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Revolut's $25Bn Moat? Embracing The Schlep
The ugly, boring problems nobody wants to touch? They’re the exact ones that built Revolut’s empire.
Alex Ayin
August 17, 2025
Every exec has schleps in their business.
The ugly, complex, bureaucratic problems that eat time and energy (and often get pushed to the bottom of the list).
It’s usually regulation, cross-country complexity or pieces of infrastructure that everyone quietly avoids because it’s slow, political, or just plain boring.
Revolut scaled to 40M+ users and a $25B valuation by doing the exact opposite.
Building a culture that doesn’t just tolerate schleps.
They attack them head-on, solve them better than anyone else, and then codify the solution into a playbook that scales.
“The more imbalanced you are, the more likely you are to succeed. Ninety‑nine per cent of the time is not really pleasure. A lot of pain, pressure, and stress.”
That line isn’t bravado. It’s a philosophy of attacking schleps head-on and thriving on the grind.
In this week’s edition, I run through the playbook Revolut (and a handful of other elite companies) used to turn the painful, boring schleps everyone avoids into the very engines of their growth 👇
The Power Of Running Into The Fire
Think about Tesla.
Everyone remembers the cars.
Few remember the schlep: building thousands of charging stations across the US.
That grind was slow, expensive, and thankless but it solved the #1 objection to EVs (“where will I charge?”).
Today, Tesla owns the largest EV charging network in the world.
Airbnb? Same story.
The app was slick, but their moat came from grinding through city-by-city legal battles.
The messy work nobody else wanted to do.
Today they operate in 100,000+ cities and have survived waves of copycats.
Netflix? Their moat was the hundreds of boring, expensive contract negotiations for global content rights.
Painful, but it turned them into a company with 270M+ subscribers in 190 countries.
The key takeaway for me from all these success stories:
The schleps your competitors avoid are usually where the moat lives.
The Four Core Philosophies From Revolut’s Playbook for Relentless Performance
Embrace The Schlep
This is Revolut’s secret weapon.
Most startups dodge the schleps (regulations, payment rails, multi-country complexity) Revolut runs straight at them.
Instead of avoiding regulation, build a team that thrives on solving it
Instead of creating custom one-offs for each market, codify repeatable playbooks
Instead of chasing the shiny, tackle the grind
Obsess Over The “Wow” Product
Revolut didn’t want to be another dull banking app.
They obsessed over micro UX touches:
The satisfying sound of sending money
Slick real-time currency conversion
Details that created an emotional connection with users
As a result, Revolut has a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 60+, one of the highest in banking, while most traditional banks average under 20.
Lesson for your team: Tiny details = massive compounding loyalty.
Never Compromise On Polish
Where most fintechs rushed out clunky MVPs, Revolut kept the polish bar high from day one.
A confusing, buggy experience wasn’t acceptable because it blurred the signal.
If a feature failed, they wanted to know it was the idea, not the execution.
The impact?
Revolut’s early traction came not just from product-market fit, but product-delight fit.
Their first viral growth wasn’t paid marketing… it was customers saying: “This feels different to my bank.”
Apple has the same principle.
They never release scrappy “test” products.
They set the bar so high that even the smallest feature like the “slide to unlock” animation feels intentional.
Deep-Then-Zoom Thinking
When Revolut decided to launch across multiple countries, they didn’t just slap a “global” label on their app.
Product leaders went painfully deep into the details:
Local regulations
Licensing
Compliance rules
Then they zoomed out to turn those insights into scalable, algorithmic processes.
As a result, Revolut is now licensed to operate as a bank in 30+ countries.
A feat most fintechs wouldn’t touch because of the regulatory grind.
Amazon used the same deep-then-zoom approach to logistics.
They didn’t just think “we’ll do 2-day delivery.”
They dove deep into warehousing, last-mile delivery, robotics, and data.
Then they zoomed out and turned it into Prime": the moat that powers $600B+ in annual revenue.
The leaders who can switch between deep detail and pattern recognition are the ones who win.
Your Challenge for This Week
Sit with your team and list the schleps you’ve been avoiding
Pick one and attack it head-on
Don’t just solve it once, codify it into a playbook so it scales
Big wins rarely come from chasing the shiny.
They come from tackling the schleps everyone else avoids and turning them into moats.
The next breakthrough for your team is probably sitting inside the very schlep you’ve been avoiding.
I’d love to hear from you… what’s the biggest schlep you’re wrestling with right now? Hit reply and tell me.
I’m pulling together the top challenges across this newsletter’s readers.
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