Expensify Growth Playbook

David Barrett saw that expense reports were a universal pain point—employees hated collecting receipts, and finance teams hated chasing them.

The 'Bottoms-Up' Employee Mutiny & The 'SmartScan' FOMO: Expensify tacticaly won by marketing to the 'Victim' (the employee) rather than the 'Buyer' (the CFO). Their growth engine is 'The Single-Product Viral Hook'—allowing individual employees to use the app for free to snap receipts. As enough employees used it, they reached a tipping point where the Finance department was forced to adopt the enterprise plan to manage the volume. Their growth relies on 'Aggressive Branding'—using polarizing slogans like 'Expense reports that don't suck' to signal that they are on the side of the worker, not the corporate machine.