How Klearly Pivoted to Dominate Hospitality Payments (Geus Walder) (S1 E21)

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What if going narrower is what makes you fundable?

Geus Walder co-founded Klearly as a generalist soft-POS app — download an app, turn any phone into a payment terminal, no hardware required. It gained traction across taxis, retail, and more. But a year of staying close to customers kept pointing to one place: hospitality had the deepest payment pain and the worst-fitting tools. So Klearly cut everything else and became a hospitality-only specialist — and that focus is what unlocked the growth, including a $12M Series A led by PayPal Ventures and a jump to 53 people.

In this episode, Geus walks through the lean-startup path behind it: validating demand with a gamified landing page that drew 600+ businesses before the product existed, raising a pre-seed with Antler to actually build it, and the operating principle the team still runs on — "speed over perfection." He also explains why in-person payments were the overlooked 80% of the market, how Klearly onboards merchants in three days instead of three weeks, and why hiring salespeople from inside hospitality (not from payments) became an unfair advantage.

If you've ever been told to widen your market to grow, this conversation argues the opposite.

Chapters

00:00 Klearly and the hospitality-payments thesis

01:06 From consulting to founding Klearly

02:00 23 hires in a quarter and a $12M Series A led by PayPal Ventures

03:00 SMB generalist vs. hospitality specialist

03:51 The pivot to horeca-only

05:56 Selling before building: the 600+ business landing page

07:41 "Speed over perfection"

08:56 The overlooked 80%: in-person payments

11:31 Go-to-market: direct sales plus ordering-system partnerships

14:19 Hiring hospitality insiders, not payments people

16:38 De-risking the leap to full-time

19:29 Lessons from the lean-startup path

Guest: Geus Walder, Co-founder, Klearly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geuswalder/

Klearly: https://klearly.nl

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