Justify
Joe Scales and his co-founder came from deep vertical SaaS backgrounds. Scales had spent 15 years building and growing a service company that evolved into a vertical SaaS platform in the babysitting and childcare space, eventually selling to public company Bright Horizons. His co-founder built Sports Engine, a vertical SaaS platform for youth sports that processed $4 billion and derived 85% of its revenue from embedded fintech products. When they compared notes on their journeys, they realized they'd both spent years walking "in the desert" building complex payment and fintech infrastructure from scratch. "There must be a better way," they thought.
The founders started building immediately in January 2021, having the advantage of knowing exactly what to build from their 15 years of direct experience. They incubated inside Rally Ventures (where the Sports Engine co-founder was a partner) and brought their first platforms onto the platform in late summer 2020. By the time of this interview, they were in production with 24 to 48 platforms and had assembled a team of 27, with over half being engineers. The company raised $10.6M in seed funding from Emergence Capital and Crosslink Ventures in fall/winter 2020-2021, followed by a $4M extension (not a separate Series A yet).
Justify's go-to-market was built on founder relationships and deep domain expertise. Rather than casting a wide net, they intentionally work with select platforms—from pre-revenue startups convinced they want to monetize payments from day one, to billion-dollar platforms looking to optimize their fintech strategy. The company offers flexible onboarding: customers can test with a portion of their volume, run alongside existing processors, and adopt Justify's three offerings à la carte: the payment processing infrastructure itself (basis points on GMV), Engage (LMS and coaching team), and Insights (SaaS fee for analytics dashboard).
The founders discovered that different platforms adopt their products at different stages. Early-stage platforms prioritize embedding the payment processing immediately, while mature platforms ($500M+ GMV) tend to start with the strategy and coaching side (Engage) since they have more complex integrations to optimize. Ultimately, the "return is so material" that customers migrate to using all three offerings together. The data backs this up: Justify unlocked at least 200 basis points of new fintech revenue for its platforms, and with $5 billion in GMV flowing through the platform, the company estimates it's created roughly $60 million in new revenue opportunities for its customers. Cohort analysis shows that platforms paying for services achieve higher net dollar retention than those who don't.
Justify is sitting on what looks like a compelling long-term opportunity. With approximately $5 billion in GMV flowing through their platform and their model of taking 5-20 basis points on the value they create (after helping platforms unlock 200+ basis points), the company is on track for meaningful scale. At $5B GMV with 2% monetization of new revenue, they could generate roughly $10M in annual run rate. The team is lean (27 people), has substantial runway, and is evaluating the timing for a Series A. Joe's philosophy—borrowed from experience—is that vertical SaaS platforms are "literally worth 3 to 5 to 10 times more" when fintech strategy is implemented well, making Justify's role as "payment and fintech sherpas" increasingly valuable in a market where SaaS founders are desperately seeking to expand wallet share and customer stickiness.
- •The founders' combined 15+ years of direct experience in vertical SaaS fintech gave them rare insight into a specific, acute pain point that they had personally suffered through, enabling them to build exactly what the market needed without wasting time on assumptions.
- •By leveraging founder relationships and domain expertise as their initial go-to-market, they acquired customers who deeply understood their own problems and could recognize immediate value, creating a foundation of advocates rather than skeptics.
- •Their usage-based pricing model aligned their revenue directly with customer success, meaning they only made money when platforms made more money, which drove product obsession and created natural incentives for deep partnership rather than transactional relationships.
- •Offering flexible, modular adoption (payment processing, coaching, analytics à la carte) reduced friction for customers at different maturity stages and allowed them to expand revenue per customer as trust and integration deepened over time.
- 1.Spend 10+ years working deeply within a vertical or industry to develop intimate knowledge of a recurring operational bottleneck that you have personally experienced multiple times across different organizations.
- 2.Identify 3-5 founders or operators in your network who have the same pain point and personally invite them to be early customers, prioritizing relationships and domain credibility over scale in your first customer cohort.
- 3.Design your pricing to directly tie your success to customer outcomes (usage-based, revenue share, or success fees) so that your incentives force you to prioritize customer expansion revenue over new customer acquisition.
- 4.Build your product as modular components that customers can adopt independently and in any sequence, allowing both early-stage and mature customers to find an entry point that matches their current stage and integration complexity.
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