[Matthias Stadelmeyer]
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Partner Marketing Podcast. My guest today is Anh Guyen, VP of Marketing at Wolt. Anh has been at the forefront of driving growth at one of the most exciting tech companies in Europe. He's led performance marketing and user acquisition at global gaming giants like Rovio and Wargaming. Today he's shaping the growth engine at Wolt, the delivery platform that has become a household name across Europe and Asia. Anh, welcome. It's great to have you on the show today.

[Anh Nguyen]
Thank you. Great to be here.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]
Thank you so much for being here. It's a pleasure talking to you. Maybe as a starter for all our listeners, could you share a little bit about your background? You have a big legacy background in user acquisition. You have worked at different companies. It would be great if you could give us some insights about your career, what you've been doing so far.

[Anh Nguyen]
Happy to, happy to. So my name is Anh, as you have been hearing. I am based in Finland, the northern part of Europe, and it's a beautiful city of Helsinki. And I have been, all of my career has been in the marketing, online marketing, MarTech, and then now leading the whole marketing team. I started my career in one of the Rocket Internet ventures in Berlin named Foodpanda. Back in the early days, that was my early access to online marketing and MarTech.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]
So you have lived in Berlin before?

[Anh Nguyen]
I have lived in Berlin before. That was more than 10 years ago. Due to work, I'm still coming back. I think back then when you were young, living in Berlin is amazing and still now, but I'm probably preferring the northern part.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]
Rocket Internet was a client of us then and I was the account manager for Rocket Internet when I started at Tradedoubler. That was some 15 years ago. That's why I asked.

[Anh Nguyen]
Right, that I was often. I still call it the golden golden age or central Europe startup scenes, I think that's a part of a lot of the startup companies and and bigger company in Europe now. So after Foodpanda and Rocket, I'm venturing into mobile games, so to Robio, Rovio, and Wargaming. I've been working with a lot of different mobile games, Angry Birds, Angry Birds game, one of them I loved, I still am, and I think gaming for me is not just a personal favorite, but also the professional side is very data-driven.

Doing marketing and gaming is a whole world of utilizing data and working with more techs to be able to make the best of that, a lot of the innovations. And more than six years ago, I took another chance and joined a smaller company in Helsinki, or back then it was a smaller startup named Wolt. With the mission to bring the food delivery or delivery service to the world, so I helped to build out the early performance marketing team, then to CRM, MarTech, then after that expanding my scope to not just look at consumer marketing but also the courier marketing and B2B marketing.

Nowadays, I'm looking at the overall global marketing team in Wolt, so we have almost 300 marketing experts in more than 30 countries, and we are running pretty much everything for Wolt when it comes to marketing at scale, both from discount promo to performance marketing, CRM, and also anything offline and influencer.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]
Very interesting. Like, Deliveroo is a huge company now, and a leading player, not only in food delivery but obviously as well in marketing, performance marketing, user acquisition. So, you're kind of like at the forefront of everything. You said before, like when I started at Deliveroo in 2019, it was a small startup company. Can you describe a little bit what it was back then, the culture, the scenery, the teams, and how it was working there back then?

[Anh Nguyen]
Yeah, I think when I say small is probably comparing to the scale of where we are now. I think now Wolt is more than 10, 12,000 people globally and back then we were when I joined it's a bit more than 200 people and the company is in just emerging from just being building a presence in the North and Baltic to slowly expanding to the rest of Europe to Southern Europe so I joined the company during the time when this step out from just a small startup to like a scale-up kind of startup and that was an exciting time because you have a chance to be able to work with the ocean's worth of data, you have a chance to be able to build everything from scratch, you're hiring a lot of the first members that's setting up the foundation.

For the marketing team that we are today and go into like different kinds of organizational build infrastructure changes, and I think Wolt as a company, even by then back then is already one of the best UX/UI-friendly companies with amazing quality service and selections. And my job is just to be able to support Wolt to be able to really spread out those wings to more countries and grow faster than the competitors.

You've been Vice President of Performance Marketing, then Vice President of Growth. Now, since recently, you're Vice President of Marketing overall. Can you describe a little bit more what comes with this role? What's your responsibilities? What does a day-to-day in the life of Anh look like?

So as you know that my long career has been on the marketing side to be precise the performance marketing and tech and then that was the starting point for me in Wolt and over the years and when I expanded beyond the performance marketing to also CRM, MarTech, B2B marketing then now are they looking after all of the, let's say all of the global marketing, including the performance marketing and CRM. We also have a regional marketing team that doing like offline media buying, commercial marketing, influencer, regional and local brand is a full stack 360.

