Spriggy, a Masterclass in Scaling Consumer Fintech: Alex Badran

The Spriggy story returns to Fintech Chatter Podcast! Five years after his debut, our most-requested guest ever is back with insights you can't afford to miss.

Dexter Cousins chats to Alex Badran, the founder of Spriggy, a fintech app designed to help parents teach their children about money management.

This isn't just another success story - it's a masterclass in scaling consumer fintech in a challenging market.

Alex shares his decade-long journey with Spriggy, its growth to over one million users, and the importance of real-world financial education for kids.

Join us as we take a deep dive into building a category and product that has captured the hearts and minds of millions of Australian families.

Favourite quotes
"We created a category that didn't exist before."
"You can't outsource growth to a partner."
"Your ability to learn is what matters."

Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background of Spriggy
03:58 The Problem Spriggy Solves
07:13 Understanding User Needs and Early Development
10:10 Adapting to Growing Users and Changing Needs
13:07 The Impact of Technology on Kids' Financial Education
15:57 Growth Strategies and Market Positioning
19:12 Partnerships and Their Role in Growth
22:12 Lessons Learned and Personal Growth as a Founder
29:10 The Importance of Learning and Enjoying Work
30:59 Authenticity in Leadership
33:33 Navigating Team Dynamics and Cohesion
37:00 Adapting to Economic Changes in Hiring
41:49 Future Vision for Spriggy
47:28 Behavioral Education and Parenting
51:56 Podcast intro vid no audio.mp4

About Spriggy

Spriggy is Australia’s #1 Pocket Money app that helps kids learn about money. Spriggy was founded in 2016 with a clear mission to help parents teach their kids about money. 

We believe that financial literacy is a crucial life skill, one that lays the groundwork for a secure and confident future. 

By learning how to manage money from a young age, kids are empowered to make informed financial decisions as they grow, mastering everything from saving and spending to setting goals and budgeting.

Download Spriggy 

Explore Careers at Spriggy

Contact: info@tieronepeople.com

Connect on with Dexter Cousins on Linkedin

Hire Exceptional Fintech Talent

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Transcript

Dexter (00:00)
1 million paying users for an Aussie Fintech consumer app is a remarkable feat no matter which way you look at it.

And this week's guest is here to tell us how he got there.

The Spriggy story returns to Fintech Chatter after making their debut five years ago.

Alex Badran is back to share insights that you simply cannot afford to miss.

This isn't just another success story, it's a masterclass in how you scale a consumer fintech here in Australia.

I'm Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm dedicated to connecting high growth fintech like Spriggy to exceptional leaders.

For those of you who don't know Spriggy, they're Australia's number one pocket money app.

Founded in 2015, Spriggy now serves over one million customers across Australia.

Before I chat to Alex, thanks for tuning

If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to give us a like and subscribe.

And if you're listening on podcast, make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you're really in the mood, make sure you leave us a comment or review and let us know what you thought of today's show with Alex.

Dexter (01:09)
Alex, welcome back. Thanks, Dexter. It's good to be back. How long have I been hustling you to do this? Oh, was mid 2020, probably late 2020. You asked me to come back on So it's been a while. So you're actually the number one requested guest to come back on the show from our listeners. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, one of our most popular episodes ever. And yeah.

As anybody who listens to the show will know, probably Spriggy's number one fan. My kids have, and myself have been used as of Spriggy, I think for what, last seven years now. It'd be incredible to watch the journey. But we're gonna talk a little bit about that journey today. But before we do, maybe as if anybody who doesn't know Spriggy, can you give us the big problem that you solve?

Yeah, thanks Dexter and thanks for all the support over the years. Our flagship product is the Spriggy Pocket Money app. It helps parents teach their kids about money through real world experience. Parents sign up online and through the app they can teach their kids about earning, saving and spending responsibly. Kids get a prepaid card in their own name through which they can spend on buy the things they want and through the app they can save for the things they care about. So they can save for things via savings goals.

and they can earn money via regular pocket money or chores set by their parents. Outside of our flagship product, we also have a number of other products. Notably, we have a schools product, which is used in 10 % of primary schools in Australia. We have an investment proposition, and we also have Spriggy Mobile, which is the latest product we're offering. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when was Spriggy founded? I'm getting the sense there might be a 10-year anniversary this year. This will be our 10th year. We've been in market around just over eight and a bit years.

I think that first year was very much what are we going to build, how are we going to build it, lot of the early ideation. We launched the flagship product late 2016. So just been in market for just over eight and a bit years now. And as you said, the company's been around for a little longer than that. listening to you talk about the products, it's kind of, I feel as if I've almost watched the growth of Spriggy in tandem with the growth of my kids and yeah.

