Never has there been a better time to build a payments startup. The shift in consumer demands towards digital and contactless payments provides a plethora of opportunities for software solutions to enable all kinds of innovative purchase interactions.

从来没有比现在更好的时间来建立一个支付初创公司。 消费者需求向数字和非接触式支付的转变为软件解决方案提供了众多机会，以支持各种创新的购买交互。

While hundreds of fintech and payment startups are launched each day, each trying to be the next Stripe, Square, PayPal, or Klarna, many don’t make it. According to the Startup Genome, 11 out of 12 (92%) startups fail. According to Failory, the large majority of reasons were related to Product-Market Fit (34%), Marketing (22%), and Team Problems (18%).

每天都有成百上千的金融科技和支付初创公司成立，每家都想成为下一个Stripe，Square，PayPal或Klarna，但许多公司却没有做到。 根据启动基因组 ( Startup Genome)的数据 ，在12个启动中(有92％)启动失败。 根据Failory的说法 ，绝大多数原因与产品市场契合度(34％)，市场营销(22％)和团队问题(18％)有关。

With up to 74% of reasons relating to product and marketing, startups must carefully evaluate its strategic choices, partnerships, and product design.

由于高达74％的产品和营销原因，初创公司必须仔细评估其战略选择，合作伙伴关系和产品设计。

In this article, I’ll be outlining the steps we took at Littlepay to ensure we wouldn’t fail, and how we grew our business to 2.5 million unique users after 12 months.

在本文中，我将概述在Littlepay采取的步骤，以确保我们不会失败，以及在12个月后如何将业务扩展到250万唯一用户。

步骤1：通过强迫症发现来找出客户的第一大问题。 (Step 1: Figure out your customer’s #1 problem through obsessive discovery.)

In the early days, sit alongside your prospective customers to understand how they work, their jobs-to-be-done, their needs and motivations. The more you live and breathe your customer environment, the more you will get to understand their problems and the biggest pinpoints they need solving.

在早期，请与您的潜在客户坐在一起，了解他们的工作方式，待完成的工作，需求和动力。 您在客户环境中生活和呼吸的时间越多，您就会越了解他们的问题以及他们需要解决的最大问题。

Start making a log of problem statements in the form of facts, assumptions or hypotheses you need to validate. Your understanding of the problem will allow you to design how lean your minimum viable product can be. Use rough estimations (e.g., t-shirt sizing) with your technical teams for required effort.

开始以您需要验证的事实，假设或假设的形式记录问题陈述。 您对问题的理解将使您可以设计最小可行产品的精益程度。 与技术团队一起进行粗略估计(例如T恤尺码)，以进行所需的工作。

At Littlepay, we observed how bus operator companies worked by performing ethnographic studies to see how cash was handled on buses, interviewed drivers and support staff on their daily jobs-to-be-done, and created problem statements and personas along the way.

在Littlepay，我们观察了公交运营商公司如何进行人种学研究，以了解如何在公交车上处理现金，与司机和支持人员进行日常工作，并在此过程中创建了问题陈述和角色。

It turns out that the UK bus industry lacked a compelling solution at a price point that suited them: they could not afford a multi-million-pound investment to build a new solution every time. They needed an easy way to accept contactless bank cards on-bus, through a service that was easy to understand and adopt.

事实证明，英国公交行业在适合他们的价格点上缺乏引人注目的解决方案：他们无力承担数百万英镑的投资来每次构建新的解决方案。 他们需要一种易于理解和采用的简便方法，以便在公交车上接受非接触式银行卡。

Based on our discovery, we created our first elevator pitch, thanks to Adeo Ressi’s one-line elevator pitch template:

根据我们的发现， 借助Adeo Ressi的单线电梯间距模板 ，我们创建了第一个电梯间距 ：

???? ???? Littlepay is a specialist payment services provider for the mass transit and digital mobility industry. We help transit agencies and operators accept Visa/MasterCard contactless taps and e-commerce purchases through one core platform in the cloud, rapidly deployable through validator partners and APIs.

????????Littlepay是针对公共交通和数字移动行业的专业支付服务提供商。 我们帮助运输机构和运营商通过云中的一个核心平台接受Visa / MasterCard非接触式水龙头和电子商务购买，可通过验证伙伴和API快速部署。

步骤2：了解您在价值链中的位置，并了解您的核心竞争力。 (Step 2: Know your place in the value chain and understand your core competencies.)