But running the team of 300 or closer 300 marketing experts, 30 countries is a huge challenge. I need a lot of help. I'm not a superman to be able to say that I would be able to be in every single conversation, every single day. But I have a very clear routine. I come in every morning. I sit down, having a time for myself to plan the day and plan the week. So it's kind of like a calm time. And then also looking at all of the main metrics.

And then follow up for the rest of the day is different kind of critical discussions that I would have regarding to budget, if there is a situation in certain regions, certain countries. I, of course, have a lot of senior leaders that support me in different functions. So my job is hopefully not having to tell them what they need to do. My job is kind of like supporting them, giving them directions. And of course, making sure that the team knows that we're not just hitting the top line, but also going in the same direction that we set as a marketing team.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]
Super interesting, thank you for sharing! Now, going a little bit into Wolt itself: Wolt is a leader in food and merchandise delivery, focusing on Europe and Asia, being acquired by DoorDash back in 2021 for actually 8 billion US dollars. That is huge. And I think you kind of like share the global market with DoorDash, focusing more on the Americas while you do Europe and Asia. Can you share a bit about the mission and the strategy and focus areas of Wolt?

[Anh Nguyen]
I think Wolt as part of DoorDash and DoorDash is a market leader in the US and in many other markets, as you actually know. I think we share very similar cultures. Of course, the American market or the US markets are very different from the rest of Europe, or the rest of the world; Japan is very different from Europe. Northern Europe is different from Southern Europe, and I think that the complexity of the whole business when it comes to this delivery business—not just food delivery but also grocery retail delivery—is very, very complex.

And I would say the mission that we have as a company, and I think it's very tied to our marketing, is that we didn't want to just become a food delivery company; that's where we started. But when you're building a vast network of logistic platforms, services, technology, your mission, your vision has become a lot bigger. Our mission and vision is actually trying to become a shopping mall in your pocket. And the shopping mall, as you know, is: you go to the shopping mall, you go to the first floor, you're buying a grocery; You go to the second floor, you buy clothes; You go to the third floor, you buy cosmetics, flowers, pharmacy. Then, there's that; there's like a different layer that you and then of course, the top, normally that's all in Helsinki, that's where the food courts that's where the restaurants are. So, our ambition is to go from every single layer of that shopping mall, but bringing everything into your mobile phone, bringing everything into your app, and bring out your neighborhood to a better kind of setup that you would have now because a lot of time when the consumer behavior moves to online shopping or e-commerce, you go to the main site, you order food, you order clothes, you order pharmacy and cosmetics. A lot of times, the delivery may come from a warehouse in another country, in another region. Or what we're aiming for is actually focusing on your a very hyper local; we're focusing on your neighborhood. We actually want you to open the app and actually have every selection that you have in your area within maybe three to four or five kilometers from your house, and that's a very meaningful mission, at least from the marketing point of view.

Not for me to just go and say to the consumer, 'you know this is our marketing message.' It's actually what I'm proud of what I'm believing in because it's keep your neighborhoods alive it's keeping your neighborhoods like to be something that you want to live in instead of just houses it's actually have shop you know the shop owners you actually either you go there you order the stuff by yourself or then you can actually do it with both but you're supporting that neighborhood and you're supporting it to be part of your of your everyday life and that's something that I think is very meaningful for what Wolt is doing and also what our marketing team want to support so you kind of like expanding in two ways on the one hand geographically I think you now are active in around a thousand cities in 23 countries, if my research is right and totally expanding actually okay, see, and as well vertically.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

um so covering not only food but covering groceries um drugstores and all this stuff where where are you there now um what when you when I open the app what can I expect what in all these verticals when you say you want to be a shopping mall that is online where are you in this expansion what can I expect when as a user when I'm in the app what I can order there.

[Anh Nguyen]

Yep, I think uh, you if you would live in Berlin or you would even in Helsinki or many of our cities and what I'm referring To I'm already referring to your city or your neighborhoods because our business, as I have mentioned, is very hyper local. It's not a country that actually matters; neighbor is the city.

You would be able to order everything you open to Wolt app nowadays of course you have the restaurants-it's a dominating kind of presence that you have there. But then you can also like grocery flowers and everything can be delivered within hopefully 30 to 40 minutes, sometimes less than 30 minutes. And the speed, the quality of services, the customer support, the whole end-to-end user experience; it's the same if you would be ordering. Food versus you ordering groceries or flowers, so that's the kind of the best experience that you would have because I think if you would have done it yourself in person, or what all of the other delivery services have been doing for the last 20-30 years, every single service, every single vertical, that you go to food or grocery, have a different kind of process, have a different kind of experience for the user.

