Born in Belgium, Wealthsimple’s Chief Growth Officer Simon Lejeune wanted to be a journalist growing up. His parents did not think it was a great idea, and Simon decided to study business engineering to keep his parents happy, with the secret goal of, one day, owning a newspaper. He moved to Montreal after graduation, and held various marketing jobs that led him to become head of user acquisition at Hopper, a flight booking app now valued at $5B. In February 2020, a few weeks before Covid paralyzed the airline industry, Simon generously agreed to meet with me at the Hopper HQ in Montreal to give me some growth tips for my own fintech venture. The Chinese economy was starting to grind to a halt, and I asked Simon if selling plane tickets was harder as a result. I was surprised when he said conversion had never been as high, as airlines were discounting their tickets. This bonanza did not last, though, and Hopper ended up making deep cuts to weather the storm. Simon left Hopper to start a growth marketing agency and Wealthsimple quickly became one of its top clients. Founded in Toronto in 2014, Wealthsimple was initially a robo-advisor offering low-cost ETF portfolios. In 2019, it ran with Robinhood’s playbook and launched the first zero-commission trading app in Canada. It was an instant hit, but it became more than that after Covid hit. People were bored and flush with generous government aid cheques. As a result, an entire generation got into stock trading using the Wealthsimple Trade app. When Simon was offered a full-time job at Wealthsimple in 2021, he did not think twice. Simon Lejeune: I worked for like eight to 10 different clients. Wealthsimple was one of them, and I was super close. I was seeing the rocket ship was about to launch and I was on the launch pad. Don’t stay on the launch pad when someone offers you a seat on the rocket. I really liked Mike [Katchen], Brett [Huneycutt], and Rudy [Adler] in marketing. I thought they were super smart and knew what they were doing. So I decided to fully join Wealthsimple with a couple of people who were working with me at the agency at the time. We’re still working with Wealthsimple now. Julien Brault: Did you move to Toronto? SL: No, I stayed in Montreal. That was also interesting because it was during COVID. Wealthsimple really grew during COVID and went from a couple hundred employees to over a thousand. We’re a super distributed team. My leadership team in growth marketing, I have someone in New York, someone in Vancouver, someone in San Francisco. It’s very remote first. We do have a core office in Toronto where people go. JB: You joined Wealthsimple in 2021, and at the time Wealthsimple was known as the robo advisor. I think they had started Wealthsimple Trade, so they were a little bit like the Robinhood of Canada. It was around $10 billion in 2021 when you joined, and now we’re talking about $100 billion. There was a 10X growth. How is marketing different to go from 0 to 10 or 10 to 100 in a fintech? Obviously you cannot just do the same thing to get so much more assets. SL: Totally. It was a super important pivotal year for Wealthsimple, a pivotal moment for sure. I think the success was already sort of baked in at its inception because it’s the same people, the same mission, the same culture, and the same naive ambition of trying to become the largest financial institution in Canada. What is also still the same is a very high quality, high bar for product. We’re a very product led organization. We still grow mostly by expanding our product suite or improving existing products. What hasn’t changed is our brand strategy. It’s the same people making still unbelievable, unique, different ads. JB: I had a question I wanted to ask you later about that. I see a lot of fintechs that reach a certain scale and all their marketing budget was performance, Facebook ads, TikTok ads. Then they realize huge companies like Airbnb are investing so much in branding, and they start to say, “Okay, we should probably put a percentage at least of our budget into branding.” In the Wealthsimple case, I’ve followed them since pretty much the beginning. They always had care for branding. I’ve seen billboards since way before it was worth $10 billion. What’s the role of branding at Wealthsimple and why do you think they invested in branding since the beginning? SL: Yeah, I think there’s multiple ways to tell this story. When I think about it, it’s because that’s what the people at the time in the marketing team knew how to do. Rudy [Adler] was one of the three co-founders, and he worked in ad agencies in New York. He was this very creative guy, and he hired a bunch of people from very creative backgrounds. They didn’t really necessarily have the performance marketing DNA. In a way, that’s how we’ve operated. Hire really smart people and then let them do what they’re really good at. They’re really good at brand marketing. In