They were like, what, six? I think when they first became customers. Daughter's now 13. Her kind of, Beautifully, she still calls it spriggy money, not pocket money. But it's amazing to see how her, now she's out with her friends, going to shopping centers and stuff like that. And I'm starting to get alerts on my phone going, your daughter spent X amount of lush. Talk us through that kind of early stage of the, yeah.

the original product and how you kind of came up with the problem to solve, because you don't have kids yourself. kind of one of the things that see a lot of founders make as a major mistake is to try and solve problems that they don't really have any kind of real life experience of. Yeah, it's good. I think you've seen the growth of your kids and also you've known the business since there was a handful of us. So you've seen the growth of the company through all those phases. I think

I think how do we approach the problem and how did we empathize with the user base, know, not having kids in the founding group? I would say that my background is in academia. So I did a postgraduate degree in mathematics, which was really just a crash course in problem solving very well. And so while we didn't have customers in the demographic in our household, we came at it with the very first principle of problem solving approach.

I did have nephews and nieces around the same age as your kids are now, kind of anywhere between eight to 13, my nephews and nieces were in that group. But yeah, we very much came to the problem cold. We looked at it from a perspective of how do you teach people about money, not just kids, how do you teach people about money in a world where cash is becoming less and less prevalent and digital payments are on the rise. So that was kind of the starting point.

we believe and there's literature to support this, you learn about money through real world practice. So you learn by doing. kind of pillar one is how do you teach people about money as it becomes less tangible. Pillar two is you learn by doing. So how do we create experiences that are educational, but engaging and there's behavioral education there. So people get to make decisions and through those decisions, they can learn.

We also looked at the themes taking place in finance, which is the ability for technology players to own a part of the life cycle of the financial product life cycle, focusing on user experiences without actually having to be the underlying bank themselves. So we brought those experiences together and very early on, we had these pillars which we thought made a lot of sense. We thought looking at where the world was going, what we were building made sense and

all the themes that we were playing into would become more true as time went on. But then we very quickly realized that that's all good in theory, in practice, you you need to find a group of customers and solve a real problem for them. So we went out looking for customers, all sorts of ages, parents with kids, friends of mine, older people, younger people, all sorts of age groups. And we learned pretty quickly that

You build your behaviors around money at a very early age and a lot of people have a great solution for learning about money, which is apathy. So if you're trying to solve this problem when someone's in their 20s or 30s, it's too late. Very quickly on in our experience as a company, we focused in on, well, the right age to learn about money is when you're young and how do you help teach kids about money? It's through their parents. And so...

I would say probably in the first couple of months of running the business, we went from those kind of pillars to how do we help parents teach their kids about money via real world experience, noting full well that if you're going to help the kids, you really have to solve a parent problem first. So we went from that abstract concept all the way down to working with customers, talking to customers, learning about their day-to-day problems. And I think that's been a kind of core theme that's really stuck with the business since those early days. So remember when we first met?

and still early days of the product. And I think I was probably more excited about the product than you were. I think you still are. Yeah, I think I still am. But I remember, and this was kind of the most powerful moment, I thought, I've got to reach out to these guys and kind of just find out what they're doing. And it was my kids when they started using the product, and I think it was six months in. And there were two things that they'd taken.

now were terms of taxis, they called Ubers and pocket money, they now called Spriggy money. I saying you don't know how powerful that is, right? That you kind of got something that people now associate kind of something with your name, right? And something that's quite an emotional thing, Like pocket money, you get rewarded. How have you found the kind of journey with

As the kids have grown up and perhaps, know, I'm not very cool to my daughter anymore. A year ago I was her hero. Now when I drop off at school, I go to park around the corner so she can't see me. How do you deal with the kind of user base starting to grow up and become young adults and move away from pocket money and you know, kind of, you know.

the piggy bank kind of branding and those things? It's a great question and I think it's one of the most fascinating parts of the business. We deal with parents and kids and kids go through so many changes through the ages of 8 to 15. I'd say that from a customer life cycle, typically what we see is what you've described is your experience. So parents of young kids, we call it parent led engagement or parent driven engagement where

The real, if you look at the family, the person driving the engagement is mom or dad, usually mom. What we would find is they would, Seaspringy, would solve a parent problem predominantly. It enables parents to give their kids independence. It has a safety wrapper around it. It's educational for kids and it's fun. So they're the kind of four brand pillars we have, typically led by the parent. And then as kids grow up and they become older, they become more independent and we see that flip.

what was parent led engagement now becomes child led engagement. So the behaviors within that family unit are really being shaped by what the kids are doing. And that presents a very interesting product problem and a very, and we think of the product problem in two buckets. The functional utility. So when kids get older, they might have a part time job called babysitting and they need to get paid by an employer. So there's real clear parts of the product that need to evolve for a use case.

