Cambrian Fintech with Rex Salisbury
00:28:33 · Jack Zhang
[00:28:33] S1: Yeah. We... Because as the DNA of AirWallet has really kind of started infrastructure business, it's very much of a selling to enterprise customers. It's a very sort of outbound sales driven. And that was the case for, I guess, the first five years of the company. And at one point, we realized we need to kind of do go to market in so many different countries, and it's very efficient of of, you know, using just sales, and only outbound to to to to kind of acquire customer. We start building a marketing function so the company moved from a very outbound driven company to, you know, now to kind of probably, like, I would say, seven years out in the journey that we start to have, you know, marketing function without having a partnership team. And over time, you know, now... Nowadays, probably, like, 70 plus percent of the the customer acquired from marketing. So it's kinda really shifted, from a outbound motion to a majority of inbound motion and partnership motion. And as we kind of shift into that inbound motion, we spend a lot of money on paid and and organic. But at certain point, you couldn't really invest more money because the CAC just sort of become inefficient and that the LTVs to CAC is... Doesn't make much sense. That's when we realized we need to keep investing in brand in top of the funnel and middle funnel, and then doing fully integrated campaigns so that we can continue to invest in more marketing dollar for the CAC to work. And that's basically when we started this... We started this journey about two years ago. We sponsored MacFunner, and, obviously, we got quite lucky. And, you know, MacFarlane was a tier two team at that time, but then they just did extremely well when when the constructor championship last year, and they're probably gonna win this year again. And we were also starting sponsor Arsenal and doing long at home campaigns and integrated campaigns. And as we kind of invest in more on top of funnel, and we found that we can put more dollar into the, lower funnels, so basically paid an organic investment that we... Just the last quarter, we saw our new customer grow about 50, and CAC went down 30%, because we're able to put more dollar into work. And as we invest in more marketing, the investment on on brand kinda is stable. Mhmm. But, that kind of stopped paying off.
00:30:57 · Rex Salisbury, Jack Zhang
[00:30:57] S0: And how did you know when it was time to invest in doing these global brand initiatives? Because a lot of, you know, companies, as they're starting to scale, they're trying to decide between do I scale engineering, product, go to market and sales, or do I start investing in brand? And if you invest in brand, oftentimes, there's kind of a large nebulous ROI. So have you been able to measure how effective that's been for Airwalks? [00:31:20] S1: I think we didn't know. I mean, arguably, we could have invested a bit early, but we... Because we didn't know. And and it's always hard to understand the ROI of investing brand because it's harder to measure. Right? Because the only way to measure is fully loaded CAC. Right? And and we... But at that point, we already kind of break even, so the company is not burning money. And we cannot... And we still have close to 500,000,000 in the bank. We're kind of sort of able to experiment a few things. And even we make mistakes, and we we should... You know, that shouldn't damage the company so much. It would not change the trajectory of the company. And we we also really struggle to kind of getting the efficiency, you know, by putting more dollar into into paid and and and SEO and, you know, that's kind of when we started to sort of experimenting, investing in brand and fully, fully integrated campaigns.
00:31:20 · Jack Zhang, Rex Salisbury
[00:31:20] S1: I think we didn't know. I mean, arguably, we could have invested a bit early, but we... Because we didn't know. And and it's always hard to understand the ROI of investing brand because it's harder to measure. Right? Because the only way to measure is fully loaded CAC. Right? And and we... But at that point, we already kind of break even, so the company is not burning money. And we cannot... And we still have close to 500,000,000 in the bank. We're kind of sort of able to experiment a few things. And even we make mistakes, and we we should... You know, that shouldn't damage the company so much. It would not change the trajectory of the company. And we we also really struggle to kind of getting the efficiency, you know, by putting more dollar into into paid and and and SEO and, you know, that's kind of when we started to sort of experimenting, investing in brand and fully, fully integrated campaigns. [00:32:20] S0: So basically, you know, company is breakeven. You realize doing paid acquisition, you've kind of capped that out. But now that you're breakeven, it's like, okay. Let's invest in brand and see how that experiment plays out.
