Exited my eCommerce brand | Co-Founder at Workspace6.io & MediaSpace | Helping B2B startups understand brand psychology to boost sales

I started a B2C brand with $188 at 17. Grew it to 8-figures in sales and sold for 7-figures.     Then I co-founded a 1,000 member private community for 7-9 figure operators. Combined member revenue is over $13bn.     Now I run Redux Payments, where we use AI to recover failed payments and fix involuntary churn for B2C subscription businesses.     This is the problem I’m obsessed with solving. I write about what I find, what works, and what doesn’t. I’m always down to nerd out if you want to jam!     ————————————————————————      Now building:    Redux Payments (reduxpayments.com) - Stop losing revenue to failed payments. We slash involuntary churn and grow ARR by 8%+ for subscription businesses by using AI to recover failed payments.————————————————————————      You can reach me via email: philip (at) reduxpayments.com

Philip Pages - workspace6

100+ Stripe audits and I missed this. 

Last week I spoke with a former J.P. Morgan payments consultant.

A B2C subscription company hired him after Capital One stopped approving all their transactions.

In Stripe, their chargeback rate was under 1%. Nothing looked wrong.

But something was very wrong...

He showed me a hidden number in Stripe that was 8x higher than the chargeback rate.

"This is what issuers are actually looking at."
__

He called it the claim rate.

Chargebacks + Early Fraud Warnings.

Here's what I didn't know:

When a customer tells their bank "I don't recognize this charge," the bank files an Early Fraud Warning with Visa.

No chargeback, no notification. The merchant sees nothing.

But Visa counts it. The issuer counts it. And they use it to approve future transactions.

This company had 5–7% of transactions flagged as EFWs. 

They had no clue.
__

Capital One saw the real number (8% including EFWs, not the 1% in Stripe) and shut off all approvals.

The merchant crossed a threshold they didn't know existed, based on a metric they never checked.
__

HOW TO CHECK YOURS

Go to Stripe Dashboard → Payments Analytics → Disputes.

EFWs show up there and in payment logs.

It's visible but buried deep enough that in 100+ audits, I never looked until last week.

If I missed this, most B2C subscription companies are too.

Go check yours.

Philip Pages

CEO @ Redux Payments | Stop losing money to credit card failures | Exited Founder

We're signing $50M/year companies. We're competing with teams 10x our size. And we're winning.   

Redux Payments has a core team of 9. Engineers, machine learning, go-to-market. 

Everyone owns something end-to-end. No one is riding coattails.

I'd rather have 9 people who are absolute killers than 90 who are just filling seats. 

Here's what I've learned building this way:

1/ Small teams move faster. 
There's nowhere to hide. Every person either contributes or the whole thing breaks. That pressure is a feature, not a bug.

2/ Ownership isn’t for everyone. 
Some people thrive when they’re accountable for the result. Others don’t. We've had to let people go who couldn't keep up with the pace. It sucks, but carrying dead weight on a team this small will sink you.

3/ Care shows up in the details 
Last week, a customer hit a bug. Our engineers shipped a fix the same day. That’s what happens when everyone actually cares about the customer. You don't get that at a 200-person company where the ticket sits in a queue for 3 sprints.

I’ve watched incumbents with massive teams get slow, bureaucratic, and complacent. In this new era, a small, hungry team that moves fast will run circles around them every time.

9 killers > 90 coasters

Last month, an iOS app doing $2.1M/MRR on Stripe came to us struggling with trials not converting. What I found was almost too obvious.

Trial starts looked great. Meta was performing. But nothing was converting to paid.

Their team was blaming the product, the onboarding, the pricing.

Then I pulled the card-level data.
__

Stripe doesn't surface this by default. You have to pull it from the API and I only know to look because I've audited over 100 Stripe accounts.

Credit cards? Normal failure rates.
Debit cards? Fine.
Prepaid cards? 95% failure rate.

Prepaid cards were 10% of their card mix but 25% of all payment failures. One in four failed payments was a card that was never going to convert.

Their Head of Growth told me: "We had no idea prepaid was even a category we could filter by"
__

A user sees the ad. Downloads the app. Signs up for a free trial with Apple Cash or a prepaid card with $2 on it. The $0 auth goes through. Trial count goes up.

7 days later, the real charge hits. There's no money on the card. It fails. It will keep failing.

No retry strategy in the world is going to put money on an empty prepaid card.
__

HOW TO CHECK YOURS

Pull your charges from the Stripe API or Sigma. 

