Jupiter : An Acquisition Problem

Shubham Baranwal

11 min readOct 9, 2022

Table on Content

1. Elevator Pitch

2. What does the product solve for ?

3. What is the ideal customer profile (ICP) ?

4. Where do customers spends time and money ?

5. What is total addressable market ?

6. Acquision methods

— Organic

— Referrals

— Paid Ads

— Product Integrations

— Content Loops

Elevator Pitch :

India is a young country.

Our first experience with bank was with a physical location.

But now we are not even expected to be at bank anytime because everything is coming on the app itself.

Future generation might not have that first visit to bank to open a minor or independent account.

Their first experience with bank might be just another app.

Jupiter can be that future app.

Jupiter is making new baking experience for new India, Young India.

What does the product solve for?

It’s new-age banking products. They are building a place where users can get better experience for their finances rather than just a plain banking app. They are like a bank, so the basic expectation of a consumer from a bank is that they should have a deposit product and a lending product. These two are their immediate priorities and they will keep adding features on both these products.

What is the ideal customer profile (ICP)?

This is designed to help you know the potential users much better.

Below numbers came after a survey of 28 users.

Few of the questions that can help you arrive at this question are.

1. What is the demography of the customer?

Age : 20–25 -> 14.3%, 26–30 -> 85.7%
Gender : Male — 71.5% and Female 28.5%
Education : Completed Bachelors and Working 57.1%, Completed Masters and Working 42.9%
Marital Status : Single — 66.7%, Married and no kids — 33.3%
Hometown : Tier 1–28.5%, Tier 2–42.8%, Tier 3–28.7%
Currently Staying : Tier 1–57.1%, Tier 2–28.5%, Tier 3–14.4%
Salary tax bracket(tax bracket — response) : 5% — 20% : 10% — 20%, 30% — 60%

2. What are they typically interested in?

Most used social media apps : LinkedIn, Youtube 85.7%, Instagram, Twitter 71.4%, Reddit,Slack and other 28.6%

3. What are typical problem statement that they have?

a. What do they look for in a Digital bank ?

Good UI/UX — 42.8%
Customer centric — 28.6%
Nothing Much — 28.6%

b. Why did they choose Jupiter as Neobank solution ?

Trying something new — 71.4%
Different account for different kind of expense, didn’t like the traditional bank experience, looking for a secondary bank account, offers — 14.3%

4. How do they value time & money?

They prefer quick and reliable access to services even if it costs some money when it comes to spending. But when it comes to investing and saving, they take time before put their money anywhere else.

Save/invest : Save and invest 30–70% of salary

5. How much do they trust Digital Bank ?

Low 42.8%
Medium 28.6% (less than their primary traditional bank account)
High 28.6% (early adopters and understand the whole concept of Digital banks)

6. Things people don’t like about NeoBanks.

They promise customer-centricity but do not deliver.
Long way to go in terms of building trust and reliability.
they are just a layer built over traditional banks giving no autonomy
No personal service like RMs in banks.

Where do customers spend time & money?

1. Where do they spend time?

Entertainment — Youtube, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hotstar, Spotify, Outdoor activities
Travel — Used to do atleast thrice a year inclduning visiting hometown
Commute — Mostly work from home but used to be 1–2 hours
Location — Home(WFH and hybrid)
Time of the day they are captive — Commute and during lunch breaks,
Exercise — Online classes(online sessions), gym (local and Cult), self-assisted and no-exercise also
Hobbies — Music, traveling, food, fitness, tech-savvy, reading

2. Where do they spend money?

Entertainment — On OTT, music
Reading — Books, Books like Kindle, Paid newsletters Ken, inc42
Travel — Flights, train, cabs
Commute — Ola, Uber, Rapido or own vehicle
Food — Swiggy, Zomato
Renting out/Buying stuff — Married people prefer buying but single people prefer renting
Online shopping — Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Nykaa, Sugar
Major expense apart from rent, daily commute and household bills: Saving/Insurance/Investment 71.4%, travel 14.3%, varies from month to month 14.3%

What is your total addressable market?