What we want to do is give you the unified best experience that you have now, you've been there more or less from the beginning, or at least from an early start, before this massive expansion.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Can you share a little bit more about the expansion itself, how that works? Because on the one hand, obviously you need the providers, so you need the partners, the stores or shops or restaurants or whatever. On the other hand, obviously the users. And then you always have, of course, this chicken and egg. The more users you have, the more relevant you are, the more partners want to work with you. But you need to have, obviously, an interesting selection in order to acquire the users. Can you share a bit on how you do that? Especially on the partner side because I know something about user acquisition but how you deal with the partners with the restaurants with the shops i think that is something that me and and all our listeners don't know so well.

[Anh Nguyen]

Yeah i mean the partner the merchant partners that we have either that would be the restaurant owner the key or the owner of the franchise for the bigger franchise that you would have globally or that would be a convenience store owner many of them are our key partners and the reality is that as you have seen our core business is delivery but actually with the focus on the hyperlocal Like our sales team, our marketing team, We're supporting that sort of a mission and the way that we're acquiring and retaining and engaging with the partner, with the merchant partner.

It's like end-to-end experience. Like, we're trying to make sure that we explain to them what is the benefit of joining Wolt. Then, when they are joining Wolt, we're actually also trying to make sure that we're communicating with them either through our account person. or to let's say different marketing or communication channels hey the service today is probably gonna have like a peak because of the x y and z holiday season so people normally ordering more or the weather is actually getting worse um be prepared you're gonna see that there's a lot more orders or demands that's coming in oh i'm sorry we have a we have some hiccups on our services the order all the services maybe let's say or the demand may be a bit lower than nowadays we have all of that data and what we're trying to do is not just pushing that data without understanding about the partner business but also to make sure that we actually trying to build our in-person experience in-person communication but also like a personalized tailored experience that we or communication that we would be able to share to the partner making sure that we help them to grow the business because the only way for us to survive is actually for the partner to be able to succeed succeed and if the partner does not succeed if they don't really see any value involved if they go out of business then we don't really have any business ourselves so that's a that's a very very important kind of partnership that we built.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

How does this process then work like the user orders through the app Like I order through the app something to eat. This order then gets processed to the restaurant via an app as well. Do they have an app as well and receive the order then through the app? Is that how the process works?

[Anh Nguyen]

Yeah. So when you make an order on your app, you can browse through the foods, you can browse through the items from the grocery store. You choose, you place the order. It flows to the the apps that the restaurant owner has; some of them have iPads, and some of them have services that they can choose if they want to be able to get its estimation of ready in 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes it's going to the system, and then, of course, during that time we're optimizing our logistic or logistics outreach algorithms. We have our career partners who also go and pick up the package.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Right, that needs to happen at the same time, of course.

[Anh Nguyen]

All at the same time. And the more data points you have, actually everything is almost real-time. And you want to also make sure that the food is being placed and the end-to-end experience, hopefully, based on our business. Support and customer support, and business build is to get everything within 30 minutes so the end-to-end experience is to make sure it's okay. The restaurants and the merchant partner preparing everything getting it ready as fast as optimized, the career partners show up at the right time, pick it up instead of waiting there for 20 minutes. They can actually do multiple orders and then pick it up along the way and then bring it to the user so the end-to-end experience is seamless.

The end-to-end experience for the user is seamless, the end-to-end experience for the partner is also seamless, and that's an important part.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

And I guess the money flow is kind of like the same that goes down through the app or the necessary connections API connections and to bank accounts, etc in the same way, pretty much. And how do you earn money? How does Wolt earn money then?

[Anh Nguyen]

I think it's going a bit to the business model, which, of course, as the marketeers, I'm not the most expert to say. But from the broader picture point of view, we're supporting the restaurants and the merchant partner to grow. So if they make more orders, then we take part of the commissions.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Okay, so you take a commission per order, basically.

[Anh Nguyen]

Yes, exactly. And our ambition, of course, is like bringing incremental growth for incremental demands, for the partners. Of course, it would also the user behavior that has changed a lot since COVID. Back in the day, you probably enjoyed more in-store or in-restaurant eating experiences. Nowadays, there's a group of people who actually enjoy more the delivery service; it's still the same customer, they just change their consumer behavior. And we are the one that actually supports them both.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Do you know that? Just like out of interest, um, in a city like Berlin, how many career drivers um do you have working for Wolt?