And then you have the emotional utility where kids might find the branding suitable when they're, you know, before they get to high school, when they get to high school and when you're a kid, you want to be a kid. When you're a teenager, you want to be as far away from a kid as possible. mate, the Kylo Ren and Frozen cards always, they're still there but you Yeah, and it's funny because kids want to distance themselves. They want to be perceived as adults so they want to distance themselves from childhood. So it's less actually about

an absolute branding question. It's more about a relative. It's like, well, I no longer want to be perceived as a child. It's very different to I want to be perceived as XYZ. And then when you go from being a kid to being an adult, adults actually want to be kids again. So we have this life cycle of branding where Spriggy branding for the younger kids makes a lot of sense. Then there's a teenage branding piece and the functional utility piece. But there's also this connective tissue, which is

parents are sitting across the whole experience and there's a nostalgic part, which is Spreaky kind of derived from the piggy bank and parents are thinking about their childhood. So how do we navigate that? It's been fascinating learning about that as our kids grow up. So just like your kids are growing up with the product, all of our kids are growing up with the product. I think we originally thought we would need to put something completely different in the space, which is Spreaky suitable for this age group, but they need to distance themselves completely. We've actually just learned that's just not true.

While there is from kids they want to be perceived as adults, there is a safety and familiarity that comes with the brand that they've grown up with. And we've done all sorts of stuff in market trying to understand how people respond to that brand transition. And one of the surprising insights I think for me and the team is how much value they place on that safety and familiarity. So we originally started with concepts which were when you turn 13,

what does it look like and it looks and feels a lot more different to your original experience. We brought that all the way back in. So right now, for kids who are older than 13, the Spark Mode, so it's Spriggy Spark Mode, is within the current app, kids get to a certain age and parents can activate that mode. So through it you have the ability for parents to turn on and off ATMs, the ability to get paid by an employer, kids can now start to transfer money to their friends, but it's definitely supervised by parents.

The look and feel of the product has evolved for kids. Different car designs, kind more mature car designs. And the user experience itself is more adult. The branding is more adult. But critically, it's still spiky. It's not not spiky. And we found, we tested a lot of permutations and we found that's what people really responded with. If that were an independent app, it's part of the same experience, it'd be a top 10 app in the app store. What's really interesting is to hear you talk about the age to make kids are

It's about 16 months between the two of them. And they've both now got iPhones. And they've got them within a year of each other. And it's almost like the iPhone has been the catalyst for the next phase of growth, not the turning of the age. And it's amazing how it's changed their lifestyle and independence.

I would equate it to when I was a kid and I got a bike and all of a sudden I could ride anywhere. Them getting the iPhone is a bit like me getting the bike. All of a sudden they can go to the shops with their friends in the shopping mall and mum and dad are just a text away. They can use their phone and they've forgot their card. They can pay by Google Wallet or whatever. What are you seeing around, I guess, the changes in behaviour?

from kids as they grow and as they start to become more exposed to this kind of digital world? Yeah, it's fascinating. think the rate at which the world is changing is the fastest it's been ever. So year on year technology changes are rapid and they're accelerating. I think kind of starting with the parents, if you talk to parents, when we do talk to our parents, it's...

Tell me about the world in five, 10 years. Tell me about how you feel about the world and the role you're playing bringing up your kids. I think you'll get feedback which is in and around this. I want them to grow up to be good people. I want them to be happy, healthy, kind. There's a dimension of safety which is they see their role as keeping them safe and preparing them for this world. And then there's this role of education, teaching them and giving them the core skills which is how to...

having core financial skills is part of that, but that's one piece of the bigger puzzle. And then, so that's kind of how parents feel. And I don't think that's changed. I don't think that's different today than it was five years ago. I think the landscape through which they are required to parents is changing. And that is, I would say daunting is probably the word that comes to mind for parents. There's no real, you know, there's no real,

There's no manual, there's no easy way for them to do it. And while there's a lot of advice out there, the tools to do that don't necessarily exist. So that's kind of from the parent's lens. And I think that kind of looking at it from the kid's lens, like the technology available to them is, as you said, it enables them to access and see and interact with so much more of the world than you or I had. The question is really how do you enable them to do that safely? It's not a question of...

Ultimately, technology is here and it's part of our lives, whether we like it or not. The question is, at what point in time do you expose kids to the next thing? And how do you do so in a way which, going back to the kind of way people perceive our brand, that enables them to have independence in a way that is safe, it's engaging and engagement is important because that's how you learn and it's also fun. And so how do we think about it in that context?

As I mentioned earlier, are a flagship app and the Pocket Money proposition is the kind of core, that's the kind of core pillar of the business. As we look to do more for our customers, we're looking at tackling some of these problems as well. So how do you think about the problem of a parent giving their kids their first phone? You know, when that happens is different for every family. Some kids might be at boarding school and might need to talk to their parents. At a younger age, some parents,

might not necessarily not want that to happen until an older age. And how do you do that in a safe way? How do you provide parents with the controls that enables them to do that? And how do you ensure that kids are learning through the experience as well? And that's kind of, Spriggy Mobile is what we're trying to tackle with that part of the business. Now, you're gonna blush here. I'm gonna talk about you, but anybody who asks me, I'll kind of label you as perhaps the...

most talented, authentic, down to earth, intelligent entrepreneur I've ever met. I think somebody who kind of perfectly gets the balance between technology, product, and growth.

It's been amazing to watch the growth of Spriggy from kind of its humble beginnings. You, what, year and half to, was it a year and a half ago, hit a million customers, About a year and a bit ago, yeah. For an Australian only consumer app. Yeah, thanks to It's pretty incredible. They're numbers that we kind of don't see from businesses who've invested and spent a lot more money than you guys have.

What's your secret to success? mate, that's a big question, thank you. I mean, they're very calm words. Yeah, we're just on one point. ING's not there, by the way. I they've been here 20 odd years. Yeah. So I think the first point is we focused very deeply on solving a problem for people. I think you see a lot of solutionism in companies where people, I mean, you see it with AI at the moment, where people are...

taking a solution and trying to throw something at a customer without kind of deeply understanding the needs. So I think kind of the first point is we spent a lot of time and effort trying to understand deeply the needs of a family. And we, I think in doing that and finding product market fit and really putting a lot of...

pressure internally on holding out at a high bar, we gave ourselves an opportunity to form a platform for growth. So that's kind of the first part. think you can throw as much money as you want as you wanted a problem. If you don't fundamentally solve an unmet need, I think you're going to be pushing uphill. I think that's kind of the first point. I think you touched on it before when you said your kids call their money, spriggy money.

I think what's been really interesting for this business is we actually created a category that didn't exist before. So if you asked me in the early days what the biggest quote unquote competitor was, it would be cash because we were creating a solution in a space where no one had really solved it before. We weren't looking at a series of solutions and putting an incrementally better one in the space or.

a solution in the space that's distributed a certain way, we took an unmet need, we solved it, and we went zero to one in a category that didn't exist in Australia. And I think that gave us, that was hard at the beginning. We were talking to parents about their kids, about education, about money, and no one was Googling digital pocket money solutions or digital, there was not really anything there. And so by kind of launching when we did and focusing on the product proposition as deeply as we did,

we ended up being able to kind of create a little pocket of the market for ourselves and really build a brand that has become synonymous with the category. So you're eight times more likely to Google Spriggy than pocket money. And those two things then coupled by the way we bootstrapped our brand. So taking an unknown brand and working with the likes of Disney and Warner Brothers to take a familiar brand with our audience and then associate ourselves with it.

as we scaled, enabled us in the early days to really get market share quite aggressively. And then toward the back end, as we've invested more in actually marketing and our brand story, having that fundamental infrastructure in place of good product, good brand positioning, good audience, our customers have been, most of our growth, over 50 % of our growth come from customers.

telling other customers. So that early day effort kind of gave us a foundation which has been really a flywheel for our growth.

In terms of the partnerships, it's think kind of often seen as the panacea of the growth. And it usually comes with a whole host of problems that you never ever encountered. What tips or advice would you give to other founders who kind of are thinking, hey, we're going to jumpstart the business by getting a partnership with Disney or kind of partnership with the Big Four Bank?

I think the first thing is, and you see a plethora of this, which is people who are like, look, I've got this idea, I just need to find a partner, they'll get me my customers, I'm sorted. That never works, never ever ever works. I think that the growth is the, founder's got a handful of responsibilities, is, one of which is to continue to ensure your business grows. And if you try to outsource that.

I don't think you'll be very happy or in business for very long. think figure out growth in a structural way is important. How are you going to grow your business? And if something sounds too good to be true, which is a big full bank's going to give me all my customers and then my job's done, it probably is too good to be true. I'd also offer that if you're trying to grow a product or category with a partner where they've failed to grow that

product or category, the chances are of them getting you customers. What's the saying? The blind lead in the blind. Yeah. And I don't think that's not to be critical of any big partner. It's just that there's a reason they want to work with you. It's because you can do something that they would like to be able to do in their organization. And if you're trying to outsource a core part of that capability back to them, it really is they're coming to you to try help them solve a problem and you're going back to them to try solve that problem. So just being really clear with

where you add value and where the organization can add value. I'd say with our brand partner, with our brand partnerships, we were very strategic with those, which is we recognize that bootstrapping a brand and scaling in a category where our brand didn't exist, trust is a key component of that. And we leveraged brands in a way where we could build trust with our audience. But the fundamental growth infrastructure around that was ours.