Filter by card.funding = prepaid. Compare trial-to-paid conversion against credit and debit.

If prepaid is a growing % of your trial mix, you have a problem you're not measuring.

The fix isn't complicated. 

Detect prepaid cards at trial signup. Block them, require a micro-charge to validate funds, or route them into a separate cohort so your metrics stay clean.

You might find that 25% of your "growth" isn't real.

I personally tested Headspace’s payment recovery flow and, honestly, expected way more.

I signed up for a 7-day trial ($12.99) using a card with only $1 to see how they'd handle failed payment retries.

June 26th: First charge failed.

They sent a "your last payment didn't go through" email and began retries:

June 27th, 8:03am
June 28th, 8:19am
June 29th, 9:03am

After three attempts in three days, they cancelled the subscription.

PROBLEMS:

Retries all around the same timeframe tell me they're fixed "dumb" retries.

If these were spread out with seemingly randomized date/time patterns, that would tell me that they're using an intelligent model that's adapting the retries. 

But there’s no intelligent modeling here, no adaptation for paydays, month-end cycles, or specific bank error codes. 

Compare to Hulu. When their transaction fails, they retried me 13X over a 50-day window. 

That's 7 weeks of recovery opportunities Headspace abandons after 72 hours.

*Backend Recovery Logic Rating* = D 

Looking at their recovery emails, I really liked their copy: “Is this really goodbye?”, but their strategy behind it is flawed. 

They trigger an email with every single retry. 

Every email slightly increases chances of voluntary churn, so their goal should be the opposite: Recover as many transactions as possible behind the scenes so the customer never even knows there was a problem. 

*Recovery Email Strategy Rating* = C+ 

Overall, for their web based failed payment recovery I'd give Headspace a C. 

It’s wild to see a company of this scale leaving so much money on the table. It proves that even for the giants backend recovery is rarely on the radar. 

There is a massive amount of "found" revenue waiting for any brand willing to move past basic retry logic and actually upgrade their stack to solve it.

Head of Growth: "failed payments were $419K. Stripe's recovering 28%."

CFO: "WTF. that’s not what my numbers say. what does that 28% include?"

Head of Growth: "subscriptions that failed and got retried. it's right there in the recovery dashboard."

CFO: "does it include trial-to-paid failures?"

Head of Growth: "...what do you mean?"

CFO: "go to your Stripe revenue recovery page. hover over the info icon next to 'failed payments.'"

Head of Growth: "it says... 'excludes failures on the first payment after a trial.'"

CFO: "meaning every free trial that tried to convert to paid and failed? not in that number."

Head of Growth: "how many trials failed last month?"

CFO: "I pulled it. $550K. just from trials."

Head of Growth: "that's more than our entire subscription failure volume."

CFO: "and zero of it shows in your recovery dashboard. zero of it hits your 28% rate."

Head of Growth: "so the real number isn't $412K..."

CFO: "it's close to a million. and your recovery rate on trials? under 8%."
Head of Growth: "8%?? how is that possible?"

CFO: "prepaid cards. users with $2 in their wallet signing up for a free week. 10% of your card mix. 25% of all failures. 95% never convert."

Head of Growth: "and Stripe retries them the same way as everything else?"
CFO: "four attempts. same generic logic. gives up. no one notices because it's not even on the dashboard."

Head of Growth: "so our churn graph looks stable..."

CFO: "while the trial funnel bleeds out before we ever collect a dollar."

Head of Growth: "how long has this been happening?"

CFO: "$1.4 million in invisible trial failures. last 3 months alone."

Head of Growth: "this is priority one."

CFO: "now we're talking."

Work from home is a scam and anyone who says they're more productive at home is lying. 

These are the 2 worst things 2 years of it cost me:

1) Mentally lost track of the competition. 

Seeing people show up day in and day out and grind toward a goal is a visual reminder of the effort it takes to actually build something real. 

If other people are doing it, you’ve gotta do even more. 
That pressure’s non-existent sitting alone at home. 


2) It killed serendipity. 

I never would’ve met my Redux Payments co-founder if we hadn’t been at the same Austin WeWork.

Years back, we were both working on opposite sides of the floor, doing our own thing. 
And every day like clockwork people would start heading home at 5pm.  
But he stuck around past 7, 8, 9:00, until the overhead motion detection lights went out and the cleaning crews started making their rounds. 
We didn't talk for weeks, maybe months. Until one day we started talking about AI or something. And just kept talking. 

