5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Plumery’s Journey in Banking Tech
Sometimes the most valuable innovations come from seeing the same problem twice. For Ben Goldin, founder of Plumery, witnessing banks repeatedly struggle with digital transformation during his tenure as CTPO of Mambu wasn’t just an observation – it was the catalyst for creating a new category in banking technology.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ben shared insights from his journey building a headless digital engagement platform for banks. Here are five key go-to-market lessons that B2B founders can apply to their own ventures.
1. Turn Personal Pain Points into Market Validation
Long before founding Plumery, Ben experienced firsthand the problems he would eventually solve. “I experienced a very clunky, slow and unreliable interface of a traditional bank,” he recalls. “And I said, gosh, if I would have a chance to change that sometime in the future, that would be awesome.”
This early experience, combined with his later professional observations at Mambu, provided crucial market validation. He witnessed “how many organizations are still building the same thing again and again… and still do not manage to create a proper experience for their end customers.”
The lesson? Sometimes the best market research comes from living the problem yourself and then seeing it replicated across an industry.
2. Create Categories Through Hybrid Innovation
Rather than competing within established product categories, Plumery created a new one by combining proven concepts in novel ways. “We are the first headless digital engagement platform out there,” Ben explains, introducing a concept well-established in e-commerce to the banking sector.
This category creation extends to their product strategy. Instead of forcing banks to choose between buying out-of-the-box solutions or building custom ones, they pioneered what Ben calls a “buy for feature parity and build for competitive edge” approach.
3. Leverage Domain Expertise in Fundraising
Having raised $4.5 million, Ben’s experience offers a crucial lesson about the value of industry expertise in fundraising. “Being someone who did things before, being someone who stayed in the domain for a while, it’s definitely much easier to raise capital,” he notes.
The key is not just having the expertise, but strategically leveraging it: “It’s good to connect with some angel investor or some non leading VC who is super well connected and can introduce you with others and create a hype around the product that you are building.”
4. Target Specific Market Segments Initially
While Plumery’s platform can serve various financial institutions, Ben recognizes the importance of focus. “Right now our ideal customer is mid to small size financial institution anywhere in the world trying to modernize their digital experience. Or a neo bank or digital world trying to build a new proposition from scratch and need an acceleration.”
This precise segmentation allows for more effective product development and go-to-market execution, even while maintaining a broader long-term vision.
5. Balance Vision with Execution
Perhaps the most subtle but important lesson from Plumery’s journey is how they balance ambitious vision with practical execution. Ben articulates a grand vision: “to change the way how people experience banking and do that for a meaningful number of people globally.” Yet he remains pragmatic about implementation, acknowledging that success could mean impacting anywhere from “10 million, 50 million, 150 million or a billion” people.
His advice to founders reflects this balance: “Don’t be too serious. Keep it simple and relaxed… We sometimes are too afraid of doing things we don’t feel confident about our own instinct and thoughts.”
The Bigger Picture
Plumery’s journey offers a masterclass in how to enter and innovate within a mature market. By combining deep domain expertise with fresh technological approaches, they’ve found a way to solve persistent problems that others have overlooked or approached incorrectly.
For B2B founders, especially those targeting traditional industries, the key takeaway is clear: success often comes not from creating entirely new technologies, but from rethinking how existing technologies and approaches can be combined and deployed in novel ways to solve longstanding problems.
The challenge isn’t always finding new problems to solve – sometimes it’s about solving familiar problems in smarter ways. As Ben’s experience shows, this approach can create significant opportunities even in well-established markets.