Nude

The original approach was based on codes, user 1, could generate a code, that user 2 could enter in their app, thereby ‘teaming them up.’ This was an efficient approach from an internal complexity perspective and from an experience point of view, it was well suited to allowing existing customers to come together.

However, given the size of Nude’s customer base at the time, the most common use case, and the one a startup chasing growth was most interested in, was attracting new customers, which meant a customer inviting someone who was new to the app to join. Sending over a short code and not much else didn’t work well for this purpose, with the new customer having to download the app and complete the entire onboarding journey before said code would be of any use. The low conversion rate suggested we needed to do more to get the second, new, person up and running.

Instead of the code, we switched to sharing a link. For existing customers, this further sped up the connection, clicking the link did the job, no codes to enter. For a prospective new customer however, the link took them to the App Store, making downloading it quick and easy.

We then allowed this new customer to skip chunks of onboarding. Instead of asking them to enter a savings goal of their own, we let them copy the original user’s, and included options to copy other data, like address history, speeding the process up for them.

Additionally, we added prompts and reminders to the first customer’s experience, both so they could see their partner’s progress, but also enlist them as help to nudge the process along!.

Conversion improved immediately after launch, contributing 12% of all new customers in its first month (a record for the feature) and increased the percentage of invited users that downloaded the app going on to open accounts from 30% to more than 60%. This actually led to a marked drop in Nude’s customer acquisition cost.

Given that couples are the vast majority of first time buyers, nailing this feature was hugely important in of itself, but also as a cultural point for the team. Previously, understandably, they had favoured pursuing new features over modifying the old, so the immediate and measurable improvement helped to really sell the concept of iterating on what we already had, leading to a number of other improvement pieces that further contributed to boosting customer and deposit numbers.