How Do You Navigate Barriers Early to Validate a Product?

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There's a trust friction. And then there was technical friction as well for this product. We were able to overcome some of that trust barrier and kind of do this impedance matching by one going to smaller customers, understanding that we can grow with them. So if you are an established payments company, it's easier for you to show your case studies, show your volume, show your stats, and earn bigger business. There's no way around that. But the other one is the initial five customers that we had, believe we're all YC, either batch mates or also in Y Combinator. The idea is specifically with payments, and it might apply to other things where there is this

Today we speak with Jareau Wadé - currently the founder of Batch Processing, previously the co-founder of Balanced (acquired by Stripe), head of growth at Tilt Pro (acquired by Airbnb), and Chief Growth Officer at Finix.

We spoke with Jareau about the early days of Balanced - how they prioritized, gained trust with initial customers, and competed with companies like Stripe and PayPal. Jareau talks through a bunch of different heuristics and models he uses to evaluate risk (stack it early), tackle the cold start problem, synthesize feedback, figure out the technical side of your business early on, and manage the mental side of starting a business.

It's an awesome conversation and you'll take tactics and methods away from it.