How to Launch a Consumer Product | Andrew Graham, Founder of Borrowell

Getting started with a consumer product is HARD.
Unlike selling to businesses, you can't just grind it out with cold calling. You'll need to figure out how to get noticed and drive traffic to your site.
And getting media attention is one of the best ways to do it. Andrew is the founder of Borrowell, a startup with millions of users. When he launched he was featured in dozens of publications across the country. For the first time, he describes in clear, step-by-step detail, exactly how he did it.
If you want to maximize media attention, you won't want to miss this episode.
09:01 - Leverage local media
16:15 - Earned media strategy
18:18 - Tailor your message
20:02 - PR agencies
22:37 - Launch logistics
Andrew: 0:00
I think the story you tell really depends on the audience. You really need to change your message and tailor your message to the audience.
Pablo: 0:08
Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I’m Pablo. I’m a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product-market fit. Today, we have Andrew, the co-founder and CEO of Borrowell, a fintech company that offers free credit scores, financial education, and loan products to consumers. They now have about 100 employees and over 1 million members. Andrew, it’s a pleasure having you here today.
Andrew: 0:39
Great to be here.
Pablo: 0:40
Look, the topic of today’s episode is How to Launch a Consumer Product. As I think about the differences between consumer and maybe B2B SaaS, everything’s got its challenges. With B2B SaaS, you can go out, and you can start cold calling potential businesses that you think are target market, and do some customer discovery, do some pre-sales, do that hand-to-hand combat. You can’t really do that with consumer products, and so the launch becomes a lot more important. The world is really noisy out there. It’s not easy to have a successful launch. As I understand it, Andrew, you guys had, with the free credit score product that you launched, almost this dream launch. I’m looking forward to digging into that with you.
Andrew: 1:25
Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to talking about it.
Pablo: 1:28
The big question for me just to set things off is, if I take something that – if you think about free credit scores from traditional Equifax, TransUnion, et cetera, et cetera, you have to pay $20, right? If you take something that’s worth $20 that people are paying $20 for, and you all of a sudden make it free, it seems obvious at least at first that that should explode, that a lot of people should be more than happy to join that, to become a member, and to get something that they’re paying $20 for for free. Was it that obvious at the time when you were going to launch this product, or there are some concerns? What were the things you were thinking about at that stage?
Andrew: 2:04
By the time we launched free score, we had pretty high conviction that there was a lot of consumer demand for it. That was based on a couple of things. First of all, we had been in the market with a loan product at that point for well over a year. We knew that a lot of people who were coming to us applying for our loan had very little idea what their credit score was like. They were interested to know what it was, but didn’t have a way to get it very easily. Then when you look across the world, there’s been lots of examples of companies offering free score, including large banks now in many jurisdictions. There’s lots of consumer interest and take-up on that. We had pretty high confidence that there was huge demand for it. The bigger challenge was finding the right partner. In this case, we work closely with Equifax, one of Canada’s largest credit bureaus to work out an arrangement that we were both excited about.
Pablo: 2:59
When was this? What stage was the company at? What stage was the world at in terms of free credit scores who was offering it back then?
Andrew: 3:06
Yeah. This was pretty early in our life as a company. We launched our first product, which was a lending product in early 2015. I would say that worked out okay. We had a lot of consumer interest. A lot of people were coming and applying, but it was a pretty challenging funnel because we had – because it’s a loan product, we had to have credit criteria, underwriting criteria. Many people who would apply would ultimately not qualify. Nothing’s more painful for a B2C company than you do the work marketing, you do the work building, word of mouth. People come to you wanting your product and you have to say no. That’s a massively painful process, and you’re ultimately letting down a consumer. We didn’t have anything really to offer them as a downsell or as an alternative. I think at that point, we were probably about 20 employees, so still pretty early.
Pablo: 4:12
It’s 2015, 2016. When it comes to free credit scores, were there a lot of companies already offering this, whether in Canada, or in the US, or were you one of the first?
