John Natalizia Is Helping People Beat Their Budget Challenges

Name: John Natalizia

Company: Snoop

In one sentence, how would you describe your startup?

Snoop is an award-winning money platform that provides data-driven, personalized insights (‘Snoops’) to help customers save money, both on their bills and their overall spending.

What are you building and who benefits most from it?

We’re building the open data-powered platform that everyone can use to help people spend, save, and live smarter. Snoop ultimately puts customers in control, ensures no nasty surprises, and saves them both time and money.

One of the most important things to us as a business was to develop a proposition with a universal appeal. Snoop customers come from across the U.K., with a broad geographic split. Basically, we’ve built a fintech company that isn’t just for tech enthusiasts: 80% of customers are over 30, 40% are over 45, and 10% are over 60.

Hearing from customers about how Snoop has helped them is important to us, particularly when it comes from people who say they would otherwise struggle to manage their finances (for reasons of poor mental health or otherwise). Downloads, login, dwell time, commercial performance and other metrics are all important, but nothing gets you out of bed in the morning more than knowing you are making a positive difference in people’s lives.

What has been the biggest challenge so far and how did you overcome it?

Launching a business at the height of the COVID pandemic had its moments, but the biggest challenge we have is the demand from customers asking for views across all their accounts and financial products. The boundary that was drawn around payment accounts needs to be extended to all financial services products, including all savings accounts, mortgages, pensions, investments, and insurance. We want open finance and smart data: Customers demand it, and it’s coming.

What tool or app could you not live without and why?

I’d probably say Snoop—in quite a literal sense! It’s my business and my livelihood, and as someone who works all hours of the day, with very little time for life admin, it makes it much easier to stay on top of things and prevent those pesky auto-renewals that line the pockets of big business.

What marketing strategies have worked for you?

The key to reaching customers is a laser-sharp focus on social and digital channels (we use a mixture of in-house developed ad creative and influencer-style content) and building a proposition that generates talkability and word-of-mouth recommendations. PR is also a key channel for the business, particularly case studies of real people waxing lyrical about how Snoop works for them, the personalization, and how much they’ve been able to save.

What’s the best specific piece of advice you have for other entrepreneurs?

If you don’t have a purpose, you don’t have a business. Snoop’s purpose and ambition is to help make everyone better off. It guides our strategy, planning, and roadmap—basically, the work we do every day.

What does your company’s trajectory look like over the next five years?

Snoop is award-winning, revenue-generating, and downloaded well over one million times. We’ve had more than 10,000 four and five-star reviews: customers who have rated us 8/10 say it’s much easier to keep on top of their money and spending, and nearly half score us 10/10 when asked how likely they are to recommend Snoop.

Our trajectory is focused on scaling all the above, and with the Financial Conduct Authority’s latest Financial Lives survey showing that nearly 32 million people (or 60% of U.K. adults) are finding it a burden to pay their bills, Snoop feels like a business right for the times we’re living in.

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