we saw here on the forum was the early adopters of those groups. If you’ve been here more than 12 months on the forum I’d say you fit into that category.
What we’re seeing now is a move into the “mass adoption” phase, since we’re pushing towards 3 million UK customers, national TV adverts, and more of the public consciousness. That group has it’s own “early adopters” and whilst they aren’t considered early adopters compared to the first group in general, they are the early adopters amongst a much larger segment of the population, and I think there’s also a trend towards forum activity amongst those people.
Secondly, we’re getting the early adopters from the US tech crowd starting to sign up since we’ve now run two US product launch events and we have actual US customers now! We try and make sure a lot of topics are worded broadly enough for all to contribute and enjoy, so whilst the new US signups aren’t necessarily going to engage in the finer points of what’s launching here in the UK if it doesn’t yet apply to US product, that won’t preclude them from engaging in a large amount of discussion that we have here.
I personally see us making our community (events, forum, and more) as interactive and engaging as we possibly can. One very recent example is when we (just a few months ago) turned on user voting in our Feedback section. We’ve been feeding the most voted ideas back to our Product teams every month, and user voting has played a huge role in what we’re building (see Bills Pots!) - on top of that, we have some very highly engaged Product Managers across every area of the business engaging with folks here on a daily basis, and I think you’ll start to see much, much more of that 