Scaling growth beyond channels: Simon Lejeune on the next playbook for Fintech

I got into growth through politics and the 2012 elections in Belgium. I was running Facebook ads in their early days, and the targeting was still super granular. You could target a single street. It was a side project, but it showed me how powerful and self-serve online advertising could be.

I took it to Montreal, joined Busbud in 2014, a startup selling intercity bus tickets around the world. We grew it into the largest bus ticketing site in the world, connecting thousands of cities. We had an almost infinite catalogue of bus connections and writing an ad for every route wasn’t going to happen. So Damien Gonot and I tapped into the Google Ads API, automated the operation, pumped out millions of ads and optimized CPC bids for every pair.

That was the first time I saw how tech could scale growth beyond just grinding it out. And how important it was to find strong tech partners who understood growth. Damien and I still work together to this day.

Then I spent 4 years at Hopper, another travel startup that felt like a rocketship. I got there as they were making a big call: kill the website, go mobile-only. The CEO, Fred Lalonde, had this vision. Expedia and Booking were dropping billions on Google Ads. We couldn’t compete on that field. So we didn’t. We went mobile, leaned into paid social, where they weren’t strong.

They had all this cash tied up in search, and we were building something that didn’t make sense to them. We got really good at it, using our proprietary hotel and flight deals engine and automation tools like Smartly to spin up ads fast. A crazy $49 flight from Montreal to Vegas shows up, we’d launch a Meta ad in real time, with a custom creative, targeting and bid to optimize our ROAS.

Hopper took off because we synced up acquisition and retention in a way that clicked. On the acquisition side, paid social was our engine, especially before all the privacy changes hit.

I’d learned at Busbud how to handle a long tail, thousands of routes, millions of combinations. Our Hopper ads engine scaled fast and Facebook loved it, as they were after the billions that Booking and Expedia were spending on Google. We got early access to their travel products and helped shape them. 

Retention was where it got interesting. Going mobile-only meant we owned the relationship. Google’s web model is click, convert, gone. We could reach back with notifications, price alerts that told you when to book. You’d wait a few days, save $150, and feel like Hopper was the deal. That drove repeat bookings, made it a habit.

Expedia and Booking were obsessed with closing you on the first visit, running these massive A/B testing machines to juice conversions. Their sites turned into Frankenstein messes, all to avoid paying Google twice. We played for lifetime value, built an app people liked using.

The first one is don’t take on giants where they’re strongest. And retention’s the other big one. Acquisition’s great, but keeping people matters more. Hopper showed me that. Get them in, sure, but make the product something they stick with. With ads optimization algos levelling the playing field, retention and monetization, through great products, ultimately rule. 

And tech’s your leverage. Ads APIs at Busbud, dynamic feeds and notifications at Hopper, those let small teams do big things.

Every marketing channel sucks right now. This is an observation by Andrew Chen that I agree with. We’re in this in-between era where the old channels are saturated, less incremental, reach local maxima quickly – but the new AI-first channels are just emerging.

If you’ve got a team locked into a channel and it stops working, they’re stuck with nothing to do – or worse, spend a lot of time and effort grinding through 10-20% gains. 

We changed things up and every team focuses on a specific metric we’re trying to grow, like assets under administration, number of clients, or getting people to direct deposit with us. They don’t get a set of tools or channels handed to them. I’d rather hire smart people who are generalists, give them freedom and resources to move that metric however they need to.

AI also levels the playing field in terms of channel expertise – everyone should be able to do paid social, email, conversion optimization, SEO or incentives. I just need really smart and really driven growth-minded people on my team.

The upside’s all about focus and keeping things flexible. It creates a more interesting environment, keeps people sharp because they’re owning the outcome, not just keeping some tool running. 

It’s not always smooth. Teams can overlap, try the same thing without knowing it. The tech stack feels it too—Braze handles a lot of growth hacks, but we’re definitely stretching it.

Fintech growth is cyclical, just like the markets. Incentives are a great bear market investment we unlocked in 2022. In bull markets, when new client demand is high, ads perform strongly, there’s a lot of momentum and word-of-mouth that you should encourage through ads, content, influencers, referral promos…

But when the markets turn, the ROAS falls off a cliff and it’s better to leverage your existing audience, communicate through your owned channels and get your clients to consolidate with you through controlled and easy to attribute spending.