Andrew: 4:23
In Canada, we were the first. No one had done it before in Canada. In other countries, especially in the US, it had been other companies did offer free score or had started doing that a few years before, but it had never come to Canada. We were the first to bring it to Canada.
Pablo: 4:42
There’s a lot of signals and a lot of reasons to believe that this is going to take up, this is going to be big. Then you still have to figure out how you’re going to launch this product. Can you take us back to that time? What were some of the thinking around it? Was there a goal with the launch? Did you have specific targets? How did you plan everything?
Andrew: 5:02
We certainly had targets or hopes, I guess, for how many people we would sign up over the course of each month, and what that acquisition funnel, and what those acquisition targets would look like. It was a bit of a shot in the dark in the sense of we didn’t know exactly what those numbers would look like, but we were optimistic based on the tens of thousands of people at that point who had tried to apply or had applied for a loan with us. We knew that there was a lot of interest out there. We did start off with some – even though we were still early as a company, we did start off with some really great assets. We had email addresses and customer lists from all the people who had applied to Borrowell.
Pablo: 5:44
How big were those lists at that point?
Andrew: 5:47
I would say somewhere between 1,000 and 100,000, this 10, 20,000 person range. We started with those. We also had great relationships with financial bloggers, and we knew the reporters at mainstream newspapers and television stations who were covering personal finance as well. We were known, somewhat at least, as a brand in the financial, personal finance space. We had those relationships, so we knew exactly who to call because we had already been in the market with our loan product when it came time to launch.
Pablo: 6:22
What were the goals? Was it around, okay, I want to get these many people to sign up with us and get a free credit score? I want the conversion rate from free credit score to some loan product to be X, Y, Z. Well, what were the pieces, the key metrics that you were – even though it’s all shots and dark, you don’t know what they’re going to be, but what were you optimizing for?
Andrew: 6:40
I think certainly, number of people signing up was really crucial. That was a function not only of how good a job we did at marketing, but also how efficient our funnel was. Because if someone comes to us and wants to get their free credit score, there’s an application form. They have to verify their identity. We had goals for each stage of the funnel. We had very specific numbers for how many people we thought would apply, how many would abandon, how many would fail the identity verification step. We had very clear goals for each stage of the funnel. Then from there, we did have monetization goals. We knew that some percentage of those people would take a loan with us or would apply for a loan with us. Then we were also building up a roster of other partners that we could refer our people who got a credit score too. When someone got a credit score, one of the first questions was, what would I do with this now that I know my score is good or great, or whatever it is? Now, we can help direct you to a company that would love to talk to someone like you, depending on what product the customer’s looking for.
Pablo: 7:47
Just to understand something else is when you went to launch this product, how much did you raise up to that point where you were post-seed? What was the budget for this launch?
Andrew: 7:57
We were post-seed. We had raised up our seed round in late 2014. Actually, just pre-launched, before we had launched our first product, the loan product. We started working on free credit score in 2015, ultimately launched it in 2016. It took a long time, but I can tell you, we didn’t spend a huge amount of money on this. We weren’t taking out billboards. I think the single biggest success we had was all the earned media we got. We had a lot of bloggers writing about this. We got coverage in major newspapers and on television. Lots of people in the personal finance community who talked about this because of its benefit to consumers. It really is helpful to a consumer to get their credit score and not pay for it. We got a lot of buzz and a lot of coverage for that. I think we did have a pretty sophisticated strategy around media coverage on the day of – we knew exactly which reporters we were speaking to. We had our partners at Equifax involved in the launch as well. Then over the course of the coming weeks and months, we had a follow-on strategy where we would talk to journalists in specific places. One of the great things about the product free credit scores is there’s a lot of data involved. Within a month or two, we could go to other markets. I remember I went to Saskatoon soon after the launch. We could say, here’s the average credit score in Saskatoon. Here’s why it’s above or below the provincial average or above or below the national average. That provided a really strong hook for the local – tell the local – I think it was a CBC TV affiliate to then cover that that is a story. Otherwise, why would they cover a launch that happened three months ago? The reason was because we were giving them new data that was hyperlocalized and would appeal to their local viewership. Those kinds of media hits really drove conversion. We could literally watch usage on our website spike when a TV segment, a new segment would air, or a radio segment would air was pretty cool to watch.