We didn't get tens of thousands of customers from third parties. We worked with them in a way that enabled us to accelerate a growth engine that we had already created. It's actually funny you mention that because it's really similar with, you if do a podcast and you go chasing somebody who's also got a big audience and you automatically think your numbers are gonna double or triple.

and they just stay the same, right? I don't know why that is, right? But maybe I think we just overestimate our importance. I think it's also like we just want it to work. I think there's a... I make this mistake regularly and I kind of catch myself which is you've got a hard problem.

you want it to be an easy solve. often, you know, a hard problem requires you to think deeply and figure out, work the problem. And when someone tells you they've got this magic solution out of a box, you kind of kid yourself, because you're like, yeah, I want that to work. And I think the amount of times you need to just be honest with yourself that a hard problem is a hard problem, you've to do the work. I how many slash licenses do we have that we never use that? Yeah, exactly. When you started Spriggy, as you mentioned earlier, you'd kind of come from background.

of academia, a fairly limited kind of work experience to then going on and founding your own business. You know what, nearly 100 people, you've got a million plus customers that you're responsible for. How have you developed and turned in to the leader that you are today? And kind of when you look back, if you were able to write a letter to yourself 10 years ago as you were kind of getting ready to start Spriggy.

What do you think would be in that letter? Other than, don't do it. Yeah, go on. I mean, all the cliches are cliches for a reason. I think it would be something less about work and it'd be more about life outside of work.

Don't cancel your gym membership. Don't skip the gym. Make sure you spend time with your friends and family. Like all the things that, because I think it's just so easy, because you will run out of time. You'll have less hours in the day than you need and then you're gonna start making small decisions that compound into big decisions in your life. And this is true for any job, not just this job. I think that when founders who are starting out ask me for the advice,

I say like make sure you get breakfast with your co-founder once a week and talk about things that don't work and make sure you get a gym membership and you lock it in before you lock in your work. All those cliches I think because I'm pretty, I think that's where I'm personally more likely to skip and slip. I think, so it'll be thematically around that. I think this cliche is the average of the five people you spend the most time with so pick them wisely.

I have lots of friends and people you see through work and I think if I look at who I'm spending the most time with, I've got other founders, I've got friends who I grew up with, I've got family. So I make sure that I curate the people I'm spending time with because they can compound, they can make you much better or they can kind of actually send you in the wrong direction and that's something I've felt. I certainly wouldn't be here without having

being fortunate to have excellent friends who know nothing about the tech world and don't care about it, and excellent founders who have supported me through challenges, and excellent family who, again, just want me be a kind and happy person, healthy person. So that's probably in those areas. As for like the work side of things, yeah, it's hard, but I think there's a lot of, I think a lot of people glorify how hard the job of founder, everyone's job's hard, you know. I think it's...

Your learning rate, I think I may have spoken to you about this before, your ability to learn is what matters. You should never dismiss information out of hand, you should categorize it. So if someone tells me something that I don't agree with, I should understand why they're saying it, why I don't agree with it, and then move forward. And I should be continuously learning because the company's growth will be constrained by my growth. So I need to make sure that I prioritize my ability to learn as opposed to...

prioritize my ability to get work done without actually growing as an individual. Yeah, it's, I've got a really simple equation to kind of figure out what talent is and it's skills, capability to work under pressure, resilience, propensity to learn.

And I think that kind of propensity to learn is the key. And it's probably the big thing that isn't being assessed at all in interview processes or when businesses are hiring. Yeah, totally. It's pretty hard to do point in time. You just need to see someone here and here and then look at there. Yeah. I'd also say...

Also, enjoy it. I think there's a lot of founders who are like, I'll do this, I'll start here, I'll get here, and then it's done, and I'll run hard at the thing until I get to this point. The reality is, irrespective of the success of your company, you still gotta turn up, you still gotta work there. And so I think...

I think for me, particularly the last couple of years, it's gone from being I've just got to get to the next gate to, I actually enjoy my, I want to enjoy my life and I want to enjoy work as part of that. And I think there are pros and cons with every role and build it in a way that's actually sustainable so you can do it for a long time. And that's something I probably was a bit naive about, which is I always was like, if I just get to the next hurdle, everything will get solved. The truth is it gets harder. It doesn't get easier. It gets harder.

but you get better and your ability to handle pressure goes up. So the complexities of the role go up. But equally, think you grow at a rate which is faster than that, so it becomes more manageable. You've talked a lot about kind of managing yourself. What about leading a big group of people? How's that transition been?

Yeah, I think you're very, you're very kind of humble guy. know, you're kind of, you're not that kind of big charismatic leader who kind of, you know, let's ring the bell, let's go. You know, you're very kind of thoughtful, considered, you know, kind of really kind of, you know, want to take in all the information around you. You are very rarely ever heard you say to me, you're wrong. It's like, that's interesting. Let me have a think about it. I'll come back to you. Yeah, I think on that, it's a good

Before I started here, I worked briefly on a trading floor.

and there was a trader there who he was exceptional. I was just about to say the world standard for HR practices, best practice is global trade and flow. I mean, you can't get into my point. think there were two big lessons there, right? Like... Just two. There were a few. I think this guy, like, so he was a, he's an exceptionally talented guy. And everyone used to say to me, you see that guy, you should be like him.

