How we acquired our first 1,000 customers

Deep-dive: The growth framework that helped us turn a licensed MVP into a predictable, scalable growth machine

My co-founders and I joke that in fintech, you don’t start at zero. You start at -1.

The first year or two is just fighting upstream: licensing, compliance, setting up infrastructure in a market that hasn’t seen this before. In our case, we were the first to get licensed under the Innovation Testing License in the Middle East. First 10 clients. Then 100. Sandbox restrictions. Weekly updates.

We finally “graduated” from the sandbox with a full license. It was quite a milestone. We threw a launch party, got press coverage.

And then it hit us:
Now what?

How do we grow? What channels do we focus on? Which ideas get built? Who decides?

We didn’t have the answers. But we got lucky. Shortly after, we attended a 500 Global retreat that flew a lot of people from the US. They introduced us to a simple but powerful growth framework. We combined it with Paul Graham’s Startups = Growth mindset and aimed for 5% weekly growth in AUM.

It worked.

Here’s how we ran it:

---

Step 1: Map the Client Journey

We started with the basics:
From acquisition to activation, then upsell, retention, and finally referral.

We defined key KPIs across that journey:

• New visitors → Registered users → Funded accounts

• % of users setting up auto-deposits

• Churn rate

• Referral per client

Every drop-off point was a potential growth unlock.

---

Step 2: Set Up Weekly Growth Meetings

We weren’t a big team, so we fit in one room.
We kicked off with a 2-month focus on activation, the most painful area at the time.

Each week, we tracked:

• New ideas to prioritise

• Learnings from last week

• Status of current experiments

If you want a great walkthrough of the original framework we adapted, this 30-minute video by Brian Balfour presenting to 500 Global is worth your time:
Watch here

---

Step 3: Brainstorm Pain Points

Everyone pitched in.
What’s blocking users from getting activated? From our customer conversations, team meetings and anything we could gather info about.

Examples of pain points that came up:

• “I don’t have a proof of address.”

• “Why are you asking me so much before I even sign up?”

• “ How do I fund the account?”

• “The selfie feature doesn’t work on Safari.”

• “How does this actually work?”

• “I wish I could just try this first.”

• “Is my money even safe?”

We used post-it notes and then grouped similar ideas so that themes resurfaced. A clear one was the amount of steps — to cut down and guide customers with more videos, FAQs, recommendations, visuals.

We dropped everything into a shared google sheet. Then tagged each pain point by funnel stage (in this case, activation).

---

Step 4: Build the Experiment Pipeline

We created a structured backlog. For each experiment:

• Name

• Funnel stage (e.g., activation)

• Metric impacted

• Prediction (uplift %)

• Effort

• Impact

• Owner

• Deadline

• Success/failure

We ranked each by impact vs effort from 1 to 4 (4 being high impact/low effort). Only engineers could vote on effort.
Then picked 5 to run with different owners across product, growth, ops.

Each experiment had:

• A Google Doc with details and prediction

  • Pre/post metric comparison

  • Documented learnings

• A row in the master Google Sheet for tracking results

---

Step 5: Repeat Weekly

Every week:
What moved?
What didn’t?
What did we learn?

If something worked, we scaled it.
If it didn’t, we documented it and moved on.

---

What’s Next

Once we hit 1,000 customers, the growth function evolved. More on that soon.

So you can follow these 4 steps with these resources if you want to run this yourself:

1. Our experimentation loop

2. Funnel breakdown with KPIs (attached below)

3. Backlog and live experiment tracker (in Google Sheet)

4. Experiment doc template

Beyond getting us the first 1,000 customers, we loved how we were working and how we got there, and turned some of the chaos of building in a centralized area that's cross functional. And quite honestly this is the magic of startups and way of working that people leave the corporate life to join as it is so exciting.