[Anh Nguyen]

Um, I actually have that number. Yeah, actually because I see so many of my hands, but Berlin is one of our our strong cities and this is the story: like I'm not trying to to say that we are we are known or visible in own part of Germany. And let's be honest, like Germany, we have so many cities; probably one of the few countries that have like so many cities and the population is living very spread out. So, we the the service that we go or the business that we go is that we're growing, we scale the supply and demand from neighborhood to neighborhood within the city until You cover the whole city at the same time or afterwards, you go to the next city, then you go to the next neighborhood, so that's a kind of and then you acquire customers, you acquire couriers, you bring in the merchant partners, and you make sure that everything-supply and demand is met, the quality of service is strong, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one. So it's a snowball effect. Of course, my hope is that we have been able to strengthen that muscle over the last 10 years. We know how we're launching a new country, we know how we're launching a new city, and we know how to be launching a new neighborhood. So that becomes hopefully a well-oiled machine.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

I know people that are desperately waiting for you to expand because they sometimes live on the outskirts of bigger cities and it's just in the area that is not serviced and they're like, 'Oh my God, it's just 100 meters and I would be able to get delivery service and I'm not.' So they're waiting for you. They're waiting for you. Very exciting. Thank you so much for sharing these insights about yourself and about Wolt. Let us go a little bit more into marketing, performance marketing. And I'd be especially interested in user acquisition because of Wolt, of course, but because of your background as well. I know that you are a proud member of the UA, User Acquisition Society, and you kind of like have done that all your life. How do you define then a strong performance marketing or user acquisition strategy in a company like Wolt? How do you do that?

[Anh Nguyen]

I think the company I Wolt when I started is probably a very early day. We did something, but we haven't done much. That was a very different phase than where we are now. I think it's the scale, the business, the country, the selection. It's a lot different. But there's a few fundamental parts of what I have learned that probably remain the same, regardless of the Wolt that you are now and Wolt back there more than six years ago. First one is marketing tech. Or the infrastructure, the foundation that you need to build because marketing nowadays very data-driven, like if you won't be able to measure the data uh within like uh either it's last click MM model, everything needs to be almost real-time flow, like you need to be able to know where the user coming from, that's the bread and butter of doing let's say performance marketing or marketing so that's the first start step of us building the foundation for the marketing team involved and in other companies. So having a right attribution partner, having the right attribution model, think about how the data flow, how do we track the user, how do we separate the user, how do you build the LTV model, how do you justify the optimization and bidding optimization all of that connecting into that technical setup, the martech infrastructure that we build.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

So you do that with external technologies or have you built your own stuff as well?

[Anh Nguyen]

The MMP or the marketing measurement partner, we're using a third party, a known one. And then for a lot of the others, we use a combination of in-house and third-party services.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer] 

So you license different tools, but you bring it together in a way that it's customized, that it serves your purpose.

[Anh Nguyen]

Exactly, we have an extensive martech stack and I think there's a very, very, very few companies in the world that proudly say that they build everything in-house because nowadays it's almost impossible. You need to be a combination of both, you know?

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

I can imagine that, and that's a bit where my question is coming from so. There is nothing really on the market that you could say um is a fit for purpose for everything you need done right. Is that the conclusion?

[Anh Nguyen]

It's always like the if you look at the marketing tech stack it's always like a combination of like dozens of third-party and in-house services and every company, sorry I'm just saying that every company like building like a mix and match different services in-house and third-party and build it their own kind of model.

This can be a formula, but I think the one that we have for Wolt is probably very different from the one that they have in the e-commerce company or in mobile games so there needs to be like a bit of a tailor-made.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

How would you recommend for smaller companies then? For them it's much more complicated right to to get a similar setup than Wolt has or or anything matching um, how would you recommend? For them, if you would start at a smaller company again, so to say.

[Anh Nguyen]

Yeah I think there are a few things that I would say. Um, and by the way, there's a lot of like third-party and free services nowadays, so we're talking about the MMP, the measurement partner.

I think if it's on mobile, I would suggest let's say AppFlyer or Singular, and then on web, of course you have GA; you have uh some other services that you would help you to be able to build then. Um, you still need to have like some sort of like merge-like process emerging the data, then of course like uh services that actually help you to be able to unify the attribution and then The in-house elementary data tracking just to be able to build like a whole flow of user attribution that can be done, and that's not the most complicated. And then, of course, when it comes to building out the optimization, the bidding, automation, visualizing the data, there are a lot of services out there you can also use Looker, or if you have more money using Tableau.