The “payments industry” is more like a collection of clustered industries with functionality overlapping in often inefficient ways. New entrants must familiarise themselves with their competitive landscape and value chain.

“支付行业”更像是集群的行业的集合，其功能通常以低效的方式重叠。 新进入者必须熟悉其竞争格局和价值链。

For example, if you are a business that processes bank card payments, you are on what’s called the “merchant acquiring” side of the payments industry acting on behalf of a merchant.

例如，如果您是一家处理银行卡付款的公司，那么您代表的是付款行业的“商户收单”方。

At Littlepay, we needed to process transactions and clear and settle them via card schemes: Visa and MasterCard.

在Littlepay，我们需要处理交易并通过Visa和MasterCard卡计划结算并结算。

We quickly made two very significant value chain decisions:

我们很快做出了两个非常重要的价值链决策：

• Instead of selling hardware and managing the software on them, we focused on publishing unified APIs to allow connectivity from any contactless validator to submit us their payments.

  我们专注于发布统一的API，以允许任何非接触式验证器的连接都可以向我们提交付款，而不是出售硬件并对其进行软件管理。

• Instead of becoming our own merchant acquirer, which has its own regulatory and cost challenges, we integrated with a strategic acquiring bank on partner terms.

  我们没有成为自己的商户收单行，因为它面临着监管和成本方面的挑战，而是按照合作伙伴条款与战略收单行进行了整合 。

We let the hardware and acquiring partners play to their strengths, as we did ours: reliable, cost-efficient, scalable payment processing!

正如我们所做的那样，我们让硬件和收购合作伙伴发挥自己的优势：可靠，经济高效，可扩展的付款处理！

步骤3：与您的非核心能力价值链合作伙伴整合。 (Step 3: Integrate with your non-core competency value chain partners.)

Your next priority is agreeing on which partners you need to integrate with, and negotiating with them to ensure each party benefits.

您的下一个优先事项是就需要与哪些合作伙伴达成共识并与他们进行谈判，以确保每一方都受益。

For Littlepay, we had two main partners:

对于Littlepay，我们有两个主要合作伙伴：

• Validator Hardware — Making this decision was not trivial and required significant due diligence by our target customers (the buyers of the hardware). Luckily, they chose a hardware partner (Ticketer) that had fantastic customer service and were willing to work closely with us during pilot.

  验证器硬件-做出此决定并非易事，需要我们的目标客户(硬件的购买者)进行认真的尽职调查。 幸运的是，他们选择了硬件合作伙伴( Ticketer )，该合作伙伴拥有出色的客户服务，并愿意在试点期间与我们紧密合作。

• Acquiring Bank — We decided to launch with an agile Icelandic wholesale acquiring bank: Valitor. Their acquiring platform was easily accessible to us via web services and had an in-house hardware certification team that could certify devices within a matter of weeks rather than months.

  收单行 —我们决定与一家敏捷的冰岛批发收单行Valitor一起启动 。 通过Web服务，我们可以轻松访问他们的获取平台，并且拥有内部硬件认证团队，可以在几周而不是几个月内对设备进行认证。

Once partners have agreed to work with you, you must map the integration points and messages to/from each partner. Your agreed integration method will help inform what kind of interfaces are needed and what processing is needed for an end-to-end transaction workflow.

合作伙伴同意与您合作后，您必须将集成点和消息映射到每个合作伙伴/从每个合作伙伴映射。 您同意的集成方法将有助于告知需要什么样的接口以及端到端事务工作流程需要什么处理。

Other things to be aware of during this period:

在此期间要注意的其他事项：

• Changing interface scope — we used light documentation to ensure we agreed to flows on paper to provide clarity across all teams. A Scope of Works document usually helps here.

  更改界面范围 -我们使用了简单的文档来确保我们同意书面流程以在所有团队中提供清晰的信息。 工作范围文档通常在这里有帮助。

• PCI compliance and integration certification activities — we found out that the acquiring bank needed evidence to reassure their risk and onboarding teams. Although we prefer interactions over documentation, we still had to document many systems and processes to demonstrate PCI Level 1 compliance.

