NBT #8: The Day We Broke Venmo

Plus, why it pays off to be weird.

There are so many automation tools nowadays that allow marketers to run campaigns at scale. The problem is that these automation tools rely on channels that are digital – email, SMS, Google ads, Instagram ads, etc. While these are helpful and necessary for most businesses, everyone is using them. So, if you think you're going to stand out by relying solely on automated digital marketing, then you're most likely going to be sorely disappointed.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think there is so much value in true grassroots marketing. If anything, you're more likely to stand out in an age where thousands of ads are being shown to a single individual on a tiny screen all throughout the day.

However, I have met very few founders who have the drive and energy to even attempt on-the-ground, grassroots marketing. And I can't help but think that they're kinda lazy...

When I started out as a marketer at Venmo, I was mostly working with one other incredible marketer, Sylvia Pak, and one of the co-founders, Iqram. Iqram had a real passion for brand and marketing. He was a hustler, and I think this is partly why Venmo was so successful.

I can't help but laugh when people say things like, "Wow, Venmo was such an overnight success!"

"Overnight success" could not be further from the truth. Venmo was so much hard work for many years by an amazingly hard-working group of smart individuals who lived and breathed Venmo. I'm honestly shocked looking back on my younger self, because I have no idea why I was so obsessed with Venmo being a success. Maybe it's because I was young and single and really craving one big win in my tech career. I don't know.

God bless Mike Vaughan, our COO, who was my manager at the time. I slacked, texted, email him at all hours of the day every day for years and he never lost his patience with me. He knew how to unleash all my energy on project after project.

Back in the day when nobody in NYC had ever heard of Venmo, we were trying out all sorts of shenanigans to get people's attention. Here are a few wild things we tried that were non-scalable and non-lazy.

1. We printed out lottery-like scratch off cards and handed them out to people standing in line waiting to get into night clubs. (Shout out to Sylvia for this brilliant idea). Scratch off cards were worth anywhere from $5 to $500 and we handed them out to tons of people all over NYC waiting to get into clubs. They could redeem the amount with a unique code if they downloaded the Venmo app. Note: People waiting in line are very likely to pay attention to what you have to say because they can't go anywhere; they're stuck in a line.

2. We offered to give $5 to people waiting in line for buses all over NYC. (So, I'm not sure if anyone else on the team did this other than myself because at the time, I was constantly taking the QM express buses between my place in Manhattan and my parents place in Queens. Haha.) But, to my earlier point about people waiting in line being receptive to conversation...people waiting for the bus with me nearly always downloaded them app when I offered them $5 to try out Venmo.

3. We went bar-hopping and told people we would repay them for their drinks on Venmo. Things got aggressively competitive one night between me, Sylvia, and Iqram – we wanted to see who could get the highest number of downloads that night – and we ended up getting ourselves kicked out of a bar.

4. We gave out Venmo branded coasters to restaurants all over NYC. This was a fun one. We printed out coasters and asked restaurants and bars to provide them at tables because lucky patrons would be able to get repaid for part or all of their meal by downloading Venmo.

Lastly, shout out to Thomas Jeon (engineer) and Sylvia Pak for coming up with this one. We broke Venmo one day after launching a game called the Venmo money tree. We launched a website that showed a tree with leaves falling. You had 30 seconds (or maybe it was 1 minute, I can't remember) to click on as many leaves as possible. Each leaf was worth a certain amount of money, and you had 3 tries to collect as many leaves as possible. Once you had your total amount, you could cash out via Venmo. This ended up being way more successful than we had anticipated (driven by college students), and Venmo actually broke for a day because we had too many people using it.

In conclusion – do something different. Get creative. Get weird. Be the weirdo standing at bus stops asking people if they know about your product.