Our First Full Year

The end of the year is a good time for reflection before setting goals for the new year. I personally find time visiting friends and family in Australia to be a great time for that. One of the things I like the most about where we typically hang out in Australia is the bird sounds; they’re very unique (and quite noisy) and not at all what you’d expect. Favorites include Pied Currawong, Eastern Whipbird, Magpies, Lorikeets, Galahs, Cockatoos and the most distinct of all with its laugh, the Kookaburra. That change from the norm is a chance to explore something new or from a different angle. Plus, it’s future product name inspiration!

There really has been a lot to be grateful for in our first full year as a company. We have grown much faster than most of our KPIs, and we’ve learned a lot of new things along the way. To set the mood for this post, please imagine us humming a tune involving a partridge in a pear tree as we dig into some numbers reflective of the past twelve months at Pagos:

• 3 company offsites (plus several team-specific gatherings)
• 5 improved products
• 41 Birders across the globe
• 900,000,000 transaction events

5 Improved Products

We quickly expanded our nest, introducing Peacock, Canary, Parrot, Toucan, and Loon, and we’ve released features that improve your ability to turn disparate and hard-to-access payments data into actionable business insights. You can now easily complete no-code data imports from Chase, Adyen, Stripe, Braintree, dLocal, and PayPal, including metadata, soft descriptors, and fee metrics with transaction data. Then use Peacock features like custom dashboards, date filters, and retry data deduplication to view that data in the ways you need. And to top that off, Canary features like new trigger metrics and filters, relative thresholds, and no-code Slack notifications make it even easier to monitor what’s happening in your payments stack in real-time. We’ve also started releasing use case guides for Canary and Peacock so you can take flight faster. Check out our blog for other exciting announcements like 3DS support and batch uploads in Parrot.

Speaking of learning together, we now work with many of the world’s leading brands, and we are so humbled by the opportunities their input has given us to deliver even more features and better experiences. 

“We’re seeing data in more detail than we have ever been able to do before—and we can easily track and monitor our key KPIs across multiple processors as well as payment methods.” Rob Anicetti, Payments & Monetization at Eventbrite

Benchmarking against yourself is revealing! It’s easier to see trends over time across more of your metrics. Our favorite chart is the decline distribution over time with the trend line.

“With Pagos we can finally see data from all our processors apples-to-apples, allowing for easy comparisons of key metrics over regions, time frames, retries, payment methods, and so much more. And, us business people can create unique views and graphics without dependencies on data analytics resources.” Adam Hollenberg, Payment Partnerships at Adobe

Granularity is powerful. Leveraging the details in your transaction data to segment and focus allows you to prioritize the most important optimization or review work.

“Pagos has unlocked Peek’s ability to easily measure, monitor, and improve the critical areas of the payments lifecycle across the different channels in our payments platform. The technology allows our payments team to provide best in class service to the business as a whole, but more importantly to our individual sub merchant customers.” Scott Engel, Payments Strategy and Operations at Peek

Transaction descriptors hold your secrets. How could you put them to better use? (We have some ideas.)

Motivating Team Moments

900,000,000 Transaction Events

We announced we’d hit 100,000,000 transaction events in May. Then things just went wild. We have now processed over 900,000,000 transaction events and are excitedly looking forward to celebrate the 1 Billion mark as our next huge milestone! That’s a lot of transaction data to have already. And it means we need to prioritize more time on scaling the platform, which is a good problem to have but wasn’t something we expected to have to plan for at this scale and so quickly.

3 Company Offsites

We’re a remote-first company, so we put a lot of effort into how we spend time in-person. We met as a partial team for the first time in March of this year and then again in August and in October. Our first two offsites were held in the US, and our last one was in Turkey. These were structured as week-long gatherings where our intent was to:

• Build connections – Relationship-building is significantly easier in person, so this will continue to be a top priority at our gatherings 
• Share context – We held discussions on the industry, where we’re going, why, and how to promote greater understanding and alignment
• Have fun and always be learning – We held events that allowed us to learn something about where we were and make fun memories together
• Do project work – We try to create significant space for teams and individuals to organize their own schedules and take advantage of time to meet their peers on relevant topics while in person

The standout learning from organizing gatherings as an international team is that getting a travel visa outside one’s home country isn’t the same—or easy—for everyone. Timelines to apply to visit the US were prohibitively long for some Birders, for instance. As a result, we haven’t yet gathered as a whole company but we’re working on it. The war in Ukraine has also hit closer to home for some than others; it is a good reminder not to default to assumptions on what, why, or how world events are impacting those around us. It’s important to stay open to learning and be empathetic toward other peoples’ experiences.

41 Birders Across the Globe

We started Pagos as a remote-first company because we want to maintain a global focus on companies’ needs and help them solve complex problems more easily wherever they’re located. For this, we need local views and experiences mixed into the strategy from day one. We currently have 41 Birders representing 9 countries, plus 11 different states in the US. 

Something I’ve learned as CEO (AKA chief administrator in early-stage startups) is that this amounts to a lot of paperwork to follow relevant rules and regulations. If you’re planning on building a remote-first startup, I recommend finding yourself a good professional employer organization (PEO in the US)—we use Justworks—as well as a good Employer of Record (EOR) partner for international markets—we use Remote.com—to help you wrangle those tasks quickly and accurately since it directly affects your team. We also support individual choice, so some of our team members for their own reasons (such as local tax benefits) prefer to work as independent contractors. We still consider them part of the flock and employees of the company, while giving them the freedom they seek (from a paperwork perspective).

What’s Ahead

“Pagos is an accelerator for global payments insights. The combo of out-of-the-box visibility across our payment ecosystem with the ability to track, measure, and monitor in ways that are specific to our business creates instant value.” Colin McCarthy, Global Payments Operations & Risk at Warner Bros Discover

2023 is going to be an even bigger year for us, quantitatively and otherwise. We’ll be expanding our team with more Birders and adding more features, no-code integrations, and new and exciting Birds to our nest. Speaking of new Birds, we are currently working with some of our customers on a Payments Performance Benchmarking Pilot to drive additional performance optimization and answer questions like:

• How is everything I’m doing compared with peers?
• Something happened to my KPIs. Who caused it – me, my vendor, or is it happening to everyone?