Blomfield gave one of the first two dozen prototype cards to Eileen Burbidge, Monzo's first investor. She tweeted about the payment push notifications and a TechCrunch article followed in May 2015.

“she was so excited about the payment push notifications that she immediately tweeted about it”

After the first TechCrunch piece the team made PR the strategy. Blomfield made himself the visible figurehead, met journalists in person and gave several of them early preview accounts.

“we got so much interest following the Techcrunch article that we doubled down on PR as a strategy”

He attributes the whole of 2015's hype and signups to press, and puts the receptiveness down to timing: the UK press wanted startup stories in 2015 and had few to write about, his first investor was well known to journalists, and a new bank built from scratch fit the underdog story British press likes.

“I'm pretty sure all that press was the reason for the hype and user signups we got by the end of 2015”

Signups joined a visible queue and could climb it by sharing Monzo socially or inviting friends. The alpha was capped at 3,000 because that was the TestFlight limit, and the cards themselves had Alpha printed on them.

“If you help spread the word about Mondo by tweeting or posting to Facebook, we'll even bump you up the list.”

Scarcity was deliberate and copied from Gmail. Early adopters treated access as a badge, so bugs read as proof of being early rather than as a defect. Blomfield met all 3,000 alpha users face to face because Monzo had not built postage yet.

“exclusivity & scarcity was a big part of the strategy early on (drawing on early Gmail launch tactics)”

Monzo ran a one million pound crowdfunding round early in 2016 with the same scarcity playbook: pre-registration for existing customers, a cap of 1,000 pounds per person, Investor printed on the card and a queue skip for anyone without one.

“we set up a pre-registration system so that our customers could invest before the general public”

The PR came from a failure rather than the plan. The crowdfunding partner's servers collapsed seconds after opening despite 6,500 pre-registrations, the story of a site crashing under investor demand ran for days, and the rebuilt round sold out in 96 seconds.

“the campaign relaunched and sold out in 96 seconds, making it the fastest crowdfunding in history”

From May 2016 Monzo published its product plans and took input from the community, and told customers about problems before they were asked. The customer led rename went the same way: asked for a replacement for Mondo starting with M, around 20,000 customers sent 12,000 suggestions in two weeks.

“when things went wrong, we'd proactively tell our users about it and explain what we were doing to fix the situation”

Transparency and community were positioned against the incumbent banks, and each transparent moment paid back in goodwill and coverage without a budget attached.

“Invariably, this transparency generated more customer goodwill and positive PR.”

Instead of paying for referrals, Monzo gave each customer one Golden Ticket after roughly two weeks of use. It let exactly one friend skip the queue entirely.

“This was a one-time-use invitation that you could send to one friend to enable them to skip the queue entirely”

Gating the invite on real usage meant the people inviting already liked the product, and having queued themselves they treated an account as scarce and worth handing to a friend.

“about 40% of our signups in 2017 came from Golden Tickets, and it cost us nothing”

Monzo built payments off your phone contact list, then split the bill, request money, shared tabs, emoji reactions and Monzo.me links for friends who were not on Monzo yet. Contacts who were not on Monzo were where Golden Tickets went.

“We started with peer-to-peer payments, based on the contact-list of your mobile phone.”

The product got better as each friend joined, so adoption spread through whole friend groups. Arriving with three or more friends already on Monzo lifted the chance of still transacting at day 90 from 50 percent to 70 percent.

“Peer-to-peer payments drove massive adoption - time and time again we saw Monzo take hold in a new group of friends”

The card was bright pink, unlike anything else in a wallet, and Monzo ran customer service that people named unprompted in NPS surveys, which sat around plus 70 at the time.

“the colour alone often started a conversation when customers pulled it out of their wallets to pay”

Blomfield puts organic growth first on product quality: a delightful day to day experience against clunky incumbent banking apps, without which he says nothing else would have mattered.

“I think the day-to-day product experience (for all its functional limitations) was world-class”

Four small Facebook campaigns were run as part of a hiring assessment. Three sold benefits: no foreign exchange fees, instant notifications, overdraft control. The fourth sold the mission.

“we had him set up and run 4 small Facebook campaigns”

Mission framing beat every benefit framing by almost 300 percent and became the core of Monzo's marketing for the next couple of years.

“This was to become a core part of our marketing over the next couple of years.”

Monzo offered to turn up at large London companies with 50 or 100 cards, present for twenty minutes over lunch and let attendees skip the waiting list. That got the team into Transferwise, McKinsey and the BBC.

“We would promise to come along with 50 or 100 Monzo cards, give a 20 minute presentation during the lunch break”

As user acquisition it did not pay for the effort. It turned out to be a recruiting channel instead, producing a flood of inbound CVs a week or two after each talk.

“it didn't actually turn out to be a very effective way to sign up users, but it was an incredibly strong recruiting strategy”