Hey Reader,

A customer writes in and asks Daivik Goel whether Shor, his international payroll platform, can run payroll in a country like Finland. You can probably predict the answer: Shor doesn't cover that country yet.

So Daivik goes and learns how payroll works there, down to the local details that nobody has written down anywhere.

Do that enough times, and you get the record that Daivik has posted publicly, with dates. Shor launched in August 2025 with Employer of Record (EOR) coverage in 3 countries. About 13 months later, it runs 27 live EOR markets. Over the same stretch, the EOR plan went from $99 a month to a starting price of $299.

Think about the implications here... the request that you can't fulfill today is a customer telling you, in writing, where your product could go next.

I've lived and worked outside the US for 13 years. A close friend of mine has to be in Armenia right now, in person, just to set up the business that lets a US company pay him… all because that setup can't be done from a website. That in-person, country-specific process is solved in Step 3 shown in the graphic below, which shows all five steps that Daivik repeats every time a customer asks for a country that Shor doesn't cover yet.

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What We Discussed

• How Daivik and his co-founder, Avi, shipped and sold a payroll product in 7 days to Y Combinator (YC) companies and batch mates who were working against a demo-day deadline
• The five-step loop that turned customer requests for unsupported countries into 27 live EOR markets in about 13 months
• The local process knowledge that you can't learn online, and why Daivik counts it as part of Shor's moat
• How Shor raised its EOR price from $99 a month to a starting price of $299 after the coverage shipped, and the dated public record that backs the number
• The second type of customer for Shor, the contractor, whose US dollar account changes the economics of what the employer pays
• Why Shor publishes its flat 2% foreign exchange margin on every receipt

Referenced

• Shor, Daivik's international payroll and EOR platform
• Y Combinator, whose companies were among the first that Daivik reached out to
• Shor's pricing page, which publishes the flat 2% foreign exchange margin, $0 setup fees and no lock-in

Where To Find Daivik Goel

• Daivik Goel on LinkedIn
• Shor, where you can sign up and run the self-serve flow end-to-end

My Biggest Takeaways

1. Daivik was building under the same demo-day deadline that his YC batch mates were hiring under, and they needed contractors paid that week. That shared deadline closed deals on a product that was still being written. Your first customers may just buy because they're already under a deadline, so consider finding the founders whose deadline matches yours before you spend another week polishing your positioning.
2. A request for a country that Shor didn't cover became Daivik's next market, and he repeated that loop until 3 countries became 27. Every request that you file away as a lost deal is a market that a competitor gets the chance to learn first.
3. In fact, Daivik and Avi had built cross-border payout systems six times for other companies, and none of that prior work covered Finnish payroll filing. As Daivik put it, "That's knowledge that you can't necessarily just learn online." If your only advantage is the software, a competitor with a good engineering team can rebuild it, and the local process knowledge is the part that they can't easily replicate.
4. Shor's EOR plan went from an introductory $99 a month at launch to a starting price of $299, while coverage grew from 3 countries to 27. If you raise your price before the coverage exists, you can end up spending months justifying a number that you haven't validated yet.
5. Shor serves two types of customers: the employer, who pays for payroll, and the contractor, who gets a US dollar account. Daivik points out that in many of the countries where those contractors live, money that sits in local currency loses 10 to 15% of its value every year. If you only ever look at the side of the transaction that signs the contract, the only lever left to you is undercutting a competitor's price.
6. Daivik answers his own support messages, usually within 5 or 10 minutes. At an early stage, your own fast support replies are part of your unfair advantage.

If your customers keep asking for coverage, integrations or markets that you don't offer yet, Daivik's loop applies to you too, whatever you sell.

Fact of the matter is that Daivik had already built cross-border payout systems six times for other companies before he built Shor for himself. The contractor side of the transaction gave him the business model that he couldn't find years ago.

Daivik and I ran long on both of our calls. The full interview covers everything from the 7-day launch to the contractor revenue that lets Shor justify the price that employers pay. Enjoy!

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All the best,

Lillian Pierson

Fractional CMO & GTM Engineer