7 Go-to-Market Lessons From Building a Payments Operations Platform

Most founders overthink the decision to start. Klas Bäck didn’t make a decision at all. He and his co-founder spent months casually discussing a payments data problem they’d observed at PayPal. Then gradually, without a formal commitment moment, they were already building.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Klas Bäck, CEO and Co-Founder of Pagos, a payments operations platform that’s raised $44 million in funding, shared hard-won lessons from building in an emerging category.

Lesson 1: Start Building Before You Decide

The founding story of Pagos defies conventional startup narratives. There was no dramatic quit-your-job moment.

“We had just one day where we looked at each other and like I guess we are actually doing it now because somehow we had already passed into a world where were building and doing and we hadn’t really made a decision until after the fact,” Klas recalls.

This accidental commitment represents a powerful approach to difficult decisions. When you start building before formally deciding, momentum carries you forward. You gather real data and discover whether the problem is worth solving through action rather than analysis.

The lesson: Sometimes the best way to make hard decisions is to not realize you’re making them until you’ve already committed through action.

Lesson 2: Your Network Is Your MVP Launch Strategy

Pagos didn’t have product-market fit figured out. What they had was decades of relationships in the payments industry.

“In the beginning it’s a little bit of a brute force like okay, who should we go after?” Klas explains. “I literally went through every single person that I was connected with on LinkedIn who are a good fit. What should I tell them and why should they care?”

This worked because Klas had built credibility over three decades. “Basically started pinging people with a lot of messages and maybe because we’ve been around for a while, there was a fair amount of people that took the first call.”

The lesson: Your first customers come from existing relationships. Leverage them without apology, but recognize this is a finite strategy.

Lesson 3: Traditional Demand Gen Is Broken

Even with favorable conditions, traditional playbooks fail. Pagos learned this with Google AdWords.

“There is so much more noise out there in the last couple of years than there ever has been,” Klas observes. “So no matter what you do, nothing is as easy.”

They operated in a narrow niche with high buyer intent. Google AdWords should have been perfect. But “that actually didn’t really worked out. Even with expert help, it was pretty complicated to manage and really see, like if we spend $1, do we get anything back?”

The broader ecosystem has deteriorated too. “There are less journalists around. So they don’t write about small companies, they don’t write about big companies.”

The lesson: Test quickly, measure honestly, and pivot when the math doesn’t work.

Lesson 4: Create Value Before Extracting It

When paid channels failed, Pagos returned to first principles. What creates value for target buyers? The answer was facilitating peer connections.

“We have hosted quite a few dinners in different locations around the US,” Klas explains. “Come and have a good time. But it’s not really about meeting us. It’s actually meeting your peers and talking to them is actually valuable for another professional contact that you can draw for the future.”

Instead of extracting attention, Pagos creates genuine value through peer networking. “We try to be a node of the people that are working with us or are thinking about working with us.”

The lesson: When you can’t buy attention, earn it by creating spaces where your target buyers genuinely want to be.

Lesson 5: Ship Imperfect Solutions to Validate Demand

When customers needed features that would take months to build, Pagos started with the simplest version.

“We want to automate this. It should be in the online app that we have. But we can start if you let us send you a file of data once a week and then they became a daily file and then they became a streaming file as an example,” Klas recalls.

This incremental approach delivered immediate value while buying time to build the scalable solution. “Otherwise it would have been too big of a lift in the short term, but it was valuable for them, so were lucky enough to do it.”

The lesson: Ship the minimum viable solution that proves value, then iterate toward the ideal implementation.

Lesson 6: Action Beats Analysis Every Time

When asked about his most important go-to-market decision, Klas emphasized execution over deliberation.

“At the end of the day you just got to go for it. Like, hey, not everything is perfect. It is a startup, it is understood and ideally you get everything right, but sometimes you don’t. And then how you fix it and how you manage it matters a lot.”

The alternative is paralysis. “I think sometimes people just sitting in their own company and like, hey, thinking about all these scenarios without going out and talking to people and then you may be way off versus what people are actually looking at or you think you have the idea, but there’s something else that really resonates us.”

The lesson: The faster you’re having actual customer conversations, the faster you learn what matters.

Lesson 7: Curiosity Separates Good Teams From Great Ones

Action without curiosity leads to repetitive failure. Klas emphasizes curiosity as the essential complement.

“If you’re not curious. It’s really hard to do well in startups. Like if you don’t ask questions, you may not actually capture what’s happening or what people are doing,” Klas explains.

Customer conversations require curiosity to uncover the real problems beneath stated needs. “If you don’t ask the customers the hard questions, you may think they want something, but they actually want something completely different and you don’t understand each other.”

The lesson: Hire for curiosity as aggressively as you hire for execution.

The Pattern Beneath the Tactics

These seven lessons share a common thread: learning happens through doing, not planning. Klas didn’t perfect his positioning before launching. He didn’t wait for traditional channels to work. He didn’t build complete features before shipping value.

Instead, he moved quickly with imperfect solutions, stayed close to customers, and iterated based on what he learned. This approach works because it compresses the feedback loop between action and learning.

For B2B founders building in new categories, the implication is clear. You can’t strategy your way to product-market fit from a conference room. You find it through repeated contact with reality. The companies that win aren’t those with the best initial strategy. They’re the ones that learn fastest from actual market contact.