5 Counter-Intuitive Go-to-Market Lessons from Building Payment Infrastructure
The conventional startup playbook tells founders to move fast and iterate. But what happens when you’re building critical financial infrastructure where downtime isn’t an option? In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Orum founder Stephany Kirkpatrick shared hard-earned lessons about bringing payment infrastructure to market.
- Forget the MVP – Infrastructure Demands Completeness
Consumer tech wisdom says to launch quickly and iterate. But Stephany discovered this approach fails for infrastructure products: “People don’t want to switch money movement providers when it’s not complete. People don’t necessarily believe that you’re going to have something unique and better and differentiated until they can experience it and run a payment on it.”
While you can still apply MVP thinking, the bar for “minimum” is much higher. As Stephany explains, “We might apply the Minimum Viable Product MVP concept to it, meaning it doesn’t have parity with a bank, for example, but it’s also not supposed to, but it also can’t stop functioning.”
- Transform Technical Features into Customer Experiences
Infrastructure companies often struggle to demonstrate value because the product is deeply technical. Orum’s breakthrough came when they stopped trying to sell the API and started showing the end result: “What we’ve learned is that if you build a demo that shows the customer experience from an app perspective or a business user perspective, people go, ‘oh, I get it.'”
- Evolve Your Pricing with the Market
Even after gaining traction, infrastructure companies must continuously refine their go-to-market approach. Stephany notes, “Even recently, I would say we’ve learned a lot about how we, one, we’re structuring pricing, and two, how were positioning it. They’re two different things.”
This ongoing evolution reflects the challenge of pricing infrastructure that enables entirely new categories of products and services.
- Build for Future Innovation, Not Just Current Needs
Infrastructure companies need to balance solving today’s problems while enabling tomorrow’s innovations. As Stephany explains, “We really feel like we’re enablers of what will become net new categories of innovation and infrastructure that goes beyond just the payments piece.”
This longer-term view shapes everything from product development to market positioning. It’s about asking deeper questions like “what role does identity and fraud and thus data around those two vectors play in ultimately optimizing both payments and financial services in the future?”
- Sell the Transformation, Not the Technology
The most successful infrastructure companies don’t just sell technical capabilities – they sell the possibility of transformation. Stephany frames this eloquently: “It’s a whole new frontier when you stop having to ask how or how fast to move money.”
This vision-driven approach is particularly powerful when you’re enabling new possibilities. As Stephany notes, “if what we’re building at Orum had existed a decade ago, you would have never built Venmo, which is probably one of the most ubiquitous financial services products we all consume.”
The core lesson? Building infrastructure requires fundamentally different go-to-market thinking than consumer or SaaS products. You need rock-solid reliability from day one, sophisticated GTM motions that can evolve with the market, and a vision that encompasses both current needs and future possibilities.
This is why infrastructure companies often struggle when they try to follow conventional startup advice. The stakes are simply different when you’re building the foundation that other companies will build upon. As Stephany puts it, “We want to be always that first phone call that you make when you’re thinking about building a company and you know you’re going to do payouts or you’re going to do money movement because everything else that you’re building should go faster as a result of working with a partner like Orum.”
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