  PCI合规性和集成认证活动 -我们发现，收单行需要证据来确保其风险和入职团队。 尽管我们更喜欢交互而不是文档，但是我们仍然必须记录许多系统和过程以证明PCI 1级合规性。

• 3rd parties that are not ready to integrate with you via agreed flows— we built internal simulators that mimicked the calls made to our API endpoints by 3rd parties. We adjusted the payloads and responses along with changes to integration points mentioned above.

  尚未准备好 通过协议流程 与您 集成的第三方 -我们构建了内部模拟器，该模拟器模拟了第三方对我们API端点的调用。 我们调整了有效负载和响应以及对上述集成点的更改。

At Littlepay, we published unified APIs to allow vendors to submit transactions to our platform safely and securely. Where our APIs weren’t used due to urgent delivery schedules, we absorbed the technical debt and created message adapters to ensure our standard workflows were respected.

在Littlepay，我们发布了统一的API，以使供应商能够安全地将交易提交到我们的平台。 在由于紧急的交付计划而没有使用我们的API的地方，我们吸收了技术上的负担并创建了消息适配器以确保我们的标准工作流程得到遵守。

步骤4：与有影响力的试点客户建立战略合作伙伴关系。 (Step 4: Establish a strategic partnership with an influential pilot customer.)

Partnerships not only with adjacent partners, but also with paying customers, significantly improve a startup’s chances of survival.

不仅与相邻合作伙伴建立伙伴关系，而且与付费客户建立伙伴关系，都可以大大提高初创企业的生存机会。

The key to finding the right pilot customer is finding one that will be willing to validate your value proposition and its features, act as a reference site in future, and be an advocate that can refer you via word-of-mouth.

找到合适的试点客户的关键是找到一个愿意验证您的价值主张及其特征，将来充当参考站点，并成为可以通过口碑推荐您的拥护者的人。

The “Power vs. Interest” model can help you decide which customer to collaborate with during the pilot. Try to pick a “Player” — a customer that has high Interest and Power.

“ 力量与利益”模型可以帮助您确定在试点期间与哪个客户合作。 尝试选择一个“玩家” -具有很高兴趣和力量的客户。

Players typically are willing to collaborate with you closely, whether it be in product strategy and road-mapping workshops, or sprint review meetings. Aim to secure their buy-in, leverage their ideas and knowledge and establish a close and trustful relationship with them.

玩家通常愿意与您紧密合作，无论是在产品策略和制图工作坊中，还是在冲刺审查会议中。 旨在确保他们的支持，利用他们的想法和知识，并与他们建立紧密和信任的关系。

At Littlepay, we partnered with a bus operator of ~250 buses, in a pilot location that provided many lessons learned. The main client stakeholder was both strategic and operational, providing a great sounding board for problem-solving and feature development.

在Littlepay，我们与约250辆公共汽车的公共汽车运营商合作，在一个试点地点提供了许多经验教训。 主要的客户利益相关者既具有战略意义又具有运营意义，为解决问题和开发功能提供了一个不错的平台。

The customer was respectful when we challenged their assumptions and vice versa. They also provided a delightful testimonial and helped convince other companies to adopt our service. In fact, a larger transit group, upon receiving the positive feedback from our pilot client, allowed us to deploy terminals on a further 2,500 vehicles after the pilot.

当我们挑战他们的假设时，客户是尊重的，反之亦然。 他们还提供了令人愉快的证明，并帮助说服其他公司采用我们的服务。 实际上，一个更大的运输小组在收到我们试点客户的积极反馈后，允许我们在试点之后在另外2,500辆车上部署终端。

We now process transactions from almost 20,000 terminals in the field, across 100+ merchants, with the majority of deployments driven by partnerships and word-of-mouth!

现在，我们在该领域处理了近20,000个终端的交易，涉及100多个商家，其中大多数部署是由合作伙伴和口碑驱动的！

步骤5：与您的试点客户和合作伙伴共同创建。 指示安全人员说“不”。 (Step 5: Co-create with your pilot customer and partners. Inculcate the safety to say “No”.)

Your pilot customer will likely want to list out a laundry list of features to deliver. However, not all of their ideas should be accepted, nor should all of yours either.

