How Revolut got its users

Build a no-account version of one feature and host it on your own domain, the way Group Bills lives inside the app for customers and at groupbills.revolut.com for everyone else. Revolut calls the invited person a Basic User: they verify an email address, full stop. No download, no ID check, no bank account. What made that possible is the scoping, not the technology. Group Bills tracks who paid what and who owes what, and never moves money, which is why Revolut can state in its own terms that it is not a regulated payment service. Find the part of your product that forces the sign-up wall (the payment, the storage, the permissions) and cut it out of the invited person's version. Keep the part that is useful in company.

done whenA stranger can complete one full useful loop of your product, start to finish, on a URL containing your domain, with only an email address, and you can name the exact capability you removed to make that version legal and cheap to run.

Ship the invite as a link and a QR that the user sends inside a conversation that already exists. Revolut's group creation flow ends on 'Add members directly, or share a group QR code or invite link with your friends', and that link gets pasted into the WhatsApp thread for the holiday, a room Revolut can never buy its way into. Note why it gets sent: the sender wants their money back. The share is not a favour to Revolut, it is the only way the user finishes their own task.

done whenThe share step and the step where your user gets what they want are the same step. If a user can finish their task without ever sending the link, your invite is decoration and it will not be sent.

Put the non-user on an email stream fired by product events, never by your marketing calendar. Revolut's Group Bills terms are explicit: if you are not a Revolut customer, they notify you by email when bills are added, updated, or settled in a group you are part of. Across a two-week trip with five people that is a run of mail from Revolut to someone who never signed up for Revolut, each one triggered by a friend and each one carrying a number that person owes. A newsletter gets ignored. This gets opened because it is about their money, and every one of them is sent from your domain with your name on it.

done whenCount the emails a non-user gets from you in the first week after being invited. Every one should have been triggered by another person's action inside your product, and every one should contain a fact that person would have gone looking for anyway.

Let the account holder finish in one tap and let the invited person feel the extra step, without covering it with an upsell. Group Bills stops at 'who owes what' and does not settle. Two people who both have Revolut settle inside the app, free, and Revolut's own transfer page states Revolut-to-Revolut arrives in under 20 seconds. The Basic User sees the same balance on the same screen and then has to go do a bank transfer somewhere else. Same debt, worse ending. There is no banner on that moment. The gap between the two endings is the whole argument.

done whenYou can name the single moment where a logged-in user finishes in one tap and an invited visitor has to leave your product to finish, and you can confirm there is no upgrade modal sitting on top of that moment.

Give every user a personal link on a short domain that is your brand name, and hand them the sentence to say. Every Revolut customer gets a Revtag and a page at revolut.me/<their tag> that opens in a plain browser, where the sender pays by card and no account details change hands: the recipient reads your brand name in the URL bar before they read anything else. Revolut also wrote the line for its users, on its own site: 'Lent a friend some cash? Tell them to Revolut Me!' Add the reverse direction too, since Revolut lets a customer text a link that a non-customer clicks to claim money, with 7 days before it returns, so the artifact carries its own deadline. Check your defaults while you are there: a privacy toggle called Revtag discoverability decides whether non-customers can open that link at all.

done whenYour users have a personal URL on a short domain you own, it renders for a logged-out visitor on a phone with no app installed, and you can quote the short sentence a user says out loud when handing it over. If your only share URL looks like app.yourproduct.com/u/8f2a1c, you have not built this yet.