You have seen the photo a hundred times. An angler stands on a podium, grinning, holding one of those oversized novelty checks for $1 million while the cameras go off.
That check is a prop, and I didn’t know it until I talked to Han Park, the CEO and founder of Payment Labs. At the moment the check goes up, somebody backstage is only just starting to collect that angler’s banking details, personal information, and tax documents. Before Payment Labs arrived, the alternative was often a bag of cash or a stack of pre-signed checks with the name left blank.
“Which is open to fraud and check washing and all these other different things,” Han told me.
So his team reversed the sequence. They onboard every competitor before anyone casts a line. By the time the final weights come in, all 50 anglers are already verified and compliant. The money moves by same-day Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfer or instant transfer, and it reaches their accounts before they leave the tournament.
I’m Lillian Pierson, a fractional CMO and licensed Professional Engineer, and I’ve driven more than $7 million in attributed revenue across product launches for companies that range from VC-backed startups to IBM and Intel. That work is why the baseball correction described within this week’s feature is the move I would put in front of any founder who is selling into a fragmented market. It is also the move that gave Payment Labs a second line of business.
One prospect’s objection opened a second line of business for Payment Labs
Payment Labs started in esports, where Han spent 20 years building ESL Gaming’s U.S. business before the exit to Savvy Games Group. If you have ever had to pay thousands of people who are scattered across the globe, you already know the problem he was solving…
His first sports customer was X Games, and the pain there was severe. X Games sat under Disney at the time, so athlete payments ran through Disney’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system on net 60 terms with full invoicing requirements. You wouldn’t file paperwork and then wait 2 months for money you earned at an event that already happened, and neither would a busy international athlete.
When a private equity group bought X Games out of Disney, a payment solution went near the top of the list. Payouts that had historically taken anywhere from 2 to 9 months to clear, Payment Labs ran in a week.
So his team did what you would probably do after a win like that one.
“We thought that what we did for X Games would translate to every sports customer,” Han said. “Well, that wasn’t the case.”
The soccer motion broke the moment his sales team carried it into baseball. In soccer, the money problem is paying the athletes, because pro-am leagues churn constantly and most competitors hold day jobs. That gives you a fresh population of participants who need onboarding and payment every season.
Baseball told him he had the wrong problem entirely. Baseball runs a farm system, so athletes sit on payroll through a structured feeder pipeline. What baseball has instead is a high volume of 1099 contractor payments that go to umpires, referees, scorekeepers, broadcast talent, and the field hands who lay out the lines.
Han kept narrowing until he reached youth sports, where the contractor payment problem is most concentrated. One umpire officiates 4 Saturday games. Each league pays him $90. So one person, on one Saturday, generates 4 separate payments, and each one requires its own banking and tax collection.
“The world of soccer is paying the athletes,” Han said. “World of baseball is paying your event staff.”
That single correction restructured Payment Labs’ segmentation model. Park now treats each sport as a discrete industry with its own payee taxonomy; the core infrastructure, compliance layer and tax automation stay identical, while the use case that justifies the purchase differs entirely by vertical. The practical consequence is that his team stopped carrying one pitch across sports and started diagnosing each sport before they built a motion for it.
Reproduce This Win
You don’t need a customer inside a vertical to run this diagnosis. You need one conversation where a prospect tells you your pitch is wrong, and the discipline to ask what their problem actually is instead of rewording your own. Three questions give you the answer:
When does the back office work start? Han’s filter is spot transactions, which means the onboarding begins the moment the event ends. That filter is what made competition fishing an obvious fit for him.
Who is actually getting paid? Your answer reorganizes the entire pitch. Athletes, contractors, event staff and officials each carry a different compliance burden.
How does money move inside that organization? Sponsorship, media rights and ticket revenue come in. Athletes, franchises and event staff get paid out. The exact details differ by sport, and that difference is why the diagnosis is worth running.
Han stands up a new vertical in days by querying his own sales data
I asked Han what AI is actually doing inside the company, because he had told me on our first call that Payment Labs runs tools and no agents. His stack is unglamorous, and you can copy most of it this quarter.
Everything funnels into Salesforce. AI notetakers attach to the records, so every sales conversation you have becomes structured data that sits next to the firmographics. That whole corpus gets ingested into a business intelligence (BI) layer, where the dashboards look for patterns across sports verticals, customer sizes and use cases.
Han then queries that business intelligence layer directly: based on these patterns, what other verticals or leagues have the same friction?
The system returns candidates, and those get passed to Amplemarket, which mines LinkedIn for the specific CFO or controller who is most likely to hold that problem. The warm-introduction step is where most teams stop short.
“We’ll go back into our network and say, do you know someone at this league, or do you know this person at this organization,” Han said. “That gets us into a faster sales cycle than to do a cold outreach.”
The AI compresses the category research that used to take weeks, and the warm introduction is what converts a candidate into a sales conversation. Han’s read on cold outreach right now is blunt: “It’s just way too much garbage floating out there. You’re being bombarded nonstop, and it’s really hard to filter the noise.”
One published case study produced 3 customers in 3 months
Most founders treat a case study as a credibility artifact. Han treats it as a distribution asset, and the good news is that his sequence is tight enough for you to copy.
Payment Labs handled payments for the Arnold Sports Festival for a full year, then published the case study and ran a coordinated press push behind it across LinkedIn, X and Instagram.
Pittsburgh Pro, which is run by Pittsburgh Power and Fitness, saw the social posts, went to the website, read the case study, and reached out directly. They closed in 2 weeks and ran their first event on the platform within a month. Pittsburgh Pro serves the same athletes on the same circuit at a smaller scale.
Three months later, Battle Up arrived the same way.