And I try to copy what he did. And then I was terrible. I was just terrible at copying what he did. Because he's good because he is uniquely...

like he's uniquely working in a way which is congruent not just to his intellect but his personality. he would be curious and chase down things, he would work certain ways, he would explore and go wide. And then I realised pretty quickly that if I try being him, I'm going to be a poor imitation of him, at best. The best thing I can do is be a poor imitation of that trader. And then...

I like the approach I've taken here is, you know, I've got quirks, I've got pros, I've got cons. What are the things that make me unique? And how do I take the best parts of my personality and try to limit to how I work with the team? I'm not a ring the bell kind of guy. I don't like that. I'm thoughtful, I'm a problem solver. And the way I work with the team is similarly. And I think that...

the most success I've had with the team is in kind of just bringing as much of me to the table and being authentic. I think if I try to emulate a leadership style I wrote about on Twitter, they'll know it's not authentic and I'll do a crap job of it. So I think it's how do I actually bring the attributes that have made me successful and figure out how to package them in a way that can enable teams.

And in doing so, I think you come across as more authentic because you are more authentic and I think you build better relationships with the people around you. I think people can think leadership is one thing.

And if it was one thing, then the reality is there's not a standard bearer for it. And kind of whatever your kind of thoughts are, there's a reality in the world that we're in right now. And you see this in the US where it's fractured right down the middle because there are certain, know, half the country believes the leader should act one way and the other half believes that they kind of should act in a different way and the values and principles that come with that.

kind of, you know, so at the end of the day, a leader is somebody that other people follow. And I think kind of how you want to do that has to be congruent with, you know, what you know, the things that you taught about what a parent's up for and against just to be good people, have good values, work hard, you know, kind of give it a shot, try, try their best, you know, all those things. Like we're very values oriented as a business. I think we, I think people resonate with the product and brand and they like we have a lot of parents in the team who have kids

who are of the age who are going to grow up and they see the problems on the horizon, they want to kind of help solve them. So I think that does help a lot. I also think we spend a, I think a lot about what intrinsically motivates people. I think that to me is fascinating.

People talk about, there lots of ways to describe leadership. There are lots of ways to describe leadership. People talk about someone doing something because they want to do it, not because you want to do it. I think that's fundamentally what intrinsically motivates people. And across a business like this, we've got so many unique individuals. And how do you think about creating environments whereby...

what intrinsically motivates them is aligned to what the business needs to do. And I think we do that at a lot of levels here. A simple one is smart people want to work with smart people. So we have a high bar in this company and it's really, it me on my toes, it keeps everyone else on their toes. Which is when you've got particularly the younger team members who are hungry, learning, are challenging you and the ideas and trying to push things forward.

it's motivating and it kind of excites you to do the same thing. And I think that has a compounding effect. It does feel very much, you know, we're kind of five years now since kind of COVID hit the world. And it does feel like, you know, we kind of had a real kind of lowering of the bar around expectations and performance and commitment to work and commitment to the mission. And what I think is kind of really been very, very clear is, you know,

businesses are successful because of the cohesion of the teams that they have within that. And it's like, there's this kind of big battle going on at the minute around individualism and kind of all about me versus, hey, what about the team? How have you found kind of that, and we kind of hear these narratives all the time and don't hire the brilliant jerk. How have you found getting that team cohesion and how have you kind of...

dealt with those who have come in and it's the kind of individual and it's about, it's all about them. I think it's quite funny. think what I was going to say is that, I mean, I'm no different to this. Like a lot of people talk about hiring and team, but like everyone's got it. Everyone, like no one, no one truly does this perfectly. And you would see this, right? So I think there's a real risk that people think.

people can flake it working one or two times for them having a system where they can apply it. I've got an analogy for it, think founders have, it's like they've gone to the casino with a system, right? And it's worked and they're kind of, you know, they're winning and they're going for it and then it stops. And instead I'm going, oh, maybe the system doesn't work. They double down. They oh, the system, great, it works. And they keep throwing more and more into it. And then eventually they kind of run, you know, they lose all their money. And I think at high,

And very similar thing for founders. They feel they get two hires right and they found the magic formula. Yeah, exactly. And so I'm not going to proclaim to be, know, like we get something right, we get something wrong. I would say that the biggest thing I did was probably just watch time move on because frankly, think interest rates and post-COVID interest rates, I think a lot of it was macro. We've got zero interest rate environment, people throwing money at problems, people hiring.

a junior is a mid, a mid's a senior, there's title creep, there's actual salary creep, driven from a fundamental macroeconomic phenomenon. As rates went up, that kind of corrected itself. so, while I'd like to say that I figured it all out at that time, the most likely thing that has taken place is that as the economy kind of self corrected, it meant that...

the way people were applying for roles, being interviewed and moving through roles, the way people were moving through companies, that fundamentally changed it. And so I'd say the number one thing that's changed over the last five years is obviously the COVID backdrop, but then there's the macroeconomic backdrop is massive. And I think that you definitely would have seen it. 2020 was...

