“Is this a scam?”
Students were offered a loan by a company they had never heard of. Reviews and live Q&As turned their first question into 4× growth at the bottom of the funnel.
The problem
Picture a student in Lagos or Lahore with an acceptance letter from a US university. A company in Washington they've never heard of offers them a loan with no cosigner and no collateral. Their first question isn't about the interest rate. It's "Is this a scam?"
Phone calls could answer that one person at a time. They were costly, slow, and never going to scale to the countries we wanted to reach.
The spell
Trust is borrowed before it's earned. So we gave students two places to borrow it.
- Trustpilot, so they could hear from other borrowers instead of from us.
- Live sessions where anyone could ask anything out loud and watch a real person answer in real time. I hosted more than 90% of the first 25+ sessions.
A review lends you a stranger's credibility. A live Q&A goes further: it lets people test you in public, and passing that test in front of an audience persuades everyone watching.
What happened
The programs contributed to fourfold growth at the bottom of the funnel from 2021 to 2022, and they were part of the story behind my 2023 Built In Moxie Award. Live education kept growing after that, to more than 20,000 attendees by 2024.
Built with MPOWER's digital team, our presenters, and the customer-facing teams who answered the questions we couldn't.