Pablo: 10:19
One of the points you made was around how important the partnership with Equifax was. I’d like to begin to that a bit because it’s not easy as a startup to partner with a big company. Especially in your case, you didn’t have many choices, right? How did you play those cards? What were the discussions like? How did you get them to buy into this?
Andrew: 10:41
Equifax had been a partner from the beginning because as a lender, we needed to use credit bureau data to underwrite the loans, to decide which customers we could lend to. Credit bureau data becomes very important in that. We had been working with them for a while. We had gotten to know some of their senior leadership. We started pitching them on this idea of offering free score pretty early on. I think we went to them with pretty developed proposal. We said, “Here’s why we think consumers will respond to this. Here’s the way that we plan as a company to monetize it. We think we have a clear monetization strategy. We think this is sustainable. We’re going to be able to grow with you on this. Here are our technology credentials, our security credentials. Here’s why you should trust us to do this.” We were fortunate that the head of Equifax Canada at that point had actually moved from a role in the US very quite recently to becoming head of Equifax Canada. She had had a lot of exposure to the success of free credit score in the US context. She understood the business model. She understood how it could be a win-win for us and for Equifax. She was a great champion, I think, from the beginning along with others on our leadership team to say, “Look, here’s why it makes sense to do this.” Part of that, frankly, was luck. There was the right executive in place at the right time. Part of it was, I think we did put together a fairly thought through proposal about why we wanted to do this and how we would make it work.
Pablo: 12:19
Okay. That makes sense. Going back to, you’ve got this partnership now in place. You’re going to launch this, and you start thinking about channels, right? How are we going to get the word out that this is coming? It sounds like earned media was a big piece, but I’m curious, how did you think about different channels? Because a lot of people would say, “Okay, cool, let’s go straight social. Let’s go content marketing. Let’s do a lot of digital first approaches.” The earned media and traditional media was a big piece for you. How did you think through the different channels, and why did you emphasize that part of it?
Andrew: 12:50
We certainly did have multichannel strategy. We did start testing our way on paid. We did work a lot on SEO, but SEO’s obviously a build over time. Paid can also be a build as you test into what keywords and so forth work for you. We also knew that there was a bit of a land grab here in the sense of – we were confident we would be the first company in Canada to offer free score, but we knew there’d be others who would likely follow. We wanted to establish ourselves in the minds of as many people as possible. Especially in the minds of experts in the personal finance space, we wanted to have them understand that we were breaking new ground here and others were following us to the extent that they did it. I think for all those reasons, this lent itself well to an earned media strategy. It was genuine news that was useful to consumers. There was a neat fintech big company partnership angle that also made it interesting. Especially in the early stages of a company, a lot of what you do depends on the founders. I actually come from a communications background. I spent part of my career working with journalists. I was a journalist myself briefly. This was a skill set that I had. There’s lots of skill sets that I lacked, but this was one where I had some experience. I was personally really excited about leaning in on this and felt that we could do a really good job launching this with a strong earned media component.
Pablo: 14:33
I remember back in 500 Startups, they were teaching us how to fundraise. The comment was, frankly, 80% of your success in fundraising, you’ve already done it. It’s just how good is your company. Then 20% is optimization. Let me ask that question off the bat. When you think about – everybody wants to be in the news, right? When you think about getting your story and getting reporters to write about it, do you think about it the same way like 80% is just having a good story that resonates with a broad public and that’s step one, and then 20% is whatever process and optimization you’re going to do to get them to write about it?