您的试点客户可能希望列出要提供的功能清单。 但是，并非他们的所有想法都应该被接受，您的所有想法也不应该被接受。

Make sure that the problems you identify with your pilot customer are representative to the customer segments you are targeting. Otherwise, you are merely building bespoke features that may not serve a wider audience.

确保您与试点客户一起发现的问题代表了您所针对的客户群。 否则，您只是在构建可能无法为更多受众服务的定制功能。

Aim to build consensus with players but don’t shy away from difficult conversations. Don’t settle for the smallest common denominator and have the courage to make a decision if no agreement can be achieved

旨在与玩家达成共识，但不要回避困难的对话。 不要满足于最小的共同点，如果无法达成协议，请勇于做出决定

— Roman Pilcher

—罗曼·皮尔彻(Roman Pilcher)

At Littlepay, we made sure that there was the psychological safety to say “I don’t know” or “no” to questions and requests without reprimand. Psychological safety is the ability for teammates to state opinions without fear of being criticized. It can eliminate lack of trust, and fear of conflict, two of the five team dysfunctions defined by Patrick Lencioni.

在Littlepay，我们确保在不谴责的情况下对问题和要求说“我不知道”或“不”是心理上的安全 。 心理安全是队友表达意见而不必担心受到批评的能力。 它可以消除帕特里克·伦乔奥尼 ( Patrick Lencioni)定义的五种团队功能失调中的两种缺乏信任和恐惧冲突的情况。

The outcome of this step is to prioritise the features needed to be built for the minimal viable product. These may be in the form of documented user stories that match to your users ‘jobs-to-be-done’, and acceptance criteria.

该步骤的结果是优先考虑为最小可行产品构建的功能。 这些可以采取与用户的“待完成工作”和接受标准相匹配的已记录用户故事的形式。

步骤6：在迭代开发过程中弄清需求并执行频繁的节奏。 (Step 6: Clarify requirements and implement frequent cadence during iterative development.)

Once user needs and requirements have been validated, you can now begin development. Depending on the type of product being developed, this may involve user journey mapping, sequence diagrams, or user flows, to ensure internal and external teams have clarity on what needs to be built and why.

确认用户需求和要求后，您就可以开始开发了。 根据所开发产品的类型，这可能涉及用户旅程映射，序列图或用户流程，以确保内部和外部团队对需要构建的内容及其原因具有清晰的了解。

A user story mapping exercise is a useful activity at this stage, with a set budget on the number of stories to be worked upon at any given point of time. Prioritize what is essential, what is not, then get detailed into the requirements of the features that matter. Some light 2x2 prioritization matrix can assist here. Check out my other posts on prioritization.

在此阶段，用户故事映射练习是一项有用的活动，并在任何给定时间点上确定要处理的故事数量的预算。 区分重要的内容和不重要的内容，然后详细说明重要功能的要求。 一些光2x2优先矩阵可以在这里提供帮助。 查看我关于优先级排序的其他帖子。

This step is probably the most iterative and requires dedicated focus from technical teams to deliver against the product requirements and often changing priorities. Some areas to watch out for during this phase include:

此步骤可能是最反复的步骤，需要技术团队的专注，以针对产品要求和经常变化的优先级来交付。 在此阶段需要注意的一些领域包括：

• Agile principles, instead of just implementing Scrum — scope changes will be frequent. Instead of implementing full Scrum (e.g., fixed iterations with no scope changes allowed) we implemented Kanban and steered towards Agile principles to ensure we could rapidly pivot when required.

  敏捷原则，而不只是实施Scrum ，范围更改将是经常的。 我们没有实施完整的Scrum(例如，不允许范围更改的固定迭代)，而是实施了看板并转向敏捷原则，以确保在需要时可以Swift进行调整。

• Waterfall style project planning disguised as Agile — during the first 12 months of development, the client treated the solution as a single project plan with 10+ stages, each containing a new piece of functionality tied to delivery dates. We eventually realized that there were too many components to track and migrated towards an Agile roadmap based on priorities and quarterly time horizons, rather than specific delivery dates.

  伪装为敏捷的瀑布式项目计划 -在开发的前12个月中，客户将解决方案视为具有10多个阶段的单个项目计划，每个阶段都包含与交付日期相关的新功能。 我们最终意识到，有太多组件无法根据优先级和季度时间范围(而不是特定的交付日期)进行跟踪并迁移到敏捷路线图。

步骤7：实施超级护理支持。 发挥能力修复生产错误。 (Step 7: Implement hyper-care support. Carve out capacity to fix production bugs.)