I think there was a real demand on leadership because people have so much uncertainty in their lives and how do you, when all the things you think are immutably true about your life are fundamentally changing, people are looking for stability and consistency and so work is one of those domains whereby they can get that. And then as that started to roll off in 2021 where you had the real kind of funny money going around, what you saw with people is that, you

people getting all sorts of money for all sorts of jobs and so employers were all of sudden, know, the junior is now the mid and the senior and you've seen that across every role and that was unsustainable and we had to make decisions about do we play the game or do we not play the game and we kind of, I would say that we erred on the side of not playing that game.

expecting rates to turn or the market to turn. And then what you've had from 2021 to 2022 to now is like a lot of that shakeout. So you're seeing a lot of people who've grown their workforce, shrinking their workforce, a lot of people who, and I tell this to team members where a lot of people who skipped rungs of their career and didn't learn the skills and they're, unfortunately, it's the team members who are struggling because...

you know, you're in a role which is much more senior than what your capability is and then you've kind of pegged at a salary level and a title and you have to spiral back down and that can be very uncomfortable for people. And now there were in environments where a lot of the people that they could learn from aren't coming into the office. so it's it's compounding for those people. Yeah, so we saw that play out. I think something we have done well is we have opted for a hard conversation with the person as opposed to throwing money in titles.

And I think we've been broadly successful in having those conversations because we have established trust. So there are long sitting team members here who I've known for a long time who I have a chat to them about this exact thing and say, look, I'm not sitting here with a bag of titles in my back pocket trying to hide them from you. I think this is what I've seen play out.

and they go away and think about it and they are more patient about their career because they recognise, they're able to hear feedback from senior people in the business who they trust. And I think we've done that part well. I think those two things are related.

not opting into it as much as we could have, and then also having open communication with the team members. think those two things have helped us with the talent we have. But again, as I said, we haven't got everything right. We've mistakes along the way. So we're coming to the 10th anniversary of Spriggy. We've talked about this first 10 years. What does the next 10 years look like for Spriggy? Yeah, that's a great question, I think it's... Well, the question we ask ourselves is what is going to be immutably true about the future?

and then how do we think about that in the context of parents and kids. And so, you know, when we started it was very much...

looking very focused on finance. So how do you help parents teach their kids about money through real world experiences? Well, what's going to be immutably true? Cash is going to become more digital, not less digital. The need for kids to have a solution in that space is going to increase, not decrease. The ability for players like us to spin up a solution will increase, not decrease. The amount of capital going to the space will increase, not decrease. So that was the exercise we did.

when we started and what does that look like today? think we're somewhat victims of our own success in Australia. We are at scale as you said. We can't grow the same way we've grown historically. So when we look to the next five, 10 years and we look at parents and kids in our audience, what are the things that are gonna be true in the next five to 10 years? Well, parents are still gonna care about their kids. Their ability to...

bring up kids who are happy, healthy, who are kind, who are prepared for the world, that job still exists. That job's gonna get harder, not easier. As the rate of change of technology increases, it's going to become more more complex. The tools for that, the demand on tools for that are going to increase, not decrease. So things like...

finance and how do you manage money in a family? How do you do so in an educational way? Things like digital safety. How do you think about connecting your kids, getting your kids first phone and doing so in a way which enables them to have independence in a safe way. The demand on that's going to increase not decrease. The need for solutions is going to increase not decrease. How do you think about things like physical safety and the replays in the space?

How much do we play in that space versus work with others? How do we think about role in that space? Basically anywhere where you're looking at parents bringing up their kids in a safe way that enables them to be prepared for the world, that's kind of what's relevant to us. We think about, a domestic business today. We think about what does it look like outside of Australia and how do we go from here to strong domestic business to a global business and how do we think about that transition? How do we think about the universe of places where

parents are paying for things for their kids as well. We kind of touched on that with our schools business but that's a whole other ecosystem where

we could and should play. If you look at the cost of raising kids, that's not decreasing, it's going up. And if you look at all the places where parents are giving their kids money, kids are spending money, parents are paying for their kids. So that's one, that kind of financial world, we are still, there's still a lot for us to do in that. But we are, like when you talk five, 10 years, we see that to be one piece of a bigger puzzle. With your kids, it's not about whether they're...

brilliant with money and not good with everything else. It's the universe of things that you care about. And we have the audience, we have the capability. Where we win is we create brand and product experiences that...

catered to families while working with vendors across the traditional ecosystem of say finance or other verticals where the solutions have been one size fits all, how do we package them up in a way that tells parents and kids. Yeah, I remember sharing with you a kind of story about my son where

He overspent on stuff and could see and he kind of learned his lesson. I'd love to say he learned it forever, but he's keep learning that same lesson over. Especially since he got the Oculus he's been wearing. But what is really, I think, powerful about it is I'm not the nagging parent anymore. He goes in, he goes off. What I spend it on that for.

