So, according to Simon Sinek’s chart regarding early adopters, you can break down your customer base into the following segments.
0-2.5% = Innovators
2.5% - 16% = Early Adopters
16%-50% = Early Majority
50%-84% = Late Majority
84-100% = Laggards
This got me to thinking, at 1.5 million customers, where would we sit on this list right now?
It’s obviously not an exact science because there’s no fixed point where we would just stop getting new customers. But it’s an interesting thing to consider.
My personal gut feeling is that we’re very much in the early stages of the Early Adopters phase. Generalised market research data shows that significantly more people still haven’t yet heard of us in the street (and this is true for all fintech companies) but obviously that continues to grow in line with user base. This is actually quite empowering, because it proves how early a stage we’re still at - when you’re within the scene it would be quite easy to lose focus of that because it occupies such a big part of your life.
From running events, and talking to our customers around the country, it’s actually quite lovely, because the enthusiasm and excitement from a lot of people is really great to see. What I mean by that is, the product is still very new to them, and they marvel at what we’re doing, because they’ve only recently started using it. To anyone who like myself has been a user since 2016, we can forget about how delightful it is because we’ve been using it for so long already. But most people are still very new to us and that’s important to remember!
What do you think? And how are you feelings about us and the level of passion you have for what we’re doing impacted by the amount of time you’ve been a customer?
A fair question! I limited my thinking to UK for the basis of these thoughts, since any international expansion we want to do is still very early days for us.
I’d say mid to late early adopters purely time wise rather than customer number wise. The next growth stage I think will be very rapid so ‘mainstream’ will come very quickly.
But as a constantly evolving product that’ll never be marked complete is that the right model? Something completely game changing could (probably will) happen at what would traditionally be seen as the late majority stage and spur growth again.
I think it works on the user base, e.g. 1.5 million customers represents 100%, therefore the first 37,500 customers are the innovators etc and the scale slides as more people come on board?
I hadn’t heard of Monzo until the local press covered the new Cardiff office and I’m reasonably well clued up on these things. I’d suspect more “work on the ground” is required to help people wade through the noise --new apps are ten a penny now and there is a danger of Monzo falling into the yet another app pond.
I remember how I ended up with my legacy bank many moons ago. Midland Bank (who were bought by HSBC shortly after) would come into our school once a week and allow us to deposit money into our new “Livecash” accounts.
I’ve heard it said in a Q&A that Monzo aren’t keen on getting youngsters onboard, but getting your first bank account is pretty exciting and many people will stick with their usual bank. Better yet, teaching youngsters about financial literacy is no bad thing.
This is a chart that you often see across software solution verticals. It is aimed more towards a marketable software product though than a service. A marketable solution typically goes through a bell curve lifecycle. Whereas a service company will aim to continue a service without a break. Banking is something that individuals will stick with for many many years. The time and effort to move from Bank A to Bank B means that it will only occur occasionally. The stickiness of a total service will determine the total period of time that this runs. I would expect that in a few years, Monzo will be losing as many clients as it wins. The turnover will be higher than traditional banks, but that will work both ways - arrivals and departures. The technology that supports this is an important component of course that will cause the inbound to rise above the outbound.
Monzo’s biggest problem will become ‘how can we provide 1,000’s of features for every use case, whilst maintaining an easy, fast, simple user experience.’ This will be all about architectural and UX strategy + a good team not dependent on single prima donna coders (we have all met some of these). The number of clicks to get to a users target feature must be optimised. Presenting 10 features in the first app versus 1000 features in a future app is a completely different challenge. It is not easy unless you examine the psychology of user experience / patience and self learning.
So - the timepoint that you hit the middle - the inflection point is dependent on a), stickiness with you existing users, b). innovation with your new features and c). completeness of your total banking offering to those that need a full service. IMHO of course…
