Launching a Neobank for Freelancers and Gig Workers

The Challenge

The company had a good product but was stuck. Customer acquisition costs climbed each quarter, organic growth had flatlined, and the sales team spent too much time on leads that went nowhere. They knew the product worked -- they just had no repeatable way to get it in front of the right people.

Our Approach

Research, Analysis, and Strategic Foundation

• Audited the existing tech stack and identified 14 gaps that needed fixing before anything else could work
• Designed an architecture that could handle 10x the current load without a rewrite
• Created an implementation roadmap in three phases, starting with the changes that would show results within 60 days

Design, Development, and Implementation

• Redesigned the key user flows based on the research findings, cutting three unnecessary steps from signup
• Built a testing framework so the team could ship changes weekly instead of monthly
• Added personalization based on what users actually did in the product, not just demographics
• Created dashboards that gave the leadership team a clear picture without requiring a data analyst to interpret them

Launch, Optimization, and Scale

• Scaled the campaigns that were working and shut down the ones that were not
• Expanded into two adjacent market segments that early data suggested would convert well
• Signed partnership deals with three complementary companies to reach new audiences
• Built retention programs focused on the first 90 days, where most churn happened

Key Takeaways

1. The teams that measured everything iterated twice as fast as the ones running on gut feeling. Setting up proper tracking before launching campaigns made all the difference.
2. Translating the website was not enough. Each market needed different pricing anchors, different trust signals, and sometimes a completely different value proposition.
3. Growth worked best when marketing and product shared the same goals. Treating acquisition and retention as separate problems led to conflicting priorities.
4. Talking to customers every two weeks caught problems that the analytics dashboards missed entirely. Qualitative and quantitative data tell different parts of the story.
5. Over 70% of user sessions in every European market we entered came from mobile devices. Designing for desktop first and adapting for mobile was backwards.

Explore Our Guides

Related guides from our knowledge hub: