Hypercheckout

Juspay's payment stack was built for the largest companies in India: deep integrations, dedicated solution engineers, months-long onboarding. That works when a single merchant processes millions of transactions a day. It does not work for a business with three employees.

Small merchants wanted the same conversion rates and reliability the big players got, but the onboarding cost made them unprofitable to serve. The product wasn't bad; the packaging was.

I co-founded Hypercheckout as a program manager and started from the merchant's first hour, not from the system diagram. We simplified the API and built an automated onboarding checklist so that every step that used to need a human either ran itself or disappeared.

Distribution mattered as much as product: I formed partnerships with Easebuzz, PayU, and PhonePe to bring SMB merchants onto the platform, and rebuilt support operations around Genius, an AI-powered chatbot built with two engineers.

We treated onboarding friction as the product metric. If a change didn't reduce it, it waited.

SMB adoption increased tenfold, and the automation freed roughly 20% of engineering resources for product work.

The partnerships doubled inbound merchant acquisition month over month, and the product grew to contribute over $3.5M in annual revenue, a new stream rather than cannibalization of the enterprise business.

The support chatbot cut response times in half and saved about $60K annually. By the end, a program manager and four operations teammates I mentored ran the product day to day.

Distribution problems often masquerade as product problems. The technology barely changed; the packaging changed everything.

The best cross-functional alignment tool is a single number everyone agrees to care about.

Serving small businesses well is mostly about respecting their time. They don't have a procurement team to absorb your friction.