Celebrating “Get to Know Your Customers Day” with Sweatcoin
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Everyone has an inspirational story waiting to be heard. Being a customer-obsessed brand, we’re bringing the spotlight onto our customers, their journey and inspiring stories. Because we believe that each of our customers is brilliant, and we want to share their experience with everyone—what better day to celebrate our customers than “Get to Know Your Customers Day”? In today’s highly competitive world, Rowan Pereira, the Group Product Manager at Sweatcoin, a staunch supporter of gender equity and equal opportunities for success, shares her success mantra and life journey in her own words. How she balances being a daughter, a sister to three brothers, an impactful manager, and so much more.
Rowan Pereira, In Her Own Words
I’d describe myself as a high-energy individual fiercely passionate about gender equity. I love to draw portraits and try to get myself into a life drawing class when possible! The urge to satisfy my creativity, my inclination towards tech and my father led me to my career path. My father was the inspiration and the catalyst for my tech career. He had worked for IBM and Hitachi, and we spent a few years in San Jose. I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and going into tech felt like a fit. He still likes to give me ad hoc mentoring sessions over dinner, and he’s been retired for ten years!
I’d like to think my work has brought on positive change, starting with my work with 38 Degrees and Full Fact on a “Get the Facts out” impartial campaign during the referendum in 2016. Hundreds of thousands of voters saw our content, and I’d like to think we helped at least some of them make up their minds!
Launching Multiply, the UK’s first regulated financial advice app is another achievement I feel proud of.
My current role is one of the most rewarding though, working towards the unparalleled growth of the Sweatcoin app in 2022. We acquired 60 million new customers across the world and became the top downloaded health and fitness app in the world!
What is Sweatcoin, and What Excites You Most About Working at Sweatcoin?
Sweatcoin is a new step-counting and activity-tracking app breed that converts customers’ steps into currency. On a mission to get over 1 billion people around the world moving more, Sweatcoin counts customers’ daily steps and rewards them with ‘sweat coins’; an in-app currency which can be built up to spend on products (in the same way customers can collect and redeem air miles), donate to charity or exchange for cryptocurrency tender.
With over 120 million customers globally, Sweatcoin is the most downloaded health and fitness app of 2022. Data shows customers who have downloaded the app increase their daily step count by an additional 20.
10M Users in 7 Days at Sweatcoin: What is the Formula for Success at this Scale?
I joined Sweatcoin in early 2021, and in 2022 we embarked on a journey to global expansion.
Sweatcoin’s aim has always been to expand its reach and get more and more people to walk. Working towards that goal, we localised the app to over eight languages and launched it in over 150 countries. By May, we had topped over 100 million registered customers, and by the end of the year, we were the number 1 downloaded health and fitness app. I’d love to share how we got there and designed our growth engine for virality, because most growing brands struggle with that.
First, let’s talk about the channels we used:
- Organic
- Referrals
- Ambassadors/Influencers
- Paid Advertising
To help put this in perspective, let’s take our launch in Brazil as a case study and cover how we used each of these channels to work towards that goal of obtaining 10M customers. Once you gain these many customers it is a curve that you’re not looking to flatten. The truth is, it often does, which is why we think about continuous growth loops and not independent marketing channels. The goal is to figure out how the output of each loop can become the input of the next. This ensures sustainable growth and prevents you from spending marketing dollars on “one-hit-wonder” campaigns.
Often in Campaigns as Large as This One, It Becomes Confusing – Where You’d Start. How Did You Begin Launching such a Campaign?
Loop 1
Since it was a new market, our first step was to employ a local influencer marketing agency to recruit local influencers. We were an unknown entity, so we needed to build that trust in our local prospects. There were a lot of valuable learnings for us from this. One of the biggest was picking the right influencers. While the logical move was to recruit fitness influencers, we realised that lifestyle and entertainment influencers work best for us.
Going back to view this strategy as growth loop, we used the output of this influencer campaign as input for our next loop.
Loop 2
So our second loop was paid advertising; we were able to use the content created by the influencers as ads to reduce our cost per install by 70%.
This did so well because the content felt native, authentic and user-generated. We acquired 130k new customers through these paid ads.
Loop 3
It was time to re-invest these 130k new customers into the next growth loop, which was high-velocity in-app referrals.
In-app referrals are a growth marketer’s best friend; you own the channel, so the cost is almost nil, and your new customers are doing the convincing for you eliminating the trust barrier.
So we built some features specifically to generate high-velocity referrals; an example was a feature where new customers are tasked with inviting five more potential customers within a short time frame to claim a reward. Asking customers to refer quickly engineers’ velocity and effectiveness. We gained around 5M new customers through this campaign.
Loop 4
Again we fed the output of 5M new customers to the next growth loop of turning customers into influencers. We realised that while most customers end up referring only five new customers, a cohort surpasses this number by a lot. So customers who invite over 20 friends, we reward them with an experience, and they become our influencers. These super customers can redeem rewards on the Influencer Hub for every referral.
If There are Four Key Learnings You’d Like to Share with Growth Marketers, What Would They Be?
This campaign has taught us a lot; if I have to pick out four things that helped us succeed, it would be these:
- Focus on growth loops, not individual channels: Think about how you can engineer growth and marketing activities so the output of each initiative flows into the next one.
- Collaborate deeply between growth functions, like paid growth and product growth.
- Own as much of your growth engine as possible, don’t leave yourself at the mercy of the third party app platforms.
- Optimise everything for velocity; the faster you can get each lead to turn, the greater you will yield overall.
You’ve read Sweatcoin’s journey to becoming the top health and fitness app, here’s their full story on retaining their newly acquired customers at scale.
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