“Now you’ve got three, and there’s only probably about 15 more of these,” Han said. “When we go to any of them now, we just say we’re powering Arnold, Pittsburgh Power and Battle Up. Either use us or you do it yourself the hard way.”
That sequence reflects Payment Labs’ replicable vertical-entry protocol: one anchor customer, one published case study, one coordinated press push into a concentrated audience, and inbound demand from the remainder of the vertical.
Han named the mechanism that makes it work, and most founders underrate it. Racket sports people read racket sports media, and powerlifters follow powerlifting circuits. Press spend against a pre-aggregated audience carries materially different economics from broad awareness buying, because the distribution cost per qualified reader is already collapsed before you spend a dollar.
A case study fails when the league under-delivers volume, not when the story is weak
I asked Han whether a case study had ever fallen flat, and he reframed the risk correctly. The case studies themselves hold up. What fails is the bet on how much volume the league will actually run.
“Let’s say they were planning to do $3 million in payouts across six events,” he said. “But when their season came, they executed on three events and it was only like $300,000. Well, that data is insignificant for us.”
You signed up to publish a story about $3 million moving across 10,000 transactions. You got a story about $300,000 across 3 events. Nothing is wrong with the customer, and nothing is wrong with your product. The volume is simply too small to serve as proof for the rest of the vertical.
Payment Labs underpriced an early-stage league and gained a customer that now pays out $4 million a year
Payment Labs will deliberately underprice an early-stage league and absorb the margin loss. Han calls it subsidizing the customer. His team gives an emerging organization enterprise-grade infrastructure at a price that fits where the league sits today, then takes the gamble that it grows.
The Association of Pickleball Players is the proof. Payment Labs signed them 3 years ago, right after COVID, when the league was running 6 events and paying out roughly $300,000 in prize money.
Pickleball exploded. The league now runs 25 events and pays out $4 million.
“We won on that bet by being involved with them early,” Han said.
Check swapping is the related mechanic, and it is worth building into your own first-year pricing. Payment Labs prices a league at $50,000, then buys back a $20,000 sponsorship package from that same league, which includes the case study, the press, and the joint announcement. That discount functions as a marketing budget line. It buys the anchor customer and the proof at the same time.
Every league that hears about the subsidy shows up asking for the same deal, so Park qualifies the league itself before he qualifies the payments opportunity. His test is the right one, and his example makes it concrete: somebody pitches a league that is built around unicycle dirt biking. Cycling is a large sport, and BMX is a large sport. Neither of those facts tells you that unicycle dirt biking has a market.
“You have to look at the opportunity as the league itself before you say we want to power your payments and we’re going to subsidize you.”
Renewals land 37% higher because customers buy more capability, and the base price never moves
Payment Labs has had no churn across 2 years of sports customers, and renewals come in at an average 37% increase. A number like that usually signals aggressive repricing. Payment Labs gets there a different way, and three things drive it:
Feature enablement. Your customers ask for capabilities that let them cut another vendor, such as a European tax module, the mobile app, or treasury management. Han puts the add-on conversation plainly, and it costs the customer another $5,000 a year for the feature with support included.
Volume growth. Payments on the platform expand past prize money into appearance fees, travel reimbursements and contractor payouts. Monetization rises without the subscription moving at all.
Inflation pass-through. Their financial partners raise prices, and some of that carries forward.
Han refuses to have one specific conversation on a renewal call. “We’re not going there and saying we’re going to double the size of the contract because you’re stuck on our platform. That’s terrible.” Instead the renewal becomes a planning call, where he asks what you are doing in the next 12 months and what capability you need to do it.
Payment Labs also runs no standard packaging at all, and I recommend that approach for any founder who is selling into fragmented verticals. There are no starter, growth or enterprise tiers.
A tiered questionnaire profiles the use case first. Where are you registered? Where are you sending payments? What is your primary currency? Do you need pay-ins and payouts, or payouts only? Then his team enables only what solves your immediate pain.
Han keeps it that way for a specific reason. Show a small disc golf organizer everything that the platform does, and you lose them to confusion before you ever reach a price.
Payment Labs monetizes pooled volume, which is why growth never costs you more for access
“We never sell ourselves as software,” Han said. “Software could be replaced.”
The subscription controls only which parts of the infrastructure you can access. The real monetization sits underneath, in the aggregate payment volume that flows across every customer at once. X Games, the Arnold Sports Festival and the pickleball league all pool into the same stream.
Payment Labs takes that pooled volume to its global financial partners. As a fintech, its volume is a multiple of any single customer’s, which is how it negotiates rates that no individual league could get on its own. Customer growth therefore compounds Payment Labs’ aggregate volume without any increase in access pricing; the company operates an infrastructure model that happens to bill on a subscription cadence.
Han’s read on competing with the giants is that reaching the request for proposal (RFP) stage is the hard part. By then the buyer has defined the problem in terms that Stripe and the other large fintechs treat as an edge case.
Everybody can move money. Almost nobody wants to do the compliance, the taxes and the regulatory work that has to happen before the money moves.
“If it was easy, everybody would offer it,” Han said. “I want to work on the things that are hard. Automate and streamline it because nobody else wants to do it. Then you become the solution.”
P.S. Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, Han named the goal almost offhandedly. He wants Payment Labs to be the Stripe for sports, so that anyone in the competitive sports world who needs to move money thinks of him first, the same way a founder reaches for Stripe without thinking about it in e-commerce.
I asked him what stands between here and there, and the answer was that most of the leagues who need it have never heard the name. A distribution problem is an enviable one to be left with, because the compliance and tax infrastructure that nobody else wants to build is already done. After watching one bodybuilding case study turn into 3 customers in 3 months, I would bet he solves that one too.