And the opportunity for you to be able to build something simple is endless, and actually with support of AI, it's made this a lot easier nowadays, comparing to when I started like 10 years ago, okay, and good in the early days, that's at least that's what we have done we built for like small one and then we expand expand expand it to the massive tech stack that we have nowadays okay good so you said three things um the first was marketing tech what was what are the other two the other the second one is probably the hiring because in the beginning you're always looking for like a journalist rather than a very big like pretty like critical specialist and i think that's something that i i'm i actually have a blog post that i'm about to to write to to publish that is talking about it because actually for the you want to looking for like uh someone with of course strong foundations of the domain knowledge about marketing or performance marketing but you also want to looking for someone that actually would be able to set the foundation for what you want to build someone who actually would be able to wearing i don't know not just two hats three hats maybe ten someone who can be hands-on and strategics and then maybe the first person then the second person that's a very very important starting point and the reason i'm saying it because i have seen like companies or smaller company or scale up company that's actually starting with okay let's just start to specialize in this and this unless that's Hiring that person and 10 more people, or five more people, and put them into a different bucket; and let's just try to build like a massive, massive setup with a smaller budget to start in the beginning. Maybe that's not there isn't anything wrong with it, but it's probably gonna be a challenge for you to be able to really move things faster. That's something that I would likely to recommend to really think about: you can start with one or two; think about the skill set; have a mindset of hiring a marketing generalist in mind; having a strong domain knowledge; and someone who you believe that can, If you wouldn't have any funding for the next six to 12 months or any headcount that you would bring in, these people would be the one that's going to figure it out for you for the next six to 12 months.

And I think with that mindset, you can always go really far. And if you build that, you can always hire more people with a similar or more specialized profile. Okay, very interesting. And I think the last one is probably, um, let's say building a very, very clear process because building and hiring the team is step one, like when you're a smaller company, you need to be very scrappy, you need to be very, let's say, quick on movement. Like, process is probably normally deprioritized and normally, like that's a mindset that I want, because I want to have people who come in and like hack things. But building the foundational setup as for marketing, tech, and hiring as important as building a system, and when I'm referring to system and building an operating model and process, so if you would have done from the very beginning, building everything from scratch, I would like to standardize a lot of things, even it may take like few weeks longer to, like, forcing people the one that in my team to follow that process, follow that naming convention, and follow that kind of, like, structure. That I want to do, I would rather do that because it pays off big way in the future. And I'm telling it because as a as a company, we are as big now, there's a lot of the performance marketing setup, structure, account setup, campaign structure that still follows that early-day six and a half years ago, that we have done, even though nowadays we spend a lot, a lot more than what we used to spend.

But that foundational setup is so important, and many people come in and say, 'You just need to hack things and do fast.' You need to do that plus think about the future, build the process, build the system that actually helps you to be able to scale. Not just 10x but hundreds of thousands more.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

So to build a strategy, you said basically three things to have the really good marketing platform landscape from the beginning with different tools that interact with each other, have a real-time flow of data to be able to process and make good decisions. Hiring people, rather generalists in the beginning, specialists a little bit later, and very clear standardized processes from the beginning, right?

[Anh Nguyen]

Yep. Building a strong processes, building a strong system from the very beginning.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Building a machine basically, right?

[Anh Nguyen]

Building a machine.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

How you operate it then? You said you have 300 people on the team, like internally you have 300 people over many, many countries, so different cultures, probably different time zones as well. Then on the external side, I assume you work with partners, you work on different channels, you have different focus areas, you work with bigger platforms like Google and Meta, you work with more like independent channels as well. How do you operate this machine then?

[Anh Nguyen]

Well, the starting point is that I need a lot of help. So I what I'm always aiming for is let's try to build the bench. So building like the resource, the leaders that actually can help me that I can delegate because that's my job is to hiring the best, building a good system, building the clear vision, and let them let them work. Like my job is not to tell them like what they need to do. So how do I make it work? I structured the team into, let's say, a bit of a matrix. So we have a functional support, which is the verticalizing, so performance marketing and CRM. And then I have the horizontal setup within that matrix, which is a regional team. So they work in tandem. And within the regional team, each region has about 8-10 countries. And they work within that part. They make sure that they own the budget, they own the vision, they own the strategies. They are the ones that are working with the GM, the sales operations every day. They know what happens in the countries. But you still want to have a strong support from the functional team meaning performance marketing and crm because that's actually a very very unique domain knowledge it's data driven it's not everyone it's not the thing that every marketeers can actually be able to like just learn a day or two you know how to put a campaign live on facebook but actually if you can spend a million a day or a million a week on facebook or google that's a very different story you need to have a very strong expert so that so that with that matrix i actually embedded that functional setup into the regions and making sure that they work together as the streamlabs team so we have the

[Anh Nguyen] leader who's leading the performance marketing we have i have a leader who leading a crm i have a leader for leading the martech and then i have the leader who leading the regions and under them they have a different team member that they actually work with in that matrix to be able to like driving the decision uh driving the optimization if we have a we have more budget more money how do we scale where do we scale if we have To cut the money in this place, where do we cut? How do we optimize so that decision is there's a like hundreds or thousands of decisions that happen during the days that I don't need to be a part of but they work within that operating model they work towards the same vision and they work towards the same goal on top of the same foundation and operating model that we have set up.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

There is usually when you speak with brands or when you look at this data online, there is a typical share of budget spend that brands are doing like on search, on social, on partner marketing, influencer marketing, etc. How would you say this share? If you can share this information, this budget share is allocated at Walt. Where do you work and what are your focus areas?