Reaching this point is a massive achievement that should be celebrated by all! However, your job isn’t complete just yet — you’ve created a living, breathing product that requires maintenance and scaling for your business to be viable in the longer-term.

达到这一点是一项巨大的成就，所有人都应该庆祝！ 但是，您的工作尚未完成，您已经创造了一种生活所需的产品，需要维护和扩展才能使企业长期生存。

Ensure that you have enough capacity in your technical team to ensure platform stability during the first few months after go-live (otherwise known as the ‘hyper-care’ period) to fix any issue that relates to the above. For a payments company, there are a few things to look out for during this period:

确保您的技术团队中有足够的能力，以确保在上线后的前几个月(也称为“超级护理”期间)平台稳定，以解决与上述相关的任何问题。 对于支付公司，在此期间需要注意以下几点：

• Logging system events to support root cause analysis — we logged all system events to allow our technical teams to investigate the root-cause of any erroneous transaction. Logging also helped in identifying when issues weren’t the result of our system but the result of a third party.

  记录系统事件以支持根本原因分析— 我们记录了所有系统事件，以使我们的技术团队能够调查任何错误交易的根本原因。 日志记录还有助于确定问题何时不是我们系统的结果，而是第三方的结果。

• Establishing a transparent support model — we censured that the process for gaining support from your partners and the expected response and resolution times were known. Without this, your strategic pilot client may expect all bugs and issues to be resolved immediately.

  建立透明的支持模型 -我们检查了从您的合作伙伴那里获得支持的过程以及预期的响应时间和解决时间。 如果没有这个，您的战略试点客户可能会期望所有错误和问题都能立即得到解决。

• Feature requests and bug fixes that overwhelm your backlog — our backlog proliferated with ideas as well as bug fix requests by the end of the hyper-care period. We paused new product development to close out our existing issues and then used prioritisation and road mapping tools to space out our commitments.

  功能请求和错误修复使您的积压不堪重负 -到超级护理期结束时，我们的积压的想法和错误修复请求激增。 我们暂停了新产品开发，以解决现有问题，然后使用优先级划分和路线图工具来划分我们的承诺。

步骤8：测量，学习，构建和重复。 (Step 8: Measure, Learn, Build, and Repeat.)

Once your product is stable, and you can focus on customer growth and scale, it is essential to ensure you have a system in place for prioritizing ideas and new features.

产品稳定后，您就可以专注于客户的增长和规模，确保有一套优先考虑想法和新功能的系统至关重要。

Use the ‘build-measure-learn’ cycle, as described by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. Measure user impact and feedback, understand what can be learned for next time, and then incorporate findings into your backlog and roadmap.

按照“ 精益创业”中 Eric Ries的描述，使用“构建测量学习”循环。 衡量用户的影响和反馈，了解下一次可以学到的知识，然后将发现的内容纳入积压和计划中。

Open up the dialogue with your customers (in our case, our merchants, the transit operators) and invite them to provide feedback openly and critically. Any ideas should also be welcome from them, perhaps via email, Jira, or some dedicated idea collation software.

与您的客户(在我们的情况下是我们的商人，运输运营商)进行对话，并邀请他们公开和批判地提供反馈。 也应该通过电子邮件，Jira或某些专用的想法整理软件来欢迎他们提出任何想法。

At Littlepay, we integrated an ‘idea workflow’ with our agile release management process that sat alongside our roadmap priorities. Ideas required specific fields to be inputted by product owners: problem to be solved, value offering, user story, acceptance criteria, and priority score.

在Littlepay，我们将“思想工作流程”与我们的路线图优先事项一起集成到了敏捷发布管理流程中。 创意需要产品所有者输入特定字段：要解决的问题，价值提供，用户案例，验收标准和优先级得分。

Once an idea was validated through data and insight, then the idea was moved to ‘backlog’ phase, prioritized and later shipped to the customer eventually through PCI-compliant release planning.