retrospect, it was kind of interesting because it is an industry where you need a lot of trust and credibility for convincing people to move their life savings to you. All that brand investment they did in the first few years paid a ton of dividends. All that brand investment they did in the first few years paid a ton of dividends. When we went from $10 billion to $100 billion, we started to really accelerate with growth marketing. We had a lot of that trust and credibility and brand love in the bank, so to speak, to make those performance dollars go even further. The way I think about brand and performance marketing is that they have different time horizons. If you’re an early fintech startup, I usually would still advise you to invest first in performance marketing. I think Wealthsimple is maybe a bit unique in that sense, unless you have a crazy filmmaker on the team who can make amazing films, then let them do that. But you do performance marketing because you don’t know if you’re going to be alive in five years. Why would you invest in a brand that might not be around in two, three years? Eventually, as you gain confidence in your trajectory, you want to start investing in brand slowly and more and more. I see it as like a portfolio of investment where you need to have dollars going into next week, next month, next quarter’s results, but also start investing more in brand for the next two, three, five, 10 years. It compounds everything else. JB: Do you know what the percentage of investments in branding versus measurable ROI driven performance marketing is today? SL: We do more growth marketing, more performance marketing. I don’t know the exact percentage, but the way I think a brand marketing investment is sized, you set a budget based on how big your company is, how much you can spend without obviously bankrupting the company. Maybe you’re going to put 10, 20, 30% into brand. Whereas performance marketing budget, you don’t necessarily have a set budget to spend, but you have a target you want to hit in terms of return on investment or payback periods or IRR. If you find a pocket of profitable investment, you start to really press your advantage. It’s not even a cost center, it’s more revenue generating investment. We have found a few pockets like that, and we’ve been able to scale our investment into growth marketing to a point where it started to take over any other investment at the company at some point. JB: How do you decide if you should invest in a campaign about the cash account or the trading account or the tax account? How do you make those types of decisions? SL: In terms of growth marketing, we try to be a little bit more agnostic and say, how are we going to deploy our budget to get as many clients through the door in a profitable way? Eventually, what we’ve seen is once clients get through the door, they slowly but surely adopt most of our products. JB: So if I understand well, the goal is to get as many new clients as opposed to being like, “This line of business is a little more profitable.” It’s not really a profitability calculus, but more how much it costs to get someone in the door. Maybe it’s not the most profitable product, but then the lifetime value is high, so you can cross sell. SL: Yeah, it is a business, right? So we are trying to drive revenue growth to allow us to grow as a business. We do look at each product line and profitability. But like you said, the keyword we’re looking is lifetime value. There’s no point in you joining, getting burned into a very profitable product for us that was a bad fit for you, and then you’re going to leave after six months. JB: As a marketer who manages millions of dollars per month in ad spend, what keeps you up at night? SL: The fraud on Meta is out of control. I don’t know if you saw the recent report that about 10% of their revenue was potentially coming from fraudulent ads. If you go into the Facebook ads library today and you type the keyword “Wealthsimple,” there’ll be more fraudulent ads, but that works with any fintech brand, by the way. You can try Questrade, any, even the banks. There will be like 10 times more fraudulent ads than legitimate Wealthsimple ads. They use the name Wealthsimple in the copy and images. They use fake AI avatars of [Wealthsimple CEO] Mike Katchen or whatever. We report them every single day. We try to warn our customers about this, but it takes several days to take them down. JB: Their AI is not able to do a simple keyword search? SL: Clearly, their AI is able to do it, right? So it’s not about whether they have the technical capability. Google clearly allowed this a long time ago, where you can’t use my brand in your ad copy if I register my brand. Facebook just needs to do the same. I almost want to tell our customers “Never click on an ad online about Wealthsimple,” but I don’t want to say that because I still want to use those channels. JB:
