Problem

Initial internal communication and audit

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In the early stage, the company envisioned building a financial lifestyle app and the technical core of the product. I organised weekly meetings with C-executives and the product team to better understand their vision and needs for creating a financial lifestyle app. After conducting discovery calls, I identified that StormPay had to solve several challenges before going to the market: 

• The issue was about how to launch into a saturated market with basic financial solutions with a big promise for the future 
• Lack of market & customer research 
• Lack of brand clarity 
• B2B and B2C brand promotion under one umbrella – a mixture of business & retail customers content on the website and promotional channels 

Developed a 3 phase, high-level plan for a Tier 1 launch with milestones and estimated completion deadlines.

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Pre-launch ‍

GTM plan and stakeholders list

 I organised several brainstorming sessions with our team to create an initial GTM checklist and a list of internal and external launch stakeholders to have a big picture to get started. 

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Metrics to measure (OKRs)

It was important to understand different stakeholders’ goals and their KPIs to pick the right top-level goals and agree on KPIs that could translate into launch success per quarter. As PMM, I also had my own go to market OKRs.

• Conduct PMF survey with 100 B2B customers - get 40 % “Very disappointed” - If we don’t launch by Q3 2022
• To get 3,000 subscribers to the waiting list by the end of Q2 2022
• Friends and family launch: Onboard 10 business customers to test onboarding and transaction
• To onboard 100 business customers within 3 months after the launch of Q1 2023
  

Research first 

During the research phase, we created hypotheses with the product team about who we should specifically target and how to validate our hypothesis. Our primary audience was Millenials and Gen Z in the UK, which equal about 40% of the population. My task was narrowing down our target for B2C and B2B. 

Through internal interviews with the key stakeholders and researching Millennials and Gen Z’s segments’ priorities, needs, and challenges in both B2B and B2C segments, our defined specific target segment looked like:

Young and future entrepreneurs (B2B)

20 - 30 year old young and future entrepreneurs who live and run business in the UK, who struggle with everyday business challenges starting from opening a business account to cash flow management, sometimes feel exhausted, anxious and unmotivated.‍

Foreign students in the UK (B2C) 

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Foreign undergraduate and graduate students who find opening a business account in the UK challenging, struggle with making international payments, money management is a nightmare, worried about the future, occasionally feel homesick.

After the market research, we launched the first StormPay Business with basic offerings such as online onboarding, a multi-currency business account, and international payments in GBP and EUR to get business traction. Here, we were raising funds with the aspiration of building an ecosystem of financial solutions for both business and retail customers.

Preparing for launch 

Positioning 

What is Stormpay? It was an important question. We had mixed positioning statements even among team members … super app, financial lifestyle app, ecosystem of financial products, financial wellbeing, embedded finance, etc. But all these were features and didn’t say anything about the company or its benefits to people. After several brainstorming calls and internal team questionnaires, we defined our positioning statement as:

For the (foreign) students and young entrepreneurs in the UK, StormPay offers an ecosystem of financial solutions, money management - Edhub and opening a personal / business account from any corner of the world within a few minutes.  

Messaging

StormPay planned to serve both business and retail customers simultaneously, and to launch B2B in the first phase. The problems were building relationships with two different audiences from the beginning, clearly articulating product differentiation and avoiding confusion regarding product launch timelines. Based on our target segment and gathered data, I incorporated the jobs to be done framework with buyer personas to create positioning and messaging that resonated with business and retail customers’ needs, as well as prioritised impactful communication channels. 

Pre-marketing activities

Stormpay’s website was mixed content directed at both business & retail customers. We created two pages and blog categories designated for B2B and B2C. While the B2B content was focused on educating young entrepreneurs about running a business at the early stages, the B2C content focused more on personal money management topics (you can read more in the pre-marketing section below). We also split the social media channels for both groups.

Pre-launch marketing was a great way to make a name for our brand, create buzz around getting to know more about our target audience, and identify effective communication channels and upcoming product launches before StormPay fully launched.

What did we do? 

• We created landing pages for business and retail products with future offerings by signing up for the waiting list
• Got started on social media to connect with our audience
• Developed our blog and posted content related to business and personal finance topics 
• Built partnerships with fintech communities (L39, Innovate Finance, Fintech Circle, Fintech Futures). Cultivated relationships with influencers in our field
• Participated in industry and targeted community events. Created industry-related whitepapers and generated organically 500 subscribers in the first month of publication

Branding

When I joined StormPay, the company already had a ready brand identity that lacked energy and boldness and which didn’t showcase Millennial and Gen Z lifestyles. At the MVP stage, our website and social media were full of stock images that didn’t build trust and convey any brand message.
We collaborated with the design team to create a brand identity to show our personality. After design team research, several creative brainstorming sessions we had:

• A brighter colour palette 
• Changed our card design
• Refreshed our website to articulate what is uniquely different (and relevant) to future customers 
• Designed Future Landing pages (still under reconstruction and on our roadmap to go live with our retail product launch release)
  
• We implemented brand identity for business and retail customers that bring two audiences together and set them apart at the same time—you can see our social media posts examples in the pre-marketing activities section below
• We invested resources in real images
  

Testing, testing

From our network created in the previous steps, we managed to get a few target users to sign up for the alpha/beta test before publicly launching StormPay Business.

‍Launch

Public launch

‍Public launch I teamed with an outsource communication consultant to create a press release about the StormPay Business launch. Having won the work, we collaborated on the strategy and execution, including what we wanted to achieve and how to get it done. We launched the product and achieved some good coverage as a result.