5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Fintech Infrastructure Company

5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Fintech Infrastructure Company

When Shamir Karkal co-founded Simple in 2009, fintech was barely a word. Today, as he builds Sila, his experience offers crucial insights for founders tackling complex infrastructure challenges. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared hard-won lessons about bringing innovative financial infrastructure to market.

1. Start with a Clear Customer Problem, Not Just Technology

The early days of Simple revealed a fundamental truth about fintech go-to-market strategy. “From the earliest days of simple, it was very clear that everybody wanted a better bank,” Shamir explains. “Exactly how they defined a better bank was different. But just the customer demand and the customer frustration with the existing banking industry in 2009, 2010 was very clear and very palpable.”

2. Choose Your Initial Feature Set Strategically

Rather than trying to build everything at once, successful infrastructure companies need to prioritize ruthlessly. “You just have to prioritize,” Shamir emphasizes. “Do I invest a lot in building out wire functionality, which maybe only 5% of my customers are interested in? Or do I spend more… put it into building, like, whatever, a savings feature or something else that my customers care about more?”

3. Focus on Solving Edge Cases

In infrastructure businesses, success often comes from handling the difficult edge cases that others ignore. As Shamir notes, “Everything about payments, especially, it’s not about the 99 or 99.9% of payments that work fine. It’s all about that .1% that have a problem.”

4. Be Patient with Growth Trajectories

Infrastructure businesses require a different growth mindset than consumer apps. “Startups are not like an overnight success,” Shamir emphasizes. “It takes years, sometimes decades of building before you do become that overnight success and everybody hears of you. So it is 99% perseverance.”

This patience has paid off for Sila. “We’ve seen like about five X growth in total transactions this year. And yeah, almost six X, actually. And we do anywhere from ten to 25% transaction growth month on month right now,” Shamir shares. Yet he maintains perspective: “When you look at the overall numbers for ACH or cards or any other payment system in the US, we’re just a flea on an elephant.”

5. Build for Coexistence, Not Replacement

Perhaps the most counter-intuitive lesson is that successful financial infrastructure often builds upon, rather than replaces, existing systems. “Every payment system that ever achieved broad adoption across multiple geographies in human history is still with us today,” Shamir explains. This insight shapes how founders should think about innovation and market entry.

For founders building infrastructure companies today, these lessons highlight a crucial truth: success comes not from disrupting everything overnight, but from understanding deeply how systems work and solving specific problems exceptionally well. As Shamir’s experience shows, the path to building successful infrastructure requires both technical excellence and strategic patience.

The fintech landscape continues to evolve rapidly, with “about 5000 fintech startups in the US now,” according to Shamir. But for those building infrastructure, the fundamentals remain constant: focus on real problems, prioritize ruthlessly, handle edge cases well, be patient with growth, and build for the long term. These principles have guided Sila from its early days to its current scale, serving “close to 100 customers in total, more than 50 of whom are live.”

For founders looking to build enduring infrastructure companies, these lessons offer a roadmap for navigating the complex intersection of technology, regulation, and market needs. Success in this space isn’t just about having better technology – it’s about understanding deeply how to bring that technology to market in a way that solves real problems while working within existing systems.