[Anh Nguyen]

Yeah, I think depends on the maturity of our markets in many markets where we are still having a lot of users that we should acquire, that means that we are not penetrated the markets. We spend a lot more money on let's say more performance-driven channels so the budget shares is a bit bigger there when in the markets where we start to see that actually we start to penetrating a lot of the markets you're reaching a certain percentage point that actually every incremental dollar that you spend to acquire customers doesn't result the same ratio like in another under-penetrated market.

Then we make a choices thinking, like okay then let's move the focus from new user acquisitions to let's say optimizing to work, let's say platform growth order gov upselling our subscription service role plus upselling our retail user food user to retail user. And that means that the channel, the strategy changes, maybe in the under-penetrated market, we actually spend a bit more on performance marketing because it's data-driven, is actually very tactical, very efficient towards that. In the more mature market, we're moving the budget towards more brand building. Brand building, not just building the brand of Wolt, but building the brand of our services, subscription services. and building the brand of our new vertical retail, so that's that kind of like the ship that we move; we bring over the maturity of the countries, and then the channel mix kind of changes based on the that maturity as well.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

What's overall the most important channels for you then just like across kind of like all the different regions you're working in or maybe if it's too different, maybe in Europe?

[Anh Nguyen]

I would say, to be more specific, I would say Google and TikTok have been one of the, let's say, key partners for us. We're actually working with like 10, 20 different partners. There's like some that we actually invest more, some we invest less. But I think for the user that we have bring in and the scale, I would say Google and TikTok has been. the the key partners and I think TikTok has been one of the partners that has been emerged a lot during the last few years their targeting is getting better their user base is getting better their creative their user behavior also getting a lot different than the TikTok user younger audience a few years ago because actually nowadays more appealing to the broader audience so and as marketeers your money goes where is the most efficient but your money goes where you are target audience or your consumer spending time on and that's what that's a the two key partners that we we work with and another partners are actually growing To be a bigger partner for us is probably, let's say, a bigger part of that is affiliate. Or let's say within the affiliate, we have, let's say, connected TV. We have different affiliate publishers, different affiliate partners.

It's one of the partners where in some of our strategic markets, like Germany, it's actually working really well. It doesn't mean that every single channel or partner is working really well across 30 countries. But I think in countries like Germany and a few others, this has been one of the fastest growing channels for us.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Thank you very much for sharing. Very interesting. When you now orchestrate your team, the different partners, etc. I guess you need to have a very good follow-up and measuring of your data, obviously. How do you do that? Do you have any specific KPIs that you follow? Do you maybe have one leading KPI that everything should pay into? How do you do that?

[Anh Nguyen]

Yeah, I think I still remember like a while ago my only target was how do we get new customers across own country; life was complicated but it was much simpler, I would say. And I think nowadays when the business is mature in many countries where I had explained earlier that our marketing strategy moved from purely acquisition to also let's say a platform, grow, purchase, and so on. It's uh we look at both like still new user or CPA for new user but at the same time we look at the efficiency grow for the platform so our top line is gross order value or GOV then there's another metric that I'm following up is GOV efficiency; I spend let's say x amount and do I have 2x, 3x, 4x or 7x of the money to that GOV efficiency and I think that's also like a bit of a the ship that we have so now it's not either or but it needs to be both so that's a kind of like, not star metrics that I have CPA and GOV efficiency.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

And from there you scale down then and becoming more granular towards the different teams, setting targets then for, yeah, okay.

[Anh Nguyen]

Yeah, okay, very good, very good.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

What is the connection then between, like you said that you touched a little bit on it, but this connection between user acquisition and user retention, how do you face that then? Because I can imagine that's quite different, isn't it?

[Anh Nguyen]

I think the the acquisition size is much straightforward because with the attribution and the evolution of the user-user acquisition attribution, it's a lot easier to kind of follow the user journey and know that okay I pay this much this is how much the cost that I have for a new user. Now we're also doing more of the user retention either to CRM or to paid marketing. And what we're aiming for nowadays is being more targeted, but not targeted to just be on just a specific audience, but also more targeted on what kind of message, what kind of services that we are upselling the user for. If you have ordered, if you have been ordering food and suddenly you started ordering And I'm a new, I have a new baby.

