How User Research and Word of Mouth Drive Fintech Growth?
In this Marketing Stack 2025 conversation, Rachita Sharma spoke with Naimisha Rao, Co-Founder of Gullak Money, about how businesses can drive stronger growth by deeply understanding users, testing ideas quickly, and turning satisfied customers into trusted advocates.
Naimisha explained that user research at Gullak Money is not a quarterly exercise. It is part of the company’s daily culture.
Team members speak to users every day. They meet them in jewelry stores, talk over coffee, and have long conversations about saving, investing, buying gold, and the emotions behind those decisions.
The goal is not simply to ask whether someone likes a feature. The goal is to understand what shapes their behavior, what pain they are trying to solve, and what money means in their life.
How Can Companies Build User Research Into Their Daily Culture?
Naimisha explained that everyone at Gullak Money participates in user conversations.
Each person may speak to several users a day. Across the team, this creates a large and varied stream of insight from people with different incomes, regions, motivations, and life experiences.
User research is also made engaging inside the company. Teams compare insights, share surprising conversations over lunch, meet customers in person, and even run internal challenges around who can uncover the most useful learning.
This matters because research becomes more reliable when it is done continuously.
A company that speaks to users only once every few months may make decisions based on a small or narrow sample. When conversations happen every day, patterns become easier to identify and personal biases become easier to challenge.
Naimisha said this obsession with the user must become part of the culture if a business wants to do it at scale.
What Questions Help Businesses Understand Their Best Customers?
Naimisha shared two questions that guide how Gullak Money thinks about its users.
The first is: who will cry if we die?
This question helps the company understand who truly depends on the product and whose pain it is solving. It also helps the team decide which requests matter and which ones are distractions.
The second question is: what emotions are involved when someone saves, invests, or buys gold?
This helps the company move beyond financial transactions and understand the deeper reasons behind the behaviour.
Someone may save because they want to buy their first pair of earrings.
Someone may invest because they want to support their parents.
Someone may buy gold because gifting it makes them feel responsible, thoughtful, or successful.
These emotional truths help shape both the product and the way the brand communicates.
How Should Marketers Conduct Better Customer Interviews?
Naimisha warned against treating customer interviews like short surveys.
She said a two minute call asking whether someone would use a new feature usually creates weak information. People often say yes because there is no reason to say no.
Instead, her team asks about real past behaviour.
They may ask when the person last bought gold, how the experience felt, what was difficult, or why they made the purchase.
Past behaviour is more useful because people are describing something that actually happened. They are less likely to give the answer they think the company wants to hear.
Naimisha also avoids leading questions.
Asking whether someone would save in gold to buy earrings for their mother puts an idea into the person’s head. The answer may reflect the suggestion rather than the person’s real intention.
The conversation should stay open and natural. The interviewer should follow the person’s story, ask why several times, and keep going until the real motivation becomes clear.
Her advice was simple. Go into the conversation with curiosity, not a checklist.
How Can Marketers Separate Real Customer Pain From Noise?
Not every customer complaint represents a major business problem.
Naimisha explained that teams need to understand both the intensity and the frequency of a pain point.
A user may say visiting a jewellery store is inconvenient. But if they last visited a store seven years ago, the problem may not happen often enough to justify building an entire solution around it.
The team also looks for patterns across many conversations. A one off comment may be interesting, but it should not automatically drive a major product change.
At the same time, Naimisha acknowledged that a single customer can sometimes reveal an insight that changes the direction of the business.
The skill lies in knowing when an observation reflects a wider truth.
Long conversations also help reduce noise. It is difficult for someone to maintain a false story for several hours. As the discussion goes deeper, real behaviour and emotion usually become clearer.
Why Do Customer Emotions Matter More Than Reports Alone?
Naimisha said reports are useful because they provide data and raise questions.
However, reports rarely explain how someone feels.
A report cannot fully capture the joy of buying the first pair of earrings, the pride of gifting gold to a parent, or the stress of spending a large amount at once.
These emotions are often where the strongest product and marketing insights come from.
Data can show what is happening. User conversations help explain why it is happening.
Naimisha described herself as someone who values data, but she does not believe that numbers alone can reveal the complete human truth.
The best decisions come from combining both.
How Did User Research Change Gullak Money’s Marketing to Women?
Naimisha shared an example of how a customer conversation changed the company’s thinking.
She wanted to understand why men appeared more comfortable discussing investments than women.
Her early assumption was that women needed more financial education, workshops, and content.
After speaking to more women, she discovered something different.
Many men spoke about money in terms of returns, funds, and how much they had made.
Many women saw money as a way to achieve something meaningful. It could support a child’s education, help parents, pay for a home, or create security.
The difference was not necessarily financial knowledge. It was the way the outcome was framed.
A conversation with one woman made this especially clear. She had stopped joining male colleagues for lunch because their conversations about investments felt too transactional.
This changed the way Gullak Money communicated with women.
Instead of focusing only on return percentages, the brand began framing saving around what the money could make possible.
The insight also influenced how the company thought about more inclusive product journeys.
How Can Fintech Brands Turn Private Financial Habits Into Public Advocacy?
Money is personal. Most people do not openly discuss their savings balance.
Naimisha explained that they may still talk about what their financial behaviour says about them.
Someone may proudly say they started buying gold early.
Someone may talk about gifting their mother gold every birthday.
A parent may mention that they began saving for their child’s future years in advance.
These stories are not really about the account balance. They are about identity.
They communicate that the person is thoughtful, prepared, responsible, or financially smart.
Naimisha said brands can encourage advocacy by creating more of these identity driven moments.
When a product helps someone feel proud of a choice, that person becomes more likely to talk about it.
The private habit remains private, but the meaning behind it becomes shareable.
How Can Brands Measure the Impact of Word of Mouth?
Naimisha shared that a significant share of Gullak Money’s users come through word of mouth.
This is one of the clearest signs that people trust the product enough to recommend it.
The company also looks at signals such as conversions from influencer campaigns, brand search growth, sharing behaviour, and user referrals.
Her view was that the impact of influence should eventually appear in business metrics.
A campaign may create more branded searches.
A trusted recommendation may create more conversions.
A useful product may lead users to invite friends or talk about it naturally.
The exact path may vary, but the outcome should still be visible.
How Should Fintech Brands Choose Influencers?
Naimisha said Gullak Money prefers working with influencers who genuinely understand and believe in the product.
In many cases, the best partners are already users.
An influencer may have strong reach, but that alone is not enough. If the person does not see value in the product, the promotion may feel forced.
When the influencer is also a user, the message becomes more honest.
Their audience trusts them because they are speaking from experience rather than reading a campaign brief.
Naimisha also said that influencers can help create early momentum, but customers are more powerful over time.
A friend using a financial product can be more convincing than a public figure promoting it.
This is why sustainable influence comes from users influencing other users.
How Can Brands Encourage More Customer Recommendations?
People do not talk about a product simply because they like it.
Usually, the right context needs to appear.
Naimisha explained that brands can increase recommendations by connecting the product to more moments in a person’s life.
Gold savings may become relevant when someone is planning a gift for a parent.
It may become relevant when saving for a child.
It may become part of a conversation when markets are uncertain or gold prices are moving.
The more useful situations a brand is connected to, the greater the chance that it will enter a natural conversation.
The product must deliver real value first. Then the brand can create reminders and situations that make sharing more likely.
