PDP #12: The Story of PayFac-as-a-Service

Payment Facilitation as a Service, or commonly known as PayFac-as-a-Service, offers software platforms the ability to monetize payments and onboard new users.

In this episode of the Product Drama Podcast (PDP), Caleb Avery, CEO of Tilled and founder of a PayFac-as-a-Service approach, shares how he created this service and was the initial idea.

Caleb was in the payment business for over a decade. He founded his first payment business while in college and started selling payment services door-to-door.

As he started growing his business, he and his partners began to make payment consulting services for larger companies. As a result, they found out that many of their customers were frustrated with the technology, price, and support of existing payment processing providers. That was a starting point when they decided to create a solution that would reimagine the entire payment facilitation and experience.

We asked Caleb how he came up with the idea of a payfac-as-a-service and what it was like working with MVP scope. We also talked about assembling a team of developers, what lessons he learned while building his startup Tilled, and more.

Here are some quotes from Caleb:

“Customer discovery is a huge part of the MVP scope”.

“You have to challenge yourself to continue thinking differently, especially when people are giving you feedback. It’s not always positive feedback. When you go out to fundraise, you may have to talk to hundreds of people, and 95 of them are going to tell you ‘no,’ 15 are going to tell you ‘it’s a horrible idea.’ But you have to continue to press on and have faith that this is a great idea and I am going to change the world, and I am confident in my vision of what we are building”.

“The best thing about the customer discovery process was that the customers didn’t feel like our company was selling because they didn’t have a product at that time.”

“You can’t tackle every problem right at the gate. You need to figure out the smallest of the MVP that you can get out to the market and get customer feedback. Only then you continue adding features and iterate on your product”.

The book of this episode is “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel.

We hope you’ll enjoy this talk and find some valuable insights.

If you want to learn more about how to build a FinTech startup and grow it from an idea to a fully-fledged product, watch this eisode.