And it's interesting to see the first thing you come down and go, dad.

Do you need your car cleaned? It's kind of like that. You know what it has done and I think everybody kind of has different learning experiences. What it has done with my son, for example, is it's taught him how to hustle. My daughter, it's taught her how to save. Right. She's a lot more kind of discriminant about, you know, what she spends and kind of saves. And, you know, we just realized that she had two hundred and five dollars sitting in one of our buckets for

Mac that she was saving up for that she's had now for 12 months, right? And so it's kind of amazing just to see your own kids' behaviors, motivations, style, and then to have Spriggy as the...

kind of the arbiter of their learning experience instead of grumpy lecture and dad to always telling them off for the same stuff. know, my daughter going, hey, well, that's unfair because I save and my brother's always spending. It's kind of taken all of that stress away from me as a parent. Yeah, that's, and that's not uncommon. think like there is now an explicit place where those conversations typically used to be taking place. There's now an explicit entity.

whereby that's where you go for those conversations. I find the idea of behavioral education fascinating, not just in this vertical, in lots of verticals, like how do you make sure people eat healthy and go to the gym? And I think that's a problem that's been around for a long time and it's still very hard to kind of come up with a good solution. And I think the unique thing about our proposition is that the parent-child relationship is very powerful. You have this...

almost this supervisor which is the parent whereby you can enable as much as possible and create a world where they can make their own decisions.

the behaviors are shaped at a young age. So I find those stories fascinating and we see behavioral change across. We hear stories about kids getting Sproogie and then being told, look, you like to get your birthday money when you do your homework and do your chores and the kids will wake up the next day and make the bed, they'll start cooking breakfast because they, cause and effect are really clear and explicit to them. And so I think that the idea of how do you shape behaviors is fascinating, full stop. How do you do that when it comes to

learning about a category. Being good with money is not about knowing all there is to know about interest rates, it's about having good behaviors. It's actually really simple. Save more than you spend, manage your budget, understand now versus later. It's not that complex. The challenge is the behavioral part.

I think that excites me about the product and how do you think about extending it to other verticals? And I guess the paradox being that you give a really good example with health and wellness and particularly eating, right, is it's almost like you're replacing one addiction with another with the dope I mean hit of all these reminders and notifications and I get a marble watch and you're like...

I got off my ass and tried to get rid of some of this chub. I shouldn't be rewarding myself. But you do get addicted to it. And think it's getting that balance. I think that's what works really well with Spriggy is the kind of app and for the product to be successful doesn't require you getting notifications and being on your phone 24-7.

Yeah, for it to kind of to do what it says on the 10th. Yeah, and that's, that's something we talk about internally, we talk about how do you think of engagement? You know, and we could be very naive about engagement. And that could shape behaviors the wrong way. So we have this concept of an educational transaction, which is, so if you if you go into the app and update your

while that's kind of like an app open, that's not educational, by any means. So we look at kind of the spectrum of behaviors that make sense when you're learning about money, and then we kind of have a product event next to those, and we measure how much engagement around education are people doing, and how do we drive that. So there's a world where we could be driving total spending, or total top up, or total time in app. That's not really how we want to think about it. It's...

how do we have some sort of framework where we understand if we measure these inputs, ultimately, do we have any confidence that that will be aligned with the right behaviors and that's our base. Yeah. We're coming to a wrap, Alex. I guess first up, we've got, I think we're listening to over 40 countries now. wow. Yeah, we've got...

amazing talent that listen to this show. I'm sure a lot of them will be listening and will be as blown away as kind of I was when I first met you. If they're interested in careers here at Spriggy, what's the best way for them to find out? that's a great question. On our website, think go careers.spriggy.com.au but equally on our website, you can find out and follow the forms.

can also reach out to Dexter who will reach out to me. Or can reach out to me as well, I'm pretty easy to find. I think I've made about $30 from my little referral code, just through the podcast. So if anybody's listening and they're interested in finding out more about the Spriggy app, is there anywhere they can go? Yeah, spriggy.com.au. I'd say also Dexter, I think you've been ripped off.

you've surely brought us more customers than they're to. I'll talk to the team outside to see if we can up your referral code. Well, Alex, it's been amazing to catch up with you again. Thanks so much for sharing your insights. I'm sure everybody's going to be kind of encapsulated by this conversation that we've had.