8. If I Were You: The Next 90 Days
The single most important thing
Get 10 Razorpay subscription merchants paying for recovery, with holdout-proven lift of at least 3× the fee, before you build anything beyond the thin v1.
- Segment: Indian businesses billing ₹5 lakh or more a month in recurring subscriptions through Razorpay Subscriptions or UPI Autopay. Start with one vertical: edtech or content subscriptions, since education and digital media have the highest involuntary churn on Recurly's network.
- Job: "Get back the renewals my customers' cards and UPI mandates fail on, and show me the rupees."
- How: a manual leakage audit first, then a concierge pilot (you send the WhatsApp messages from a template tool), then automate only what you've done by hand for at least 5 merchants.
Sized for ~15 hrs/week: roughly 5 hours on sales, 8 on building, 2 on admin and content. Full-time compresses weeks 5–8 into 2–3 weeks and doubles the call volume.
Week-by-week
| Weeks | Goal | Exit criteria |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | API spike and discovery. On a Razorpay test account, confirm you can: receive subscription failure and mandate webhooks, read failure reasons, see mandate status, and create payment links. Read the partner and OAuth terms. In parallel, 10 merchant calls: "How many renewals failed last month? What did you do? What did it cost?" | You can read failures reliably. If you can't, stop: the wedge doesn't exist. You can state the top 3 failure types in merchants' words, with ₹ figures. |
| 3–4 | Paid leakage audits. 10 more calls. Offer an audit for ₹5,000–10,000 (credited against the first month): export 90 days of failed and recovered payments and deliver a one-page "you lost ₹X" report. | 5 paid audits. If fewer than 3 will pay, change the vertical once (edtech → SaaS → D2C refills). |
| 5–8 | Build the thin v1: webhook ingest; WhatsApp utility template → SMS (DLT) → email sequence; UPI pay-now link and "set up UPI Autopay again" link; mandate-expiry alerts; 10% holdout; monthly ₹ report as a PDF or email. Encrypted key storage and a DPA from day one. | 5 audit merchants live on a 30-day pilot at founding price (50% off for 6 months). |
| 9–10 | Free acquisition hook. Publish a "failed-payment leakage calculator for Razorpay merchants" and 3 LinkedIn posts with anonymised pilot numbers. Apply to the Razorpay partner or app programme. | 20 inbound audit requests. Partner application submitted. |
| 11–12 | Measure and decide. | 10 paying merchants. Median incremental recovery ≥3× fee against the holdout. ≥80% of pilots convert to paid. If you hit it, go on to Phase 2 of 11. If you miss it, see the kill criteria. |
Kill criteria (write these down now)
- At day 14: failures can't be read reliably through the API → stop.
- At day 90: fewer than 5 paying merchants, or median lift under 2× the fee → the wedge or the product is wrong. Don't add features. Change the vertical, or narrow to the mandate-health monitor only.
The one thing to stop doing
Stop planning integrations for Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Shopify subscription apps and general Stripe.
Paddle gives recovery away free. Lemon Squeezy won't let you retry and is moving into Stripe. Shopify subscriptions are Churn Buster's and FlyCode's market. Stripe bundles Smart Retries and has a dozen tools on top. Every hour spent there is an hour not spent finding out whether Razorpay merchants will pay you.
A close second: stop describing the product as "smart retries". On Razorpay, the retry is the part you may not control. Your product is the message, the pay link, the mandate warning and the proof.
What stays on the long-term roadmap (only after proof)
- Failure-reason decoding and multilingual templates (Hindi first, then Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi).
- Win-back of halted subscriptions.
- Razorpay partner listing and OAuth connection.
- The quarterly Indian subscription failure report.
- Then a second rail (Cashfree, PayU, or Indian SaaS on Stripe with India-issued cards), and only then cancel flows.