LISTEN CASE STUDY
How Sling Money uses Listen Labs to build a global brand with a local feel
Global reach, local relevance
Impact TLDR:
Faster localization: Sling Money can now test global messaging and find preferred local terms in just hours.
Higher user trust: Adjusted marketing language after discovering what messaging reduced credibility.
Simplified UX research: Identified what mattered and what didn’t on their website, saving time and resources.
Segmented communication: Differentiated messaging for crypto-savvy and general audiences to increase engagement.
Global reach: Conducted interviews in users' native languages, ensuring insights reflect the real cultural context
Sling Money is redefining how people send and receive money. Powered by stablecoins, they enable instant, low-cost transfers across 140 countries and 40 currencies.
“We’re making sending money worldwide as easy as sending a text message,” said Ali Romero, Marketing Manager at Sling Money. They want the power of blockchain to help users do more, not hold them back. “You don’t need to know how it actually works, the same way you don’t know how texting works. You just do it.”
Ali Romero, Marketing Manager at Sling Money
But creating an intuitive experience worldwide is challenging. As a global company, Sling Money must communicate and build trust with audiences across many countries, each with different expectations, languages, and cultural contexts.
“We’re global but we want to feel local,” said Ali. That’s where Listen Labs comes in.
The problem: scaling insight across cultures
Before Listen, Sling Money’s user research relied on one-off interviews and ad-hoc surveys with users both online and in person at events. “We’re a very small team,” Ali explained. “It took a huge amount of coordination — reaching out to users individually, scheduling time, paying them, compiling and analyzing responses manually. Even with Google Forms, it was time-intensive and hard to scale.”
Mike Hudack, Sling Money’s CEO and co-founder, wanted to ensure that decisions were driven by data beyond office conversations so the user could remain central to their service. He needed a tool that could help Sling Money survey both the general public and their actual users at scale — without losing nuance.
“Previously we would have talked to people we know, some users, and done some online research. Now, when we have a specific question about how people work with money in various countries -- from Mexico to Germany, Brazil to the United States -- we can ask a representative sample of people who are in our target demographic. Feedback on Listen Labs is more honest and more direct than when people know they're talking to the people who built the service.”
Sling Money has been able to use Listen Labs to gain insights that shape its brand and help its messaging resonate with users without losing its unique personality.
For a global fintech company like Sling Money, language defines usability. Sometimes it’s not enough to just translate terms exactly. Choosing the right words can mean the difference between a customer feeling instantly at home, or confused and hesitant.
“We want the app to feel like the apps our customers are used to using. We don’t want there to be a big learning curve,” said Ali. “They shouldn’t have to learn anything new to use our app. Therefore, we want to use the language each person is already familiar with across the different countries where we operate.”
Sling Money used Listen Labs to quickly test how their users described common financial terms. For example, when preparing for a product launch, the team wanted to know what people preferred: “payment methods,” “payment instruments,” “funding sources”, etc.
They ran rapid, localized surveys through Listen Labs, comparing six similar terms, and got results in hours. The data was clear: people overwhelmingly preferred “payment methods.”
Companies forging a brand often face a familiar question: conform to industry norms or lean into the brand’s personality?
Sling Money faced this question with its website. They were unsure whether they could have a website dominated by the brand’s signature bright orange or if they needed to use the traditional blue that many other financial apps lean on.
To find out, they turned to Listen Labs. And the results surprised them.
“People didn’t care what color it was,” Ali said. The insight was liberating. By learning what didn’t matter to users, the team gained the freedom to focus on what did: clarity, trust, and authenticity. Instead of defaulting to the safe, standard palette used by competitors, they can stand out and stay true to Sling Money’s own design identity.
The speed of Listen’s feedback loop made this type of UX testing much less expensive, so they can rely on it more often. Sling Money now has a way to test design hypotheses quickly and make creative decisions grounded in user reality.
“We’ve done so many surveys already. It’s really cool that we can make and send out a survey in ten minutes and get results later that day,” said Ali. “It’s a total game changer.”
Ali explained that getting answers like that is crucial to the app's usability. “If you see a button that says 'Add funding source,' you might not know what that is, and using the app will be harder. Whereas, if you see ‘Add payment method,’ you know what that is, and the experience is smooth.”
That clarity doesn’t just make the app easier to use; it helps make it feel familiar. In markets like Mexico or Brazil, where people use different local systems and terminology, the right vocabulary helps build a relationship by signaling that the brand understands their world. And because Listen Labs supports research in over 50 languages, Sling Money can test phrases directly in users’ native tongues. “It’s really nice that we’re able to reach a wide range of people who can answer in their own language,” she said, “It’s so helpful to make a survey and then, in a few hours, confidently say, ‘This is what people want.’”
Use-case 1: Increasing usability
Use-case 2: Learning what matters with UX
Success in fintech is about more than innovative technology. It depends on trust, usability, and understanding. Listen Labs has made it possible for Sling Money to uncover what that looks like in every market they serve.
Where it once took months to create a survey, schedule it, push it out, and analyze the results, Sling Money can now make something within minutes and get insight within hours. They have a fast, scalable way to hear directly from users in their own words and languages — something that would have been impossible for their small team otherwise.
“The fact that so many people are willing to spend five minutes to do this survey shows how easy the platform is to use. There’s way less drop off.”
Through its partnership with Listen, Sling Money has gained more than data; it has gained perspective. The team can now see their brand the way customers do and shape it into the global company with a local feel that they envision.
In a landscape crowded with financial apps competing on features and fees, the human insight has become Sling Money’s greatest advantage.