So I'm just saying that I'm suddenly ordering more diapers. So based on our cost segmentation, we should say that, okay, actually this user or this audience falling into the bucket of the family bucket, the new family bucket. How do you actually upsell the convenience store, the supermarket, different kind of offers that more tailored for them? Because this user may, probably users just spending money on food only. They make an order like two times a week, four times a week. They could probably make like eight times a week. And the incremental three, four times is actually coming from these use cases that you would be able to introduce. So that from the marketing point of view, that's what we are spending time on, like investing into the sort of user retention, making sure that we follow the audience and then try to upsell the right audience with the right content at this point.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Looking a bit into the future, what is next now? What is the plans of Wolt and especially for you in marketing for the coming months and maybe kind of like the next two years?

[Anh Nguyen]

I think it fits to the mission and the vision of being a shopping mall in a pocket. Are we a shopping mall yet? No. I think that we are in a very, very early journey of that sort. So if you think about the shopping mall is like a 10 different stores as 10 different uh story and and floors, we are probably just occupying a part of that, and our job is to actually go into the next and the next and the next.

And now from our marketing point of view, it's to find figuring out the way to work within-okay how do we continue acquiring new customers at scale in the most efficient way? But at the same time, figuring out how we're actually building the brand, building the image of Vogue to be a shopping mall of everything. Because a lot of users who have been ordering with Vogue may not know Vogue actually offering a lot more. And you're probably opening the app from Vogue nowadays, you will see that actually restaurant is only a smaller part of that than everything else. People know that. But how do you actually proactively up-platform, in platform? Communicating it at the right time, the right moment for them and that's the kind of system that we're building at the moment, utilizing data, utilizing potentially some elements of AI; we are also very early on that, but that's a kind of like the next one or two or three years for us.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

How do we actually double down on this front? You have a very clear mission. You have something to do. You know what to do. This sounds very exciting. Yes. Do you see in the market itself or maybe especially in our industry, do you see any big trends or shifts that could affect your business that you need to adapt to? Obviously thinking about AI, maybe data regulation, for example, something like that, that could affect you. What is these? What of these big topics is affecting you, do you think?

[Anh Nguyen]

I would say AI is the biggest threat that we have at the moment. Then come down to data regulation, especially for a company that's operating in Europe with GDPR, with DMA. It hasn't been an easy life for me for the last two years.

I think it's felt like a chasing game and, as a marketer, every time that you build something to be able to mitigate the changes or the risk that the regulation or the changes come from the platform from the regulators. They have a new one and a new one, and I sometimes I'm jealous with my college from the US where actually they accept Copa and few others, probably they don't have to deal with a lot of that. But that's what makes the beauty of doing marketing because you actually play by the rules. You actually have to feel innovative, just innovate yourself and your team and your setup to be able to really play by the rules, but do better than everybody else. And the element of AI, when it comes, is quite under, let's say, underappreciated at the moment.

I think everybody talks about AI, but I don't think from the marketing point of view, we are the ones that are actually facing the biggest threat from AI. Maybe a few years from now, my job would be completely depreciated. Should I be scared about it? Yes. But what should I be doing? I should actually learn how to work with AI. I will actually learn how to embrace with AI. My team needs to learn how to use AI on their day-to-day. A lot of the data analytical part needs to be automated. A lot of the content production needs to be automated. A lot of the brand storytelling, brand brainstorming, when it comes to a new brand campaign could be automated, could be brainstormed with AI and I actually sit in one of our team lead meetings yesterday, when one of our leaders sharing a story of the fact that we have been running so fast, we lack on the analytical resources, and the team conducting a lot of different conversion leap tests.

What they learned now is actually start utilizing the ai with chat gpt putting the data there and start to ask AI to be able to model out the conversion, and then they are trying to also validating it with the analytics managers. And actually, that's a fascinating case of how it is like it used to be just a data science specific task, and nowadays, there's already use cases that actually make our productivity from the marketing a lot better. So the opportunity is endless; I don't know if I would probably say that we actually even know what we are doing with AI or how are we navigating with all of these regulation changes. But at least we have been dealing with a lot of that, and we probably continue to learn how we work with it.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

But it's maybe not so much of a threat, right? It's a massive opportunity as well. Because, in the end, like, of course, your job. Kind of like, might get depreciated, mine too, on the other hand, then your job will evolve and you will just like, you're able to do more and, in the end, you will end up doing different things, right? So I find that very fascinating. Thank you so much. What would you say now with your career and your aspect knowledge, what would be the key learnings that you would give to somebody that just like starts from scratch now, somebody that is a little bit younger than us in a startup scale up scenario? What is the key learnings? What would you tell this young person?