Andrew: 15:05
Yeah. I think you need both those components. Certainly, you will have zero success or very little success with earned media if you don’t actually have a good story to sell. Whether it’s 80/20, maybe it’s 60/40, or 70/30, I do think how you approach earned media does matter if we had launched it and not put at a press release, and not told anybody. I don’t know if we would’ve gotten any coverage. We probably wouldn’t have. I don’t think reporters are watching our website every day to see what we were launching. We had to have something innovative and exciting for them to write about. We also then did put a lot of effort into getting the word out. It’s a noisy environment out there. It’s really hard being a journalist today. You’re asked to cover a lot. Helping someone cut through the noise and saying like, “Here’s what we did. Here’s why we think it’s important.” We’ll be super responsive if you want to write about this or talk to us about it. Equifax has also agreed to put someone forward if you want to talk to them. You got to try to make life easy or easier at least for journalists and just be aware of how they work.
Pablo: 16:13
How did you approach this? What was the process like from just even beginning to end, then we’ll dig in wherever, but how did you set all that earned media part up?
Andrew: 16:22
I think with earned media, especially with a product launch, you want a really clear strategy that you want to write down and have everyone on-board with. That’s going to include really basic things like, what is the date that we’re going to launch this? What’s the date and time? You don’t want to launch a new product and tell journalists about it at five o’clock on a Friday in July. You’re just not setting yourself up for success. You want to be thoughtful about what else is happening in the world and in the news. You want to pick a suitable date and time. You’re going to put the word out, and you need your product teams, and your engineering teams, and everyone else working towards that. Before you start telling the media, you can always change that. At some point, you have to commit. You want to make sure the product and everything is working well before you launch. I mean, you may want to have a soft launch first and just to make sure that the tech is working. The risk of that of course is that if someone finds out about it and writes about it, you then launched the element of news or surprise. I think knowing which journalists or which bloggers, or whatever you’re going to approach ahead of time matters a lot. You want to understand what they like to write about.
Pablo: 17:37
How did you go out and figure out these are the reporters? I mean, high level, obviously they need to be writing about finance, right? I’m assuming there’s more to it than that. What was that process like to identify these are the 20 or 40? Actually, I’m curious how many journalists we want to go after.
Andrew: 17:52
I think in our case, there were a number of different stories and different pitches. I think we pitched the Globe and Mail, major newspaper. We pitched that as more of a business story. Okay, this is a partnership that a relatively early stage fintech company has struck with a very large multinational, established financial services company. That’s the headline here. Like, wow, Equifax and Borrowell are partnering. That’s big news. It was especially big news in 2016 when there were very, very few examples of those fintech, financial institution partnerships in Canada. We emphasized that aspect of it to business reporters. To other reporters, as I mentioned in the days and weeks that followed, we would emphasize the regional aspects or the local aspects that make the story relevant to them. To the personal finance reporters, and bloggers, and influencers, we emphasized why this is valuable to consumers and why anyone who wants to get a mortgage or anyone who wants to improve their finances should absolutely know their credit score. Here’s what goes into a credit score. I think the story you tell really depends on the audience. You really need to change your message and tailor your message to the audience.
Pablo: 19:13
Did you break it down within your team like you’re in charge of the major publications Canada-wide? You’re in charge of your influencers. Each of them went and read articles about each one just to see what stories they like to write about. How did you figure out? It sounds like story audience fit is a key concept, but how did you figure out what the story should be for which audience and then craft it?
Andrew: 19:35
Yeah. A lot of that you can do in advance, right? Emails to customers you can draft weeks ahead of time, and you can spend a lot of time thinking about them. Even testing them with your testing audience, whether it’s family, or friends, or whatever. You’re absolutely right, you can assign different audiences to different people. You can say, “I want you to half do the pitch to reporters.” Even within our team, relationships matter a lot. There’s some reporters that I’ve come to know over the years. When we pitch stories, I’m usually the one to call them. Whereas my co-founder has different relationships with certain people in the personal finance world. She would take a different list of people to reach out to. We don’t use agencies all that often when it comes to PR agencies. For a launch like this, it can be super valuable to use a PR agency on contract for a short period because they often have a lot of those relationships, and they’ll know who’s looking for what kind of story. They can really, really help with some of that groundwork, and the strategy work, but the groundwork as well of actually pitching.
Pablo: 20:42
If I think about, again fundraising as an example, just a world that I know. If you want to get in front of certain VCs, your best bet is just to take some time, and try, and find warm intros. Even though many will open cold emails, many won’t. If you have a warm intro, your conversion rate is so much higher, you might as well spend the time to do it. Is that the same advice then on earned media like if you know you want to get to these journalists or to these outlets, just try and just spend the time to figure out who’s going to introduce you, or who’s going to write to them versus spending time on or doing maybe more of a mass outreach and just trying to optimize the subject line or whatever?
Andrew: 21:20
Yeah. I would say compared to fundraising, I think there is more of a case for a mass reach out when it comes to PR. With a PR strategy, I think you may want to pick 5 or 10 journalists or bloggers who you think are the key audience for this. Do your absolute best to get a warm intro or have an agency help you. I do think there’s also a case for mass spraying or mass emailing, if you will, because you never know. Like the idea of, here’s the local credit score in Saskatoon. Why did the Saskatoon reporter pick that up and the reporter in St. John’s, Newfoundland not? I don’t know. Maybe because of what was happening that day or because of their personal interest. It’d be pretty hard to come up with – it would take a lot of effort to get warm intros to the hundred plus people you’re trying to reach out to. I don’t think that’s a great use of time. I think you focus on the short list of highest value most likely to respond to reporters, and then also go broad and see who picks up on what.
Pablo: 22:37
How do you line them up? You have a launch date, and how did you do this? You have a launch date. When did you want them to write about it on launch, a few days before, a week before? Did you organize who’s going when? How did you do the timing of it?
Andrew: 22:53
I think that’s a great question. Figuring out how to manage the logistics around launch and who gets the story when matters a lot. There can be real advantages to giving a reporter a heads-up that a story is coming. If you’ve got a relationship with a reporter, or if your agency has a relationship with a reporter, maybe you even want to give them a lot of details. You typically would do that with a commitment that they not publish it. I would say that this is now getting into the territory of advanced PR. If you haven’t done PR before, I would not recommend trying to negotiate with reporters about who’s going to write about what, when. Again, if you have an agency helping you, that’s something you might do, and you might say, “Look, to these three reporters, we trust them enough. We’re going to give it to them ahead of time so they can start thinking about it, and working on it, and pitching it to their editors.” The risk is if someone writes about you ahead of time – ahead of time, meaning ahead of your launch, then it’s possible that no one else will cover it because you can say, “My launch was on the 12th.” They’ll say, “The Globe and Mail wrote about it on the 9th”. I don’t care what you say your launch was. This is now old news. We’re not going to write about it on the 12th if someone else has already covered it on the 9th. You’re dead to us in a sense. Now, bloggers may still write about it, but journalists can be understandably very concerned about being second fiddle or covering news that’s now old. They don’t want to write about something that was covered somewhere else in a competing publication days before. Managing who gets what, when is I think an advanced PR skill that you need to give a lot of thought to. I would say, if you’re going to do that, do it with the help of an agency or someone who’s got a lot of experience with this.
Pablo: 24:41
Okay. Then to be clear, let’s say you’re then going to do it all on one day because you don’t want to risk it. You’re writing a press release yourself, and you’re sending that out to journalists. Then they can either publish that, or tweak it, or do an interview and write their own piece. Is that the way the game works?
Andrew: 24:56
Yeah. A press release is the traditional way to pitch a story to many journalists. You can google online and find many examples. There’s a typical style, but it doesn’t have to be that. For many, you could just write an email. You could really think about press release as just like another way to write an email. The things you want to include are, what’s the news? It’s super helpful to include a quote or two from you or whoever the spokesperson is from the company so that they can plug that directly into to their own piece without having to interview you. Many journalists are not going to take anything from your email or press release. They’re going to want to call you and interview you, and that’s fine. Some people, especially maybe people who are blogging or whatever, may just find it easier to take quotes directly from your email or your press release. You can pay to have your press release put up on the Newswire. There’s advantages to that. They can get it out to hundreds or thousands of journalists, depending on what your market is, but there is a cost. It depends on length that can typically think of it like a thousand dollars in many cases. It can be more or less than that. That’s a way to increase your reach, but you don’t have to do that if you’ve put together a really solid list of who the right journalists are. I think email can be really effective. Maybe follow it up by a phone call if you can.
Pablo: 26:23
Then how did it go? You launched the product whenever it was. You had all this press build-up, who published what. What did the numbers look like that first day, that first week, that first month?
Andrew: 26:34
We had a great business story in the globe. Then we had a ton of coverage in the personal finance press. Lots and lots of personal finance writers wrote about this. Beyond even the first couple of days, we started getting more and more mentions as people talked about credit scores in other contexts saying, “Hey, the demand for mortgages,” maybe it’s a story about mortgages and saying, “demand for mortgages is up.” To get a mortgage, you need a good credit score. By the way, if you want to get your credit score, there’s now this new service from Borrowell that’s free and you can get it. Even if you’re not the story, or you’re not the story everywhere on the first day, you can get those derivative mentions. Then we did have a real follow-on strategy with our PR where we would do these regional trips and regional reach-outs to specific journalists saying, “Our CEO is going to be in Saskatoon on this day.” Here are some stats about credit in Saskatoon. That strategy was I think quite successful for us.
Pablo: 27:41
Relative to what you and maybe your VCs expected, did the launch outperform? Was it more or less what expected? Was it underperformed?
Andrew: 27:48
I think it certainly was outperformed. We were really thrilled with not only the consumer response, but also the coverage we got. It really helped I think cement our brand as one that was pro-consumer wanting to help people understand their credit, wanting to help people optimize their credit. Not only did it increase our reach, but it was very much an on-brand launch for us. It was a great way to explain to the market what our values were. I think that was another great aspect of this. We weren’t just announcing a giveaway of kittens or something, which might have got us press coverage. We were announcing something that was very much at the ethos of what we are as a company. I think our investors and everyone else were very pleased with that. Then of course it’s become a really important way that we not only acquire customers, but also engage them. Credit score in helping update people’s views of their credit score at the start that was every quarter, then every month, now we do it every week, has been a great way to not only build but maintain relationships with so many of our members.
Pablo: 28:56
Awesome. Then from a fundraising perspective, did you raise on the back of this launch or right as you were doing it?
Andrew: 29:04
Yeah, that’s right. We raised relatively soon after we were able to show that not only was it a great way to acquire, but also that there was a real monetization strategy that we had believed in from the beginning, which was not only to make the Borrowell alone known to people. Also, we helped connect, and we continued to this day to help connect consumers with a range of financial services companies who can offer great products for them. That’s just a winning – I think a really solid strategy. It’s really good for the consumer. It’s good for our financial institution partners. That was a compelling story to take to as we did our next fundraiser Series A.
Pablo: 29:49
Awesome. Perfect. Listen, Andrew, we’ll stop there. Just to recap, you came up with this new product idea around credit scores. You figured out the partnership piece, and then you really spent a lot of time strategizing a launch. A big part of which was earned media. That’s a skill that I would argue very few startups really understand and can really dominate, and you made that work for you. Ultimately, that got a lot of press, a lot of noise, a lot of mentions, and that led to great traffic, and ultimately a Series A fundraise. Really appreciate you sharing that story, you sharing those details. I’m sure there are a lot of founders listening that’ll be able to use that for their own companies in order to raise awareness and have a successful launch. Thanks a lot.
Andrew: 30:40
Awesome. My pleasure.
Pablo: 30:41
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