What we’ve found is that our clients really liked our product, but there was a lot of apathy in consolidating their accounts, discovering new products or finally getting their partner to sign up. Clients already know “why”, and incentive campaigns give them a “why now”. 

The other advantage over ads, is that measurement and attribution is much more accurate, almost deterministic. Incrementality is still modelled, but you can deploy millions of dollars much more confidently, personalize the offers, keep track of the returns, and reinvest the profits into more campaigns – creating a powerful growth loop.

I’ve also always liked the concept of rewarding clients to try or do something in the app, rather than pay Facebook or Google to show them ads to convince them to do that same thing. That’s why we created Carrot Cash at Hopper. And it is counterintuitive, but with a great incentive experience and a great product, there’s a lot of loyalty and brand love that come out of rewarding new and existing clients.

And it’s super fun to come up with new creative ideas, like physical rewards, private offers, drive engagement through checklists or leaderboards – and figure out what our clients like the most.

You do need a large base of clients and owned channels like emails or the app where people pay attention, visit daily, so you can show them your offer. And as always, a great product people like, which leads to great retention and allows you to make rich offers. That’s why it’s also very hard to replicate.

It’s a strong partnership with Data Science and Finance. First, we make a growth model where we integrate our assumptions. Growth people work with Data to create a few scenarios — if we do this offer, we believe we can triple applications to this product, and here’s the total cost. It doesn’t need to be perfect, and you want to be optimistic and do a bit of internal selling, “What do we need to believe for this to work?”.

Data science is also in charge of reporting the results as we go — here’s what’s actually happening, does it track to your model or not? It’s a colder analysis, popping your bubble sometimes when you’re too optimistic. Incrementality analysis is key.

Finance also weighs in, usually a bit more conservative, but they have a broader view of the investments we’re making across the business and what kind of returns and risk investors are looking for. You need to build mutual trust to keep growing the scope and budgets of each campaign.

We test a lot too, see what’s most incremental, what scales, maybe mix a discount and a bonus to maximize impact. That’s how we keep it growing, making sure it’s something we measure very closely and optimize.

I like working in Growth because you have to manage both getting to your numbers for the month or the quarter, with lots of small, opportunistic hacks and optimizations. But you have to simultaneously be really bullish on the long-term and skate where the puck is going.

I go back to where we want to be in 5 to 10 years. At Wealthsimple, we want to be the largest financial institution in Canada. That’s the lens. Does a project get us closer to that goal, and does it get us there quickly enough 

I was lucky to work with three great visionary CEOs who pushed me to think big and think long term. LP Maurice at Busbud inspired me to hustle to meet and learn from world-class people in SEM and SEO, Fred Lalonde at Hopper for his ruthless prioritization and his obsession against local maximum, and then Mike Katchen at Wealthsimple, he always says, cool idea, but what’s the way more ambitious version, what’s the 10x version?

The original head of growth at startups are the founders – and as a hired growth lead, you have to tap into that original hustle they had to get the company off the ground, to think big, when everyone else thought they couldn’t make it. 

I also really enjoy business history, and there are a lot of inspiring founders and growth leaders from the recent and distant past. The Acquired podcast’s been an interesting source of inspiration, hearing how small companies turned into empires. I love Founders by David Senra.

The Big Banks are very old businesses, with so much to learn from. When we think we have an original idea, we find out a version of it was invented or tested by a bank decades ago.

US banks in the ‘50s would offer you a toaster if you opened a checking account because they couldn’t give interest rates. The same idea still works today, and one of our most successful campaigns was to offer clients a free iPhone to transfer their large pension accounts to us.

I’m not a big tools guy, but I’ve had a really great experience with Braze at Wealthsimple for lifecycle stuff, so I’d pick that. I’m excited about new AI sales tools to replace Salesforce. I’m testing one called Regal that I’m really liking. And for measurement, AppsFlyer, though I’m starting to worry a bit about the value because attribution’s getting so messy.

I’m catching up on some classics, like Naval Ravikant’s Almanac and Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. For podcasts, Acquired and Founders are great listens.

The boring answer is ChatGPT, like everyone else. But I’m also using one called Habits! to track things I want to encourage or remove from my life, which has been helpful.