Jobs-To-Be-Done: PiggyVest
From an inspiring tweet to a product with over four million customers in eight years, PiggyVest which initially set out to digitize the wooden box method of saving money has since grown into one of the leading online savings and investment platforms in Nigeria helping customers save and invest billions of Naira.
But how does a product evolve from a tweet to serving over 4 million customers?
The Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) philosophy can provide some context for understanding PiggyVest’s growth. The JTBD theory suggests that people hire a product to get a job done or achieve a goal (functional, emotional, and/or social). Therefore, without a job that needs to be done, a product will never be used. Correspondingly, without understanding the job that needs to be done, a good product will never be created.
The size of PiggyVest’s user base clearly shows that they understand the goals people have regarding their finances. The functional goal of PiggyVest’s customers is to “build or maintain a financial safety net.” For centuries, people around the world have had this goal but they employed different products over time to achieve it. For example, in the 15th century, people stored money in household items that were made out of a type of clay called “PYGG” (fun fact; this is the origin of the term piggybank). In the 19th century, banks became accessible to poorer people who used this to achieve the same objective. Essentially, people do not want a piggybank or a bank, they want to build a financial safety net and it is left to innovators to determine how.
PiggyVest has been designed to help customers achieve their goals significantly better than before. It provides the option to automate the process of building a financial safety net while its disciplinary measures help customers commit to their plans. After successfully helping users achieve this functional goal, PiggyVest developed features that address other related goals. For example, the “Investify” feature which helps users purchase some investment products addresses this goal — “Help me grow my money.” And the “public savings challenge” feature addresses the social goal — “I want to be seen as disciplined.” From a JTBD perspective, if you take PiggyVest apart feature by feature, you can trace each one to a goal a user has.
Although PiggyVest has added tremendous value to peoples’ lives there are still jobs that customers will like to get done. Two of the many thematic areas where the jobs exist are in “daily money management” and “growth”. A daily money management goal is to “keep track of my money wherever it is stored.” By connecting all the customer’s bank accounts (e.g. savings, bank accounts of other fintech products they use, etc.), customers have a full view of their financial health at all times. A growth goal is to “make investing easier after saving”. With customers wanting more access to investment options like the international stock market, cryptocurrencies, etc. PiggyVest can either add these offerings through “Investify” (they attempted this briefly before the cryptocurrency ban in February) or create an application program interface (API) that allows customers to connect their PiggyVest accounts with fintech companies that offer these services. (If you do a lot of your saving with PiggyVest, I think you need this feature too.)
In summary, by obsessively focusing on their customers’ goals (jobs-to-be-done) and creating features that make it easy to achieve them, PiggyVest has become a favorite for millennials and Gen-Z’ers. It should be exciting to see what the future holds for the product. 🚀🚀🚀
