Reflecting and Rethinking: Venmo App
A product case study on user experience, stagnating growth, and what comes next.
The New Verb
2018 - I still vividly remember my first few weeks on campus as a freshman in college; dorms and hallways were packed with students eager to make new friends, create study groups, share contacts - it was peak chaos. Amidst the energy and noise, I remember hearing the phrases “I’ll venmo you”, “venmo me” for the first time. The product had already been out in the market for quite a while (launched 2009), but it was around this time that Venmo really became a generational commodity.
How Venmo Changed the Way a Generation Splits the Bill
In an economy where cash was becoming increasingly obsolete and people were less inclined to write checks or visit the ATM, Venmo transformed the P2P dynamic forever. Fundamentally changing how millennials and Gen Z handle microtransactions, Venmo introduced a clever and convenient, frictionless model for “splitting the check” and “settling up”.
The Market Gap for Venmo
Cash Dependency Created Everyday Friction
Before Venmo, settling everyday expenses depended heavily on physical cash. People rarely carried exact change, had to find ATMs, or postponed repayment entirely. Frequent interactions—splitting dinner, covering a cab, or buying group tickets—were logistically inconvenient. The result was lots of delay + accumulation of small unpaid debts that created lasting mental overhead
Digital Transfers Were Built for Commerce, Not Friends
Existing options like PayPal seemed to be designed for more formal online transactions, not casual peer-to-peer exchanges. Sending money required emails, manual entry, and multiple confirmation steps, making the process slow and unintuitive. The experience felt transactional and heavy, and that was the missing link—nothing was catching up to the speed and informality of everyday social interactions.
Social Friction
Requesting money from friends felt awkward and confrontational (perhaps it still does), especially for small amounts. Without a lightweight, socially comfortable way to ask or remind someone, people often avoided settling up altogether. I remember experiencing this a lot in my personal life. This led to unresolved micro-debts, unnecessary strain and tension in casual relationships, and the annoying burden of remembering who owed what.
The Solution: Product-Market Fit Done Right
Mobile-First Nature Enabled In-the-Moment Settlement
Venmo made sending and requesting money practically instantaneous. By integrating directly with phone contacts, users could pay and/or request money from peers in seconds—no account numbers, emails—no friction. Repayment shifted from something delayed and forgotten to something resolved immediately.
Repayment Made Easy
“Just venmo me”—Venmo normalized asking for money in the form of lightweight requests. Repayment became a quick, explicit action built into the product. This removed the social friction that previously prevented people from settling small, everyday debts.
The Social Feed
Venmo’s social feed was definitely a unique initiative. By default, users would disclose their daily transactions to “friended” users in the form of a feed (much like an X feed), adding a caption to each transaction to convey any message they wanted. This new form of interaction made transactions not only visible, but also familiar, and culturally normalized. Seeing friends use Venmo built trust and reinforced adoption. As more people joined, Venmo became the default way to settle shared experiences—driven by network effects, not just utility.
Status Quo:
Staple Product, Slowing Momentum
Over the years, Venmo has settled in place as a staple product in today’s market, especially within the younger demographic (18-34). In recent years, Venmo has taken on multiple initiatives - crypto, Venmo debit/credit cards, and most recently, debit cards for teens - and yet, Venmo is still miles behind its competitors in many of its core product features.
For a while now, I’ve had the intuition that Venmo’s growth as a product has been plateauing; user engagement with the product seems very superficial and cut short. I went ahead and validated this intuition by performing competitive analysis on Venmo vs. Zelle & Cash App, two of its most prominent direct competitors in the market. Below, I analyze Venmo’s relative growth compared to Zelle and Cash App on three metrics - payment volume (TPV), YOY growth in volume, monthly active users (MAU) - from 2018 to present.
While Rivals Accelerated, Venmo's Growth Stalled
Across payment volume, growth rate, and active users — the data shows a consistent pattern of deceleration for Venmo relative to Zelle and Cash App since 2021.
The gap was 1.9× in 2018. Zelle crossed $1.2T in 2025 (official, EWS). Venmo's volume is estimated at ~$312B — growth of ~7% — while Cash App inflows reached ~$316B, making it roughly equal to Venmo for the first time.
(sources included in footer)
So what?
The data seems to validate my initial intuition that Venmo’s growth as a subsidiary product (PayPal) has been on a noticeable plateau in the past several years. At first, it wasn’t so obvious as to why this may be the case. Or perhaps, what kind of growth opportunities that Venmo was missing out on.
So then I started really thinking.
User Research and Sentiment Analysis:
Venmo's Landing Screen
As an active Venmo user for the past 8 years, I’ve often questioned the raw value of the app’s landing screen for its users. Quite frankly, I’ve held the opinion that the social feed serves little to no value at all for a majority of the app’s user base - in fact, I have a strong opinion that the feed is wasted in-app real estate.
Now to be a true product person, I know that I shouldn’t rely on purely opinionated conclusions when thinking of ways to enhance or augment a product. So I decided to conduct a series of user interviews - 5 in total - as well as a sentiment analysis of several Reddit threads that discussed users’ stances on the presence of a social feed in the app’s home screen.
4 out of the 5 users that I interviewed (20-28 years old, have been active Venmo users for 5+ years) said outright that the feed seemed “useless”, expressing negative and dissociative sentiment. 1 user remained neutral, without a pressing stance.
I then wanted to increase the sample size and analyze users' sentiment towards the app's landing screen online. I performed a classic sentiment analysis (using Claude Sonnet 4.6) across three different Reddit threads, totaling a count of 187 comments regarding users' opinions on Venmo's social feed.
An overwhelming 76% of comments indicated some sort of negative sentiment regarding the app's home screen. Below, I break down the analysis even further—this time, observing the distribution of the most dominant criticisms regarding the feed, attributed by relative frequency across the threads.
The top criticism ("default public settings feel invasive") outpaces the next by 35%. Users aren't opposed to social features in principle — they're opposed to being opted in by default. Neutral users largely cope by setting transactions to private or ignoring the feed, suggesting the feature is tolerated at best. Positive sentiment (4.8%) came almost entirely from users who treat Venmo as a social-first app — a small, niche use case that does not justify the UX footprint the feature occupies.
Rethinking Venmo's Landing Screen
Despite the relatively smaller sample size, the results from the user research and online sentiment analysis clearly indicate that there is room for Venmo to improve its use of in-app real estate. Tying back to the results from the competitive analysis and signs of product growth stagnation, I started thinking of ways to enhance the landing screen that would drive product growth in the long run.
One of the key factors in this brainstorming process was acknowledging a critical nuance in the Venmo user experience: locality. Venmo is a highly localized experience for many of its users; we use the app to pay a friend back for dinner the other night, pay for a quick haircut at a local hair salon, and pay up a dog walker for his or her weekly service. Recently, many local merchants are signing up through the app with local business profiles, accepting Venmo as a source of convenient payment – local bakeries, cafes, etc.
Hyperlocal Commerce
For any app, it is true that the home screen, or landing screen, sets the tone for the user experience and heavily impacts the user’s primary intent in using the app. When redesigning the home screen, I wanted to focus on the power of local commerce and its very natural connection to Venmo’s general user experience. Instead of centering the experience around a low-value social feed simply showing friends’ recent transactions, the new landing screen introduces a hyperlocal marketplace feed that connects users to nearby merchants and reservable items. Where Venmo stands today as a “way to pay friends”, the goal is to subtly add a new dimension to the user experience, “a place to discover and pay”.
Important note: The original social feed is still present in the app’s home tab, but it is hidden by default as the second-layer tab under "Friends". The main display tab is the new marketplace feed. Check out the wireframes below for a clear visualization of this mechanism.
The idea: local vendors/merchants – bakeries, cafes, clothing stores, etc. – can post to this new marketplace feed through their business profiles, advertising and promoting their latest goods and products. Now, whenever a user opens the Venmo app to pay a friend back for dinner, he or she is immediately exposed to this new feed, visually consuming a convenient local marketplace experience. If the user is interested in buying the product being advertised, he or she can reserve it for pickup by paying directly through the app.
Mid/High-Fidelity Wireframes
Using Figma Make (Figma AI) as the canvas, I carefully prompted Gemini 3 Pro to translate my vision of the new home screen into mid/high-fidelity wireframes.
Below are the sequential wireframes displaying the user interface after clicking on "Reserve & Pay".
Strategic Design Decision: Reels-Style Swipe Card Layout
The marketplace uses a vertically swipeable, immersive card format inspired by short-form content feeds (e.g., TikTok/Instagram reels-style interaction patterns).
Why?
Increases dwell time – immersive full-width cards attract attention
Lightweight browning – users can casually explore without commitment
Creates monetizable real estate – each card becomes a potential sponsored placement
Resembling more of a familiar “feed” style layout, the swipe-card mechanism allows vendor discovery to be a modern, fluid interaction pattern.
Key Features
Hyperlocal Vendor Spotlight
Search for Vendors or Items
Immersive Swipe-able Vendor Cards
Each card includes:
Vendor name
Rating
Distance
Product image
Price
Pickup window
Primary CTA: Reserve & Pay
Driving Long-Term Product Growth
Venmo’s primary revenue streams include:
Merchant transaction fees
Instant transfer fees
Credit card processing fees
Interchange revenue from Venmo cards
The traditional social feed reinforces engagement but fails to directly monetize attention. The redesigned home screen aligns the most valuable real estate of the app with higher-margin revenue behavior.
The goal of this redesign is to impact long-term growth for the Venmo business. The standard merchant transaction fee is 1.9% + $0.10 per transaction, increased when the transaction is contactless through QR code. This is one of the highest margin revenue streams for the Venmo business model, and the redesigned home screen with the new marketplace feed directly targets this opportunity for growth. Long term, I believe that this new format will increase merchant transaction volume, encourage higher-frequency usage, and expand Venmo’s identity from a “social payments app” to a local financial utility.
Future Iteration Roadmap
If I were to iterate further on this redesign in the future, I would consider adding a personalization engine to the marketplace feed. This layer would help recommend vendors to users based on past transactions (based on transaction captions), perhaps along with smart time-of-day suggestions (morning coffee, evening dessert). I would also look into further growth mechanics, such as loyalty rewards tied to a user’s Venmo balance, streak incentives for local purchases, and sponsored vendor placements (similar to bidding for SEO).
Conclusion
I’m a firm believer that no matter their scale, products should continuously strive to adapt to evolving market needs, emerging user generations, and changing industry standards. A feature that fostered success 10 years ago may be totally irrelevant and serve 0 value to users today. A forward-driven product should embrace change through iteration and feed off of opportunities to create persistent value for its users.
Thank you for checking out this case study!