Daivik Goel and his co-founder took their international payroll product, Shor, from 3 live countries to 27 in about 13 months. We talked twice over the past month. Here are the key takeaways from those conversations on how they built their distribution.
A close friend of mine works for a US company from overseas, and to get paid properly he has to have a business setup in Armenia. He can’t do the setup from a website. He literally has to be in Armenia to get that set up. As someone who spent the last 13 years living and working from overseas myself, I find it really annoying that international payroll is so excessively complicated.
I mentioned it to Daivik Goel on our first call, mostly as an aside… but he was able to describe a working solution in about nine seconds flat, including details on which arrangement would work best for someone like me and why.
They shipped and sold a payroll product in seven days
When the math changed, he moved.
“We knew there were a lot of clients who had the same issue that we were dealing with… So we just hit up some of our old connections, some of the YC companies that we know that we could bank on. And just day in and day out, got something up as quickly as possible. I was doing sales. Avi and our founding engineer were just building this thing.”
Daivik sold while Avi built, both at the same time, in the same week.
And the reason the first customers closed is the detail I’d underline for any founder reading this. He was selling speed to people on his exact clock:
“A lot of startups who are both in our batch and just in general are in a very similar situation where speed is of the utmost importance. The appeal for our batch mates and for the startups we closed was the fact that, hey, you know, we also need to accelerate here because we only have a couple weeks before demo day and we’re hiring contractors to help us out.”
His batch mates were hiring contractors under the same deadline he was building under. They didn’t buy it because Shor was $19 instead of $50. They bought because they needed somebody paid this week and Shor could do it this week.
Key Takeaway: Your first ten customers almost never buy your differentiator. They buy the urgency they already had. Daivik found the group of people whose deadline matched his own, and that overlap is what let him close deals on a product that was still being written. Before you refine your positioning again, go find who is already in a hurry for the thing you do.
What they have now, and you can verify this yourself in about 20 minutes, is a self-serve flow that runs end to end. A company signs up, clears compliance, and pays somebody in another country without a human at Shor touching the transaction, apart from the compliance team’s review.
“People can literally go on the website right now and do the whole end-to-end process.”
In regulated multi-country payroll, that’s hard to pull off.
One customer question at a time, 3 countries became 27
So how did 3 countries become 27? Well, one customer question at a time, and the process is less glamorous than you’d expect.
A customer writes in and asks whether Shor can run payroll in Finland, or in some other country outside the handful of markets where most of his customers hire. Shor doesn’t cover it. So Daivik goes and learns how payroll works in Finland.
He learns the regulations, which you or I could also find online. He learns the filing mechanics, which take longer. Then he learns the local details that nobody has written down anywhere:
“That’s knowledge that you can’t necessarily just learn online. You have to really go through it and go through those processes to get that process. And that’s sort of the moat that we were talking about. Like, sure, you can build the product technically, but knowing those processes, being really, really customer focused and providing your experience, that is the moat I’m talking about.”
Remember that these two have shipped cross-border payouts six times, and none of that prior work contains Finnish payroll filing. Nobody gets to skip this part.
Do it enough times and you get the record Daivik has posted publicly, with dates:
- August 2025, at launch: EOR live in 3 countries, which were India, the Philippines and Nigeria. Contractors at $20 per month, EOR at $99 per month.
- Today: 27 live EOR markets, contractors supported in 150-plus countries, payouts in 100-plus local currencies. Contractors at $19 per month, EOR from $299 per month, plus a $60 tier for companies that use their own entity.
Three countries to 27 in about 13 months, and the EOR seat moved from an introductory $99 to $299 while the contractor seat came down a dollar. Every one of those markets needs a local entity or partner plus local labor-law compliance, so that’s operational build-out rather than a marketing number.
Fact of the matter is that the coverage number speaks for itself, showing the technical and compliance capability across live markets.
He also answers his own support messages, usually inside 5 or 10 minutes, and a customer eventually asked him how he keeps it up:
“For me, as a relatively early stage, you guys are what matters to me most. Like, if I can’t provide a great customer experience for you, then what am I doing here, right?”
Key Takeaway: Daivik shipped the coverage first and charged for it second, and the dated public record is what lets him defend the higher price. Most founders attempt that in reverse and then spend six months justifying a number they hadn’t earned yet. Ship coverage ahead of price, document the expansion publicly with dates, and point at the record when somebody pushes back.
A second customer funded the price the first one pays
The financial-services piece that brought Daivik back to this idea is the reason the pricing works.
Shor has two types of customers. The employer pays for payroll. The contractor, who is often in Nigeria or India or the Philippines, gets access to a US dollar account and financial products on top of it.
“In a lot of these countries, you’re losing 10 to 15% annually just by leaving money in your local currency. Just imagine how it would feel if every year someone takes 15% out of your bank account.”
That second customer didn’t just lower the employer’s price. It gave Daivik the business model he couldn’t find years ago, the one that justifies the cost instead of merely undercutting somebody else’s. And the alignment underneath it is real. A contractor in Lagos holding dollars instead of naira is materially better off, and Daivik monetizes that rather than monetizing the employer harder.
Shor also publishes a flat 2% foreign exchange margin on its pricing page and discloses it on every receipt, alongside $0 setup fees and no lock-in. In a category where the spread is where a lot of the margin quietly lives, publishing the number is a decision, not a footnote.
Reproduce This Win
How Daivik got here:
- Sell to the people whose deadline already matches yours, so that your first customers buy urgency rather than your differentiator.
- Answer the question you can’t currently answer, then build the coverage behind it, because that’s how 3 countries becomes 27.
What I’d add to it:
- Ship the expansion before you raise the price, and publish it with dates, so that the record defends the number for you.
- Publish the number your category keeps quiet, so that recommending you costs very little credibility if it goes wrong.
Daivik and I ran long on both calls, which I’d call a good sign about the density of the conversation.
What this comes down to is executing rapidly on real market demand and building out coverage with direct customer feedback… Daivik’s advantage was knowing which version of the idea was worth building. He’d already done the hard part six times for other people, and he waited until the economics agreed with him before he built it for himself.
If you’re ready to simplify your global payroll? Try out Shor today!
And, if you’re sitting on an idea you walked away from once, hit reply and tell me what stopped you. I read every one of these, and the sharpest questions tend to become the next brief.
