Relationships Over Features with Chris Brunner
In this episode of the Predictable Revenue Podcast, our host Collin Stewart, sat down with Chris Brunner to unpack what it really took to build Authvia in a complex industry: the slow work of building relationships, the discipline of not solving the wrong problems, and why product-market fit isn’t a milestone. It’s a moving target.
For founders navigating distribution, defensibility, or channel strategy, this one’s full of quiet, hard-earned lessons.
Great Ideas Look Obvious… After You Build Them
Chris didn’t set out to disrupt the payments industry. He just noticed a broken moment no one else seemed to care about.
While rolling out a text notification system for Walmart pharmacies, he watched hundreds of customers get a message that their prescriptions were ready, only to line up at the counter to pay. Texting had already done the job of bringing them in. Why couldn’t it finish the transaction?
That gap wasn’t just inconvenient, it was unnecessary friction. And once Chris saw it, he couldn’t unsee it.
Most founders would’ve started validating.
Research the market. Analyze competitors. That’s usually the default. Instead, Chris followed the problem. Messaging was already an integral part of people’s lives. It was fast, familiar, and required nothing new from the user.
The insight was that no one had connected it to payments in a seamless, scalable way. What looked like a feature request, “Can I pay over text?”, was actually the front door to a larger shift in how consumers handle transactions.
Building a company around an idea like that takes a different lens. Not “what’s hot?” but “what’s overdue?”
Build Where Users Already Are
When you’re building something new, it’s easy to chase what’s shiny. A slick app. A custom portal. A feature-rich platform. But reach doesn’t come from features, it comes from fit.
Chris didn’t start with a product spec. He started with a behavior: people respond to texts. Quickly, consistently, and without needing to think about it.
That distinction matters.
Founders often overestimate the appetite users have for learning something new, and underestimate how sticky the familiar can be. Complexity looks strategic in a deck, but in real life, it creates drop-off.
Distribution decisions are product decisions. Especially in high-trust industries like payments or healthcare, delivery matters as much as design. When adoption is critical, the question isn’t “can we build it?” It’s “will they use it right now, without help?”
Start with the channel that gets you the most effortless yes.
Don’t Sell Software. Solve a System Problem
Too many founders focus on building features. The smarter ones look for systems.
In mature industries, such as payments, healthcare, and logistics, there are already platforms generating billions in volume. But those platforms rarely work together. They leave behind gaps, handoffs, and headaches. That’s where the real opportunity lives: not in replacing the system, but in making it work better.
The value lies in solving the coordination problem that no one else wants to tackle.
The teams that scale fastest don’t compete with incumbents, they enable them. They find ways to plug into the messy middle, reduce friction, and unlock more value for everyone already in the ecosystem.
That’s what makes a product indispensable. Not the interface or the features, but the role it plays in the broader machine.
Don’t wedge yourself into a crowded market. Become the layer that drives the market.
Relationship-Led Validation Beats Product-Led Guesswork
There’s a particular kind of validation you’ll never get from a spreadsheet or a prototype: who you’ll piss off if you’re successful.
Before writing a line of code, Chris spent nearly a year speaking with senior executives across the payments ecosystem, including banking leaders, processors, and carriers. Not to pitch, but to understand. Who owns what? Where are the politics? What gets in the way of deployment, scale, or partnership?
Most early-stage founders start with MVPs and wait for the market to react. But in highly regulated or partner-driven industries, that’s a blindfolded strategy. You can’t iterate your way out of stepping on the wrong toes.
The advantage of relationship-led validation is alignment.
Chris didn’t just learn what to build. He knew what not to make, and just as importantly, who not to compete with.
Instead of disrupting incumbents, he built a model that gave the incumbents a reason to bring him in.
Validation is about proving demand and understanding the dynamics of the system you’re entering, so you don’t spend years solving the wrong problem, or worse, get shut out before you start.
(For more insight on Validation, check out Carolyn Sloan‘s or Jason Fletcher‘s episodes.)
Product-Market Fit Is a Spectrum, Not a Moment
Product-market fit isn’t something you hit once and move on. It evolves, and if your product doesn’t grow with it, growth stalls.
Early traction can feel like fit, especially when revenue starts coming in. But traction in a narrow use case doesn’t always scale. The real test is whether your product can serve a broader market without breaking every time you add a customer.
During the COVID pandemic, Authvia faced that exact turning point. They had built early momentum helping small utilities accept payments via SMS. But growth meant custom workarounds, not compounding results. So they rebuilt the platform from scratch. This time focused on APIs and distribution through partners. That’s when fit deepened and reach accelerated.
The shift wasn’t just technical, it was strategic. They stopped building for a market segment and started enabling an ecosystem.
For founders, this is the trap:
Mistaking early usage for lasting fit. You need to keep asking: Is this still the right shape of product for the market we want to serve? And is the market still big enough for where we’re going?
Fit is genuine when it scales. Until then, it’s still just a matter of traction.
Build Moats Before You Need Them
The moment something starts working, competitors show up. The question is never if, it’s when, and whether you’re already prepared.
Moats aren’t just for big companies. Early-stage teams can also build them, through IP, integrations, compliance, speed, or simply by being hard to replace. However, most founders delay those investments until they’re already exposed.
Chris Brunner didn’t wait. Before Authvia had major distribution, he filed five patents, knowing full well others would follow if the model proved itself. Years later, those patents help protect the company’s position and serve as a trust signal for top-tier partners in banking and payments.
It’s a reminder:
Moats aren’t just about preventing copycats. They’re about enabling high-trust relationships, making it easier for larger players to bet on you.
If you’re solving a problem that matters, someone else will eventually try to solve it too. The earlier you invest in defensibility, the fewer compromises you’ll have to make when scale arrives.
Founders Drive the First $1M
There’s no shortcut through the early sell.
Before process, before pitch decks, before sales hires, the first million in revenue is almost always founder-led. Not because it’s efficient, but because it’s the only way to get close enough to the customer to really learn what works.
At Authvia, early deals didn’t come from a polished sales engine. They came from Chris’s ability to build trust, one call, one conversation at a time. He wasn’t just selling software. He was absorbing objections, navigating industry politics, and shaping the product in real time.
That’s the point: those first sales aren’t just revenue.
They’re R&D. Every conversation is signal. Every stall is a lesson. And no one is more equipped to extract those lessons than the person who understands the problem best, the founder.
Trying to delegate this too early doesn’t just slow you down. It also hinders your ability to focus. It severs your connection to what actually drives conversion.
There’s no “head of sales” who’s going to close your early deals for you. That’s your job, and it’s the part that teaches you how to scale everything else.
Conclusion
The early stages of building can feel chaotic, with numerous unknowns and limited clarity. But the founders who break through aren’t always chasing what’s new. They’re tuned into what’s been broken for too long, and disciplined enough to build what the market actually needs, not just what looks good on paper.
That means listening before launching. Choosing distribution based on behavior, not buzz. Solving the messy system problems everyone else avoids. And doing the sales yourself, until you know why people buy.
Chris Brunner’s path is just one example. But the playbook is repeatable: focus, relationships, timing, and the willingness to build long before anyone claps.
The real work often feels too slow to matter, until it’s the reason you win.
Curious what Chris is building next or how Authvia is changing payments? Check out Authvia.
Want help scaling your revenue the founder-led way? Book an intro call or catch the next episode of the Predictable Revenue Podcast.
NO TIME TO READ?