[Anh Nguyen]

I would say, probably not something completely different from what you many people have been hearing. You need to be hungry with knowledge; you need to really hungry with learning on like this new trend of applying AI into marketing. Like I don't think that I would be able to continue what I'm doing if I'm not trying to innovate myself and someone who are probably starting their career now, with much younger than us, will probably already start to adopting to the new technologies a lot faster because they probably don't need to do a lot of the things that we used to do hands-on or manual or less automated; they actually know how to query it in the way with AI. Be able to automate a lot of tasks.

And I think that is something that adopting to new technologies, being hungry about the knowledge, the marketing knowledge, is probably something that I would like to recommend people to try to get. One of the things in my early career that I've taught to myself, that actually I want to be able to get, let's say, jumping between this job, getting promoted, getting a high salary from very early days. I soon realized that it actually is a very unrealistic dream; nobody with a very junior experience would be able to get that, so what you should have done is actually be able, hopefully that's what I have done, is to try to get as many, many works as you can and without higher pay. And it may sound wrong, but that's actually what happened for me.

I'm just so hungry for knowledge. I just really want to learn. I just really want to say that, hey, I don't see anyone in the team doing it. And I don't think this is something that we should try; you know what? Let me do it. Let me learn. Let me do it. And then I think that kind of builds up to your career. It builds up to your knowledge. It builds up to the kind of experience that you would not be able to have if you were joining and to fair set up with Vogue. To company level at this point, because we have a lot of set of things that already built a lot of things that have been set, but that's the beauty of being in a smaller or startup company is that you actually be your own boss, you actually be the one that actually can do a lot of those things by yourself and learn, and help the company to grow.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

So if anything, I would say that would be the advice that I have, that is brilliant advice, I think, and that is something that I could underline very much myself because that matches my experience too; whenever you just like say you want to do it and you end up doing a lot of things and you get responsibility, you get Knowledge you get, expert experience, and you make your way exactly. Yes, thank you so much for sharing all this information and insights with us on. At the end, I always ask the same three questions to all of my guests, it's getting a little bit more personal if that is okay for you, would you mind sharing with us what is the best book you've ever read, what kind of book would you recommend to us?

[Anh Nguyen]

I have been reading a lot of books some are audiobooks, some are like actual books and I, I always find myself fascinated when I find myself fascinated when reading the book from the CEO of Netflix, his name No Rules Rules and it's paint the culture of Netflix. Testing, trying, giving responsibility and ownership and it may sound too good to be true; when someone is presenting some cases where the senior leader gives you a blank check and doing x, y, and z, and it may sound too good to be true in a lot of the cases. But, it's built out a culture of innovation, a culture of giving ownership.

And I think the fundamental kind of idea behind it is something that I do hope that companies can embrace, and the leaders can embrace too because it's easier said than done. And I think there are companies that actually have been doing it; we should learn from them, adapt, and build your own model.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Very good, thank you, thank you for that! What would I say is an app or a tool besides Word obviously um that you can't live without?

[Anh Nguyen]

Uh, I talk to myself back in the day that I respect. I cannot live without WhatsApp or some of the social media apps actually nowadays, I spend much less time on though versus me spending time on ChatGPT and there's a lot I'm the guy with like a lot of ideas, and sometimes my wife always telling me that I don't know if you ever seriously think that the ideas actually make sense, or but I'm not I'm not someone who would be able to really sketch out what actually that idea would be. What can it help me to be able? To develop it further and spending time with that actually helped me to think that actually there's a lot more that actually expands my view, which I wouldn't have. It doesn't say that every answer is correct, but it's actually helping me to be able to just getting more kind of like innovative ideas every single day. And I think that have been more of the buddies that I haven't been able to live without.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Good. And then if you weren't doing what you do, so working at Wolt, working with marketing, performance marketing, user acquisition, like completely free, what would you be doing?

[Anh Nguyen]

I joined Vogue because I love being in startup. And part of me, even I haven't done it, is still feeling I really want to do something myself or build something myself. So there's a bit of an entrepreneur feeling that I have that probably if you're not seeing me here, I may be the one that's setting up like a web shop and selling something or being someone who would actually be able to start some small businesses. I don't mind. But I think that's something that you feel, and as a builder, you feel proud of doing something by yourself. I think that's something that probably you would see me if it's not doing marketing that would be what I'm doing an entrepreneur, realizing one of your ideas.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Very good. Thank you so much Anh for a really interesting conversation, and for being my guest today.

[Anh Nguyen]

Thank you very much, thank you very much, for having me that.