What are past projects, failures, or successes you’ve had in your career?
🚀 The Journey That Led Us Here
Me and Alec? We go way back. Like, "built-a-crypto-brokerage-together" back. 😆
We first crossed paths at ChangeInvest.com, where we built a crypto brokerage for the average Joe. 📈💰 It was one of the most successful startups we ever worked on, hitting a peak of 150K active traders and earning us the title of the biggest crypto exchange in the Baltics. 🏆
But of course, the startup grind never stops. After ChangeInvest, we built Armitage.xyz—the seed of what would eventually become Creem. 🌱
Armitage was a wild experiment—a platform designed to track and reward top engineers using contributing metrics, turning engineering impact into quantifiable scores. 📊🛠️ While the concept was ahead of its time, we quickly spotted a massive opportunity in the Indie Hacker space.
That’s when we realized: Payments for SaaS founders were an absolute nightmare. 🫠💸 Between compliance, global taxes, revenue sharing, and chargebacks, the complexity was out of control—and that’s when Creem was born. 🚀
So here we are—building Creem not just to simplify payments, but to redefine financial management entirely. Simplifying payments is only the first step on our journey to building a complete Finance, Growth, and Collaboration OS. Our vision is to empower small, distributed teams around the world with a seamless, all-in-one platform that handles every aspect of your financial and operational needs. Let’s revolutionize how you grow and collaborate. 💪🌍
🚀 The best is yet to come!
What 3rd party tools is your product critically dependent on?
🚀 The 3rd Party Tools That Power Creem 🚀
We stand on the shoulders of some seriously amazing tools to keep Creem running smoothly:
🔍 PostHog – Because analytics should be insanely powerful and privacy-friendly! 🚀📊
🌎 Vercel – Hosting our site with blazing-fast performance and seamless deployments. ⚡💻
☁️ AWS – The backbone of our infrastructure, keeping things scalable, secure, and always available. 🏗️🔐
🛢️ Supabase – Our database powerhouse, because Postgres + serverless = magic! ✨🗄️
Where is your customer data stored?
Frankfurt, Germany.
What is your current monthly recurring revenue (MRR)?
5K
How many customers do you have today?
300
What’s the origin of the idea for your product?
🌱 The Origin Story of Creem
Creem was actually a spin-off from a previous startup we built—Armitage.
The grand vision of Armitage was to track and reward developers contributing to open-source projects. Imagine if you could earn recurring revenue from an open-source project—not just a one-time payment, but a continuous stream of income as the project grows. That was the idea. 💡💻
But as we started integrating payments to monetize Armitage, we quickly realized something... why was accepting subscription payments such a nightmare? 🤯
Suddenly, we had to worry about fraud, chargebacks, global sales tax, and compliance—and our payment system became bigger than the product itself. That’s when it hit us: There HAS to be a better way.
And that’s when Creem was born—not just a payments processor, but a Financial OS that takes care of everything your business needs to start, accept payments, and scale. 🚀
Because founders should focus on building, not battling payments. 💪💸
What problem is your product solving and how?
🚀 The Problem Creem is Solving & How We Fix It
At Creem, we’re on a mission to level the playing field when it comes to financial tools for SaaS businesses. Our grand vision? To be the all-in-one Financial OS for your business. 💰💻 But for now, we’re laser-focused on three critical pain points:
1️⃣ Access to Payments
2️⃣ Global Sales Tax Compliance
3️⃣ Fraud & Chargeback Protection
🌎 1. Access to Payments – Payments Should Be for Everyone
Payments haven’t been democratized as much as they should be. We believe in offering fair and accessible payment processing to everyone—no matter where you are in the world, either as a business or as an individual. Your location shouldn’t limit what you can build on the internet. 🚀
Indie hackers, micro-SaaS founders, and bootstrapped startups deserve the same powerful financial tools as the big players, and we’re making that happen.
💼 2. Global Sales Tax Compliance – No More Headaches
Let’s be real—global sales taxes are terrifying. Nobody teaches this stuff in school, and keeping up with ever-changing financial laws is practically a full-time job. 😰
With Creem, you don’t have to worry about it. We handle tax collection and compliance automatically, so no matter where you’re selling, you stay 100% compliant. ✅
🛡️ 3. Fraud & Chargeback Protection – Keep Your Business Safe
We’ve seen too many startups fail because their accounts got frozen or shut down due to poor risk management. Most founders don’t realize how vulnerable they are to fraud until it’s too late.
Creem takes the complexity out of fraud prevention—so you don’t have to stress about chargebacks, fraud risks, or waking up to an account suspension email. We’ve got you covered. 💪
💡 Why Creem?
We’re not just another payment processor—we’re building the financial backbone for the next generation of online businesses. Whether you're a solo founder, a hacker, or a startup scaling to thousands of customers, Creem ensures that you can start, grow, and accept payments seamlessly—without the headaches.
🚀 The internet should be for builders—not financial red tape. Let’s fix that.
What’s the #1 thing you’re looking to gain from the AppSumo campaign?
Our main goal with the AppSumo campaign is to create brand exposure. We’re convinced that the world needs a tool like Creem, but we also know that building the right solution means listening to actual users.
By getting Creem into the hands of founders, indie hackers, and SaaS builders, we want to:
* Understand what features matter most to our users
* Refine and improve the product based on real use cases
* Ensure that we’re solving the right problems in the best way possible
What are your plans with the customers, cash, and learnings from the AppSumo campaign?
Our next big goal is to build revenue splits—allowing you to automate revenue sharing directly within your SaaS business.
🔄 How Does It Work?
Instead of one person handling all finances, you could automatically distribute a percentage of your revenue as payment for services.
💡 Example 1: Affiliates & Influencers
Let’s say you partner with an influencer or an affiliate. With revenue splits, you could automatically send them a percentage of every sale they generate—seamlessly and transparently.
🎬 Example 2: Creators & SaaS Partnerships
YouTube videos aren’t a one-person job anymore. You have:
The host 🎤
The editor ✂️
The graphic designer 🎨
Each of them contributes to the success of a video, and we want to make it possible for creators to automatically split revenue based on pre-set percentages.
💻 Example 3: Bootstrapped SaaS Founders & Co-Founders
Imagine launching a SaaS startup with your friends or co-founders—without the hassle of setting up a formal business entity or managing complex finops and taxes.
Revenue splits let you bring your product to market swiftly by automatically distributing earnings according to pre-arranged percentages.
This streamlined approach means you can focus on building and scaling your innovation, while the system ensures everyone is paid fairly, without bureaucratic delays. 🚀
Any details to clarify about the deal?
https://docs.creem.io/faq/supported-countries
list of the support countires
prohibited-products/businesses
https://docs.creem.io/faq/prohibited-products