一旦通过数据和洞察力验证了一个想法，便将该想法移至“积压”阶段，确定优先级，然后最终通过符合PCI的发布计划将其交付给客户。

Once bugs started to diminish and our platform was considered stable, we then focussed on creating a set of strategic priorities with the rest of the organisation. We created a theme-based roadmap that focussed on outcomes and goals and communicated which features would be developed upon now vs future, to meet those goals.

一旦错误开始减少并且我们的平台被认为是稳定的，我们便专注于与组织的其余部分一起制定一系列战略重点。 我们创建了一个基于主题的路线图，该路线图着重于结果和目标，并传达了要实现这些目标的现在和将来要开发的功能。

We now publish roadmaps to clients and partners every calendar quarter, similar to the public roadmaps of ProdPad, Monzo, and Buffer. We advise our clients and partners every quarter to maintain a close feedback loop.

现在，我们每个日历季度向客户和合作伙伴发布路线图，类似于ProdPad ， Monzo和Buffer的公开路线图。 我们建议每个季度的客户和合作伙伴保持密切的反馈循环。

运营头12个月的结果 (Our Results During First 12 Months of Operation)

After 12 months, we got into a rhythm of more consistent velocity, effective expectation management through transparent roadmaps and prioritisation, and onboarded clients swiftly through powerful word-of-mouth.

12个月后，我们进入了节奏更加一致的节奏，通过透明的路线图和优先次序来进行有效的期望管理，并通过强大的口碑Swift吸引了客户。

Here is a snapshot of our key results that we are incredibly proud of:

这是我们引以为傲的主要结果的快照：

• Unique Customers — 2.5 million unique customers (i.e., unique payment cards seen on our platform) by month 12 of operation.

  唯一客户-运营第12个月有250万个唯一客户(即，在我们平台上看到的唯一支付卡)。

• Monthly Active Users (MAU)— 100k MAU in 3 months, ramping up to 700k MAU by month 12 of operation.

  月活跃用户(MAU) -3个月内达到100k MAU，到运营的第12个月将增加到700k MAU。

• Cumulative Trip Count — 2 million trips by month 12 of operation.

  累积旅行计数-运营第12个月有200万次旅行。

Here are some sexy charts for your perusal and inspiration! ????

这里有一些性感的图表供您细读和启发！ ????

结语 (Wrapping Up)

In this article, we introduced eight strategic steps to launching a sustainable, growing, B2B fintech payments business, with a considerable focus on strategic decisions, partnerships, and integrations. These steps were:

在本文中，我们介绍了八个战略步骤来启动可持续的，不断发展的B2B金融科技支付业务，其中相当侧重于战略决策，合作伙伴关系和整合。 这些步骤是：

• Step 1: Figure out customer’s #1 problem through obsessive discovery and validation

  步骤1：通过强迫性发现和验证找出客户的第一大问题

• Step 2: Know your place in the value chain and understand your core competencies.

  步骤2：了解您在价值链中的位置，并了解您的核心竞争力。

• Step 3: Integrate with your non-core competency value chain partners.

  步骤3：与您的非核心能力价值链合作伙伴整合。

• Step 4: Establish a strategic partnership with an influential pilot customer.

  步骤4：与有影响力的试点客户建立战略合作伙伴关系。

• Step 5: Co-create with your pilot customers and partners. Inculcate the safety to say “No”.

  步骤5：与您的试点客户和合作伙伴共同创建。 指示安全人员说“不”。

• Step 6: Clarify requirements, and implement frequent cadence during iterative development.

  步骤6：弄清要求，并在迭代开发过程中实施频繁的节奏。

• Step 7: Implement hyper-care support. Carve out capacity to fix production bugs.

  步骤7：实施超级护理支持。 发挥能力修复生产错误。

• Step 8: Measure, Learn, Build, and Repeat.

  步骤8：测量，学习，构建和重复。

If you’re building a B2B or transaction processing startup, consider the steps above, and let me know whether they worked for you!

如果您要建立B2B或事务处理启动公司，请考虑上述步骤，并让我知道它们是否对您有用！

???? Let’s be friends! Follow me on Twitter and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to follow me here on Medium as well for all things startups, leadership, product, dogs and the mind.

be 让我们成为朋友！ 在Twitter上关注我，并在LinkedIn上与我联系。 别忘了在Medium上关注我，包括初创公司，领导才能，产品，狗和思想。