00:32:20 · Rex Salisbury, Jack Zhang
[00:32:20] S0: So basically, you know, company is breakeven. You realize doing paid acquisition, you've kind of capped that out. But now that you're breakeven, it's like, okay. Let's invest in brand and see how that experiment plays out. [00:32:32] S1: Yeah. I mean, arguably, we probably should have invested a bit early. And and we also sort of didn't realize at what point we need to invest more into paid because we invested the brand for about, you know, four quarters, and we sort of... From q four, early q one this year, we start putting more dollar into pay, then we just found our efficiency is getting basically a lot of ROI on on the pay. Right? But we could arguably did it, you know, a quarter earlier maybe. [00:33:01] S0: Yeah. One of the ways to build brand too is you as the founder talking about what you're doing in the company. You were really, really quiet for about nine years. And then you've come out and you're a lot more vocal on a lot of things about Airwallex, about stablecoins, about just kind of company building stories. So why did you go from being quiet to talking a lot more publicly about your own story and the story of Airwallex? [00:33:24] S1: I think it's just partly because of my personality. I never really wanted to talk about, you know, how great we do or, you know, how much traction. It's just not... I mean, maybe it's kind of the the culture in in in Asia and Australia. It's just like people just not get used to talk about themselves and how good they are. But, you know, I think [00:33:44] S0: Welcome to America.
00:33:44 · Rex Salisbury, Jack Zhang
[00:33:44] S0: Welcome to America. [00:33:45] S1: Yeah. So I think I'm I'm kinda just learning from all the Silicon Valley founders, and and they really kind of able to build a brand on on on social, I think. And now some of the founders in Europe, I'm sitting in London, I look at how, you know, lovable and and, you know, Eleventh Labs doing that. And I was like, wow. That's really made a made a made a huge difference. And, you know, I... You know, do I... I'm really into doing that, but I feel like as a CEO of the company, I have the responsibility to to to kinda do my job. And as part of that job is really be vocal about, and be confident about my point of view and also representing AirWallet as the brand because we also, you know, kind of almost like this, like, we deserve a bit better than than where we are from a brand point of view. Like, to think about how many companies in fintech at 900,000,000 in revenue growing 95 year on year and then people never heard us. Right? Air Wallet to be recognized, not Hawaii in that category, if you heard me. And I I I feel unresponsible to kinda tell the story to the wall that to to give the rep... The recognition to the employees that are really working hard to executing in the in the last decade. And and we also have this pivot point of AI in robotics, really build that infrastructure and then build the operating system, a business operating system, we can really have the opportunity to lead the race in energetic finance. And I feel we deserve, you know, the the the tension. I feel like more people need to hear what we do.
00:35:19 · Rex Salisbury, Jack Zhang
[00:35:19] S0: Yeah. And one thing I talk about with my founders all the time is, you know, you probably should talk about what you're building because going direct is one of the most effective ways to build a brand as a company. I'm curious how you've seen that play out and where that's been most beneficial. Like, has it helped you close new customers? Has it helped generate additional investor interest? Does it make it easier to recruit and hire employees? Like, does one of those things stand out in particular, or is it a bit across all of them? [00:35:47] S1: I think it's probably a bit across all of them. Right? So I think, you know, as I said before, there's just not many people have heard of us and at this scale, which is very all euro in in Silicon Valley. And since I started doing that, I heard a lot more positive feedback from both employees, from investors, from customer. Just anything I can do, you know, I... And, know, also, I encourage my employee to do that as well. Right? So, you know, for me to to to ask other people to do something, I need to be the role model. And, you know, that I need to, you know, show, you know, other people how devoted I am to to promote the company and that, you know, they should do the same. [00:36:29] S0: Yep. You spent a lot of time, worked very hard building Airwallex. What do you do outside of Airwallex, or is it just Airwallex all the time?