1. List down an ICP.

Age — 27
Lives in Bangalore with flatmates
Works as a designer in series B startup, moved into design recently
Earns 85,000 per month
Have a bank account in 2 traditional banks in Tier 3 hometown
Looking for banking with good digital experience and more services in one app

2. Do they search for the use case? (understanding the pull from the market)

# users searching your product on Google search

Online bank — No result in first 5 pages
Digital bank account — 1st result on 4th-page
neobank in India — 4th result on 5th page(in an article)
Jupiter — 3rd result on 1st page
Jupiter bank — 1st result on 1st-page

#users watching your product-related topics

Online bank — 4th and 7th video about Jupiter by a youtube on 1st page
Digital bank account — Not on the 1st page (Fi and NiyoX was there)
neobank in india — 3rd result on 1st page from a youtube
Jupiter — 1st result on 1st page (not from jupiter)
Jupiter bank — 1st result on 1st page (not from Jupiter)
digital bank account kaise khole — 1st result on 1st page (not from Jupiter) (146K views in 2 months)
jupiter bank account review — 1st result on 1st page (not from Jupiter) (9.9k views in 1 month)
jupiter bank kaisa hai — 1st result on 1st page (not from Jupiter) (174K )

#users reading your product-related topic

376.6K follow digital bank topic on Quora

1. How frequent is the use case for the substitute solutions in the market?

These use cases are similar to substitute and competitors. People look for online/digital banks for daily use cases but yet prefer banks with physical location, as in traditional banks. Which makes use-cases similar to all banks.

2. Try to understand how much each ICP exists in the geographies that you can serve in.

India has a population of 140Cr (Estimated for 2022).
Let’s assume that an individual keeps 10% of their income for their saving.
BRE (bank rule engine) serves well to those who earn minimum 20k/month. Varies from bank to bank but this is a general rule banks follows.
Now let’s figure how many individuals have minimum 5LPA income.
According to the income tax department, there were 5,52,60,219 (3% of the total population), individual taxpayers, out of which there were 2,03,06,060 (almost 2Cr) individuals with more than income of more than 5LPA in our country.
This can not be a real count as a lot of people don’t file ITR or file a false ITR.
But if we take this count as 20Cr or 15% of Indian(every 7th Indian) earns more than 5LPA, then this seems a more realistic number.
So, in India we have TAM of 200 million users.

Reference -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_India_by_population

https://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/Documents/Direct%20Tax%20Data/IT-Return-Statistics-Assessment-Year-2018–19.pdf

3. How much of this is addressable that you can service?

Now, this population is spread across the whole country but initially, we are targeting the top 10 most populated cities that are Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Surat, Pune and Jaipur.
The total population of these cities is 6,40,64,595(almost 6.5Cr) which is almost 5% of India’s Population.
For our product, we have selected the top 10 cities as our market which contain 5% of the total population.
So, if we normalize this for earning individuals as well, then 5% of 20Cr = 1Cr.
Now we have a 1Cr individual in the top 10 most populated cities of our country with income of minimum 5LPA.
It means there can be 1Cr bank account as well.
In top 10 cities we have TAM of 10 million users.

Acquision Methods

Organic

Step 1 : Google/ Amazon/ Youtube Search

For your product use case → “Open a digital bank account”, ‘digital bank account kaise khole’

competitor product → “open fi bak account”

your product → “buy a jupiter bank account”, jupiter bank account review, Jupiter bank account kaisa hai

your brand → “jupiter bank”

Step 2: What is the insight from all your searches?

Conclusion:

With the survey, we have figured out that people don’t trust Digital banks yet for 2 reasons,

They don’t understand digital banks and their partnership with banks completely
Fail to deliver the promised services
Startups tend to close often

Organic intent of wanting reliable and seamless banking comes from having a bad experience with users’ current traditional banks.

Users are searching in high volumes for “open bank account online” and are also searching for the other brands directly
Direct brand name: There is more than double search volume for competitor Fi Money than Jupiter

We can convert these organic visits into organic downloads with specific user journeys along with relevant content and solutions.

We need to work on 2 key areas for our ICP simple and trustworthy banking.

Referral

1. Define what is the brag-worthy thing about the product?

Fully free, digital, beautiful looking new age bank build by experts of the industry and trsyted by community.

2. Define what is your platform currency?

Rewards. Get rewards upto Earn 1% rewards up to Rs. 600 whenever referral user makes a transaction on PoS/eCom or any other value added services for the first time. This makes referral deposit money in Jupiter account and make them experience Jupiter’s service. Convert them from acquision to activatation.

3. Who will you ask for a referral?

Whenever user completes their first Pos/eCoM transaction or any other transaction based value added service.

4. How will users discover the referral programme?

A saperate section in user profile(3 clicks) and in the end of any NPS, if user give 4 or 5/5.

5. How will referees share the referral link/voucher code?

Via any text messaging service. Make whole experience exclusive and personal.

6. How will referees track referrals?

In the referal section with status of referal send on, app downloaded, created profile, setup pin and made trasaction.

