How Badge chose retail and commerce as its entry vertical inside a horizontal wallet market | Eric Senn

Badge is building the infrastructure layer for digital wallets, giving businesses a single integration point to issue, manage, and update loyalty cards, gift cards, and tickets across Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, and Samsung Wallet. The company counts Stripe among its Series A investors. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Eric Senn, Co-Founder and CEO of Badge, to learn how the company found its ICP, built its go-to-market motion, and positioned itself as category infrastructure.Topics Discussed: Eric's path from the consumer app Storr to discovering wallet infrastructure through the airline boarding pass Landing Carrefour as Badge's first major enterprise customer The three-platform integration problem across Apple, Google, and Samsung Wallet Building the product market fit bingo card to map verticals against company segment Why airlines were early wallet adopters and how that shaped Badge's go-to-market focus The shift from market education to inbound demand as wallet adoption matured Badge's Wallet Urgency Score and account-based marketing approach Matching go-to-market hires to actual deal complexity, not seniority alone The naming process behind Badge and modeling the brand after Stripe and Twilio Eric's vision for wallets absorbing every consumer touchpoint over the next five yearsGTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Match sales hires to your actual motion, not a generic enterprise team: Badge's first two go-to-market hires came from Splash, an events company acquired by Cvent, and from Cardlytics and Amex. Both backgrounds mirrored Badge's real ICP: long enterprise cycles, acquisition experience, and patience for category education. Eric named the exact failure mode this avoids: "you might end up with enterprise guys when you really have a more of a PLG motion." Hire for the validated deal cycle, not the seniority.Build a two-axis discovery framework before committing to a vertical: Badge's "product market fit bingo card" plotted verticals, including banking, retail and commerce, and travel and hospitality, against company segment, from SMB to enterprise, then worked the grid systematically. This turns an unfocused TAM into a prioritized sequence of bets instead of chasing whichever prospect answers first. Build an internal intent-signal system instead of running broad campaigns: Badge created "the Woo score, the wallet urgency score," a social listening system that pings Slack when a market signal suggests a company needs a wallet solution now, paired with account-based marketing and zero paid ads. Use your core creative asset to break one false belief, not to explain generically: Badge's adoption barrier wasn't awareness, it was that buyers assumed the wallet was static. Eric said, "we wanted to invest in video because video shows motion," engineering the homepage hero video to counter that specific assumption. Treat naming as an early positioning bet, not a branding exercise: Eric's advice, "look at who you want to be when you grow up," reflects modeling Badge's name and positioning after infrastructure companies like Stripe and Twilio instead of the loyalty and commerce use case Badge started in. Stripe later became a Series A investor.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co//Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM