Ryan Wiggins on Growth Systems, WhatsApp and Hiring

Ryan Wiggins tells Harry Stebbings that he began in Facebook customer support and learned SQL to understand and improve recurring problems. That work led him to a growth marketing team spanning data, product and marketing. He later worked on Facebook Ads, Workplace and WhatsApp before joining Mercury.

Wiggins says Mercury’s banking product appealed to him because of its customer experience and the chance to work on earlier-stage problems. He says the company had grown to more than 100,000 startups at the interview. That is a company executive’s 2023 account, not an independently verified current customer count.

His career was largely unplanned. He advises pursuing genuine curiosity in the job one already has and using it to create value, while identifying the skills needed for a desired future role. Those two principles, he says, gave him options without requiring a prestigious or predetermined path.

When Wiggins joined WhatsApp in 2017, he found a very different culture from Facebook’s heavily instrumented approach. He says the product had about 1.5 billion users and a small product and data team. His explanation of its growth combines timing, an easy and reliable messaging product, and carrier partnerships that helped users access it.

Aggregate growth can hide different country-level trajectories. He says US adoption faced cheap SMS and established alternatives such as iMessage and Messenger, whereas WhatsApp benefited from high messaging costs in other markets. His market and usage comparisons are retrospective observations, not a complete causal analysis.

Wiggins says data later helped improve products such as WhatsApp Business and regional growth, while the underlying product remained essential. He distinguishes the growth of WhatsApp Business to 100 million monthly active users during his work from a claim that one person caused the growth. He sees growth as the interaction of product, marketing, partnerships and sales.

A growth system spans acquisition, conversion, activation and retention. He says founders often ask for more acquisition when the problem is lower in the funnel. The sequence matters: pouring traffic into an experience that does not retain people can waste effort.

At WhatsApp Business, Wiggins says the team found that switching from the consumer app could lose chats, prompting businesses to return to the old app. Fixing the transition approximately doubled retention, in his account, before the team accelerated acquisition. He does not specify the measured cohort or period in the interview.

He warns growth practitioners against substituting many notifications or upsells for a useful product change. In markets where a new WhatsApp user might have nobody to talk to, an invitation shown while searching for a missing contact performed much better than other entry points. He says the context made the action relevant to the user’s actual goal.

To define a successful user, Wiggins studies retention and early actions associated with continued use. More contacts can be a proxy for finding the one person a user wants to reach, but the proxy is not the underlying value itself. He cites Facebook’s well-known early-friends metric as another way to represent a core experience.

He wants growth teams to alternate quick, tightly scoped exploration with investment in what works. For an early product, he favors a clear and substantial signal over chasing tiny improvements that are difficult to measure. This is his prioritization approach, not a guarantee that large effects will appear.

Experiment duration depends on the expected effect and available sample. Smaller changes generally need more observations, and teams should assess feasibility before running a test. He also distinguishes leading inputs, such as importing contacts, from later outcomes; an early lift is a clue, not proof of sustained impact.

Wiggins would hire a dedicated growth team once the product has core product-market fit and at least one repeatable channel brings users. Before then, he says, the company and founder must treat growth as part of building the product. Once that foundation exists, he favors bringing in a broad growth leader relatively early.

A first growth leader should experience the entire customer journey, documenting each step from discovery to active use. Wiggins recommends examining acquisition sources over time, funnel drop-offs and actions associated with successful users. Then the leader should ship something to learn how decisions and execution work inside the company.

He prefers a small initial team, sometimes one to four people, because coordination becomes harder as a group grows. Once a repeatable approach works, resources can be added. His appeal to communication complexity is a management heuristic, not a precise application of a law to every organization.

Stebbings asks how a founder knows growth is real rather than dependent on their own selling. Wiggins looks for repeatability beyond the founder and considers what happens when an acquisition effort is reduced. He expects other channels or organic adoption to emerge in many businesses, though this is not a universal requirement for every model.

When a channel works, he starts by improving it, then evaluates diminishing returns and the opportunity cost of neglecting other channels. The choice is a continuing comparison of possible impact, effort and alternatives rather than an instruction to exploit one channel forever.

To find overlooked talent, Wiggins looks for people who have made changes from operational roles, including customer support. He describes a Mercury colleague who learned to code and expanded her impact. A formal growth title is less important to him than understanding a system, changing it and showing results.

His hiring criteria include evidence of execution, the ability to analyze customer behavior and turn problems into actions, and product judgment. He uses career examples to see whether candidates understand the system behind a win rather than merely repeat a tactic. Interview formats can vary as long as they test the relevant skills.

For case studies, he cautions against asking candidates to solve the company’s immediate problem as unpaid work. A broader or adjacent problem can reveal their reasoning without anchoring the exercise too closely to the interviewer’s existing view. He also wants leadership, cross-functional peers and prospective reports to contribute to the hiring assessment.

Wiggins favors compensation that combines reasonable cash with meaningful equity and allows some choice between them. For a US first growth individual contributor, he offers a broad $150,000 to $250,000 cash estimate plus equity, depending on experience and role. This was his 2023 estimate, not a current market guarantee; equity outcomes are uncertain.

During the first month, a new hire should learn the people, product, processes and customer journey. By around three months, Wiggins expects developing opinions, useful insights, shipped changes and clear communication. He says the path varies by person and early output may not yet change the company’s overall trajectory.

His early warning signs include prioritizing personal position over the team, chasing quick wins that are not sustainable, and ignoring feedback. He thinks three to six months can often reveal the quality of a leader’s inputs even if a significant result takes six to twelve months. He recommends a candid conversation about whether the trajectory can change.

He recalls hiring someone despite shared concerns about arrogance because of the person’s skills. The experience taught him to take interview red flags seriously and distinguish an individual’s contribution from advantages created by their previous organization. This is one hiring anecdote, not a diagnostic rule.

Wiggins does not favor a formal postmortem for every small growth change. He prefers regular review of what was tried, what happened and what themes should guide the next decision; a serious breakage still merits investigation. His concern is spending too much time analyzing individual minor failures instead of learning across them.

At Mercury, where early data were limited, the team launched a product demo without requiring an email address and let visitors explore it. Wiggins says it led to more than a thousand account sign-ups and some large deposits, and also helped recruiting. These are company-reported outcomes from an executive, without a controlled causal estimate in the interview.

He says WhatsApp had reached about 1.5 billion users without an A/B testing framework, then built one around 2017 to assess possible harm from business features. The team did not detect negative effects in the tests he describes. Failure to detect harm is not proof that no harm exists, and the interview supplies no test sizes or confidence intervals.

In France, his team combined product invitations, marketing and partnerships to support WhatsApp growth in a competitive market. He says this accelerated growth and improved market share over roughly a year. The result is his retrospective account rather than a separately verified causal measurement.

In the quick-fire round, Wiggins emphasizes connecting people to the action that makes a product useful. He thinks email and push notifications can be overused and permanently lose a channel when people turn them off. He wants growth teams to talk to customers more, not only examine data.

He expects sustainable product experiences to remain central to growth and argues advertising and creative production can become more expensive. These are market expectations, not a guarantee about future costs. He admires Substack’s focus on writers and subsequent network features; that is his assessment of another company.

Stebbings thanks Wiggins for discussing WhatsApp, Mercury and the practical work of building a growth team. They close the conversation with thanks.