7. How will you keep them to refer more?

Fine tune happy flow for higher NPS, imporve rest of the flows for high NPS and imporve rewards for referals.

8. Are the referees happy with your reward?

Need to figure out the happy flow for current customer and design referal prgrams around it. Example : We are getting high NPS at the end of UPI payment, then create referal and reawrds around the UPI.

Build multiple happy flowswith good NPS and then think about monetization.

Paid ads

What is your typical CAC : LTV ratio ?

CAC : Cost per paying customer that you can afford/get

LTV: AOV x %margin x frequency x retention

AOV → average order value

LTV → Life time value of a customer

CAC → Customer acquisition cost

Freuqency → How many times in a day/week/month the user will need the product.

In successfully acquiring a customer, we need them to download the app, complete the KYC and debit card delivered to them.

Debit card delivery is done via courier and takes 7–10 days.

Basic cost of acquisition contains total digital ads cost + card package cost + delivery.

Card delivery costs around ₹100.

Printing a package costs around Rs 50(when done in bulk and no customization)

So, the basic cost becomes ₹150 to deliver the card.

If we assume that it takes 4 ads clicks to successfully convenience a user to download and install the app, then based on above table, it can cost around $5.

Which makes CAC = ₹150 + $5 = $500(almost)

Neobanks are integration of multiple value added services. It can included inhouse build features and some 3rd party product integrations as well.

For these services and 3rd party integrations there has to be some commercials involved and a complex fund flow. This can give some revenue as those services might be paid like insurance, investment, advanced spend tracker and more.

In the revenue side major cost can be yearly card fees, which can be around 200–300/year.

For 3rd part value added services, Jupiter can charge 5–20% of commission from partner.

It can be a health insurance from 100Rs/Month to Life insurance of 1000Rs, coupons, FD, mutual fund and more. So, I imagine a long retention period if the user trusts and falls in love with product.

Based on the user survey 60% users use Jupiter once a week and 40% users use Jupiter 2–5 times a week.

Without knowing commercials behind the services, it’s difficult to calculate LTV.

But we understood, card fees takes a good part of LTV (almost half of CAC), which can give CAC:LTV a positive push.

Step 2: Audience selection

Demographics — Age 20–35

Search Keywords — open savings account online, open account online, open bank account, digital savings account, digital bank account,

We prioritize Cost, Scale, and Flexibility along with targeted reach to our potential users. Google search is important as customers are actively looking for options to open savings bank accounts online. Along with this, we figured out that most of our discover us on Instagram and Twitter. So, we will invest more into these 2 channels along with Google search.

As a mature scaling startup, Jupiter can look at Programmatic ads across platforms with the main focus today on driving Awareness, Consideration and trust.

Step 3: Design the Ad

Target messages and creatives along these 3 key areas each for:

ICP 1: Early 20’s student and Salaried people

Trust & Transparency: No hidden fees
Simplicity: no banking jargon, easy to use and beautiful UI
100% Digital: no branches

ICP 2: Working 6–12 years

Trust & Transparency: RBI-licensed bank, No hidden fees
Seamless: transactions, UI/UX, relevant features
Reliable : customer support

Product integrations

The customer will primarily use Jupiter today to make payments. Food & grocery delivery and other e-commerce players are after similar a similar TAM to us. Just look at swiggy checkout page. So it makes sense to partner with the platforms where our users are already there and making transactions.

We have figured out in our user survey that investments are biggest expense after rent, daily commute and groceries followed by travel.

Potential Partners

Investment apps: Zerodha, Groww, INDMoney and more
Travel apps : Make my trip, goIbibo, Redbus and more
Food delivery: Swiggy, Zomato and more
Grocery delivery: Dunzo, Zepto, Super daily, BlinkIt and more
Online shopping: Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Sugar and more

Content loops

Jupiter’s invite only streategy worked really well aloong with public product roadmap. Currently, 200,000 people have opened accounts and another 3,000 users are opening savings accounts every day on the app that saw over 1 billion deposit transactions in the last 30 days. the credit requirements of these customers are expected to be in the range of Rs 10,000 to as high as Rs 3 lakh.Jupiter expects to reach nearly 2 million users by December 2022. Currently, 80% of their customers belong to the top five banks.

Curating content via newsletter/blogs

Daily finance news and trends [ Educational ]
Mistakes to avoid [ Educational ]

Youtube, Instagram, Twitter

How to videos, educational series
Myth busters in finance with top influencer of the topic
Advice on how to manage finance.

Forum for discussion

Something similar to open roadmap (already existing) where people can discuss in-app issues (Niyo Community)

Reference :

Thank you 😃