We recognized the same thing in each other: the willingness to grind, work long hours, and get shit done.

That kind of thing doesn’t happen when you’re burning the midnight oil alone at home. 


It’s an anecdote of one, terrible I know. But I’ve never heard of a notable figure making it into the history books by doing anything in complete isolation. 

So yeah. I’m back at my old WeWork, working around people again. And a month in, it’s already a game changer.

Notion! Notion is an infinitely customizable blank canvas of ultimate power. 

Notion's greatest advantage is also it's biggest weakness. That's where I come in.

As the GTM Lead @ Optemization, I specialize in helping companies in hyper growth mode scale effectively without letting their workspace become a "dumping ground" for scattered info, links, meetings notes, and outdated docs that no one can trust. 

Optemization is an Ops Design consultancy focused specifically on the adoption of Notion. 

That could mean large migrations onto Notion, improving current workflows, creating custom automations and integrations, or auditing what you're currently working with.

If you've made it this far and want to learn more, here's some resources that can help:

Notion's Eleven - A free online course exploring the fundamentals of building an effective Notion workspace for teams of all sizes:

https://optemizations.notion.site/Welcome-to-Notion-s-Eleven-317a0fd26bf24d0295504e4cab1eba83

AND, my last offer is if you ever want to about anything related to Notion, I'm your guy 😎 

Lastly the fun part. My Special Skills and Fun Facts include:

🏆 3x Cornhole Champion 🏆 
🏅 3x Dodgeball Champion 🏅 
👨‍🍳 Former Food Cart Owner 👨‍🍳 
🥩 Steak Off Champion 🥩 
🐔 Notoriously known as “The Chicken Man” 🐔

Skyler Birk-Stachon

Mama I made it! I'm officially a Notion consultant.

Haters are fuming right now.

What's the first thing I should build? 

**note that everyone on our team were already Notion consultants and I was just late to the party

Ask me how we optimize Notion workspaces for 150+ of the world’s top companies

I threw 10 Notion stickers at a camera to signify 10 harsh Notion truths.

#1 98.6% of companies use Notion wrong

#2 You can’t use Notion AI properly if your workspace is a dumping ground

#3 You need to stop letting your employees create random loose pages

#4 The reason you’re not getting the most out of Notion is that you haven’t properly invested into it

#5 I love Notion but 90% of Notion’s fancy features don’t actually matter to your employees

#6 You don’t have a Notion problem, you have an adoption problem

#7 Your company has a tool culture problem if you don’t have a unified way of working in Notion

#8 If your company didn’t architect Notion correctly from the start you probably hate it now

#9 If your company isn’t database driven you’re using Notion wrong

#10 No company should ever be on the plus plan. Business or Enterprise only

Fight me on them 👇

--

Psssst if you need help optimizing your Notion workspace we should talk

1000 podcast episodes produced. That's a lot of freaking episodes! Huge huge congrats to Jake Hurwitz and the Thursday Labs team on an epic accomplishment. Best in the business. And an even cooler person.

You'll be celebrating 5k in no time.

You're a legend. 

And also heard you have a pretty impressive Notion setup.... 

Wonder who built it 😉

Fun fact: We don't just help with Notion 😏

Notion has over 100 million users, over 4 millions paying customers, and over 35,000 companies using it but most of companies are still using it wrong. Here’s the reality if you want a successful rollout:

#1 You need an adoption plan - Don’t wing it. Be intentional.

#2 Define a unified way of working in Notion - How will you work in Notion at X company?

#3 Exec alignment - Why do you actually care about rolling out Notion? What bigger initiative is this a part of?

#4 Need to assign Notion champions - Internal owners who are in charge of each teamspace / the big databases

#5 Patience - Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your Notion workspace be.

Get these right and Notion becomes your company's greatest productivity asset. Get them wrong and it becomes just another abandoned tool.

I’m gonna let you in on a secret.

Your employees don't give a shit what software your org uses.

Notion. Confluence. Asana. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. They couldn't care less about your tech stack.

**unless you give them clear enablement and support

Here’s what this looks like in practice for Notion:

Most companies look like this: (wrong way)

→ “Hey we use Notion for knowledge management or product roadmapping or xyz use case”

**leads to uncertainty, negative sentiment overtime and people using it however they see fit (and an FAQ / youtube tutorial rabbit hole) 

Here’s what it should look like:

→ “Here’s how you use Notion in your day to day role and here’s how it enables you to get more done and become a better employee”

- Here’s how product uses Notion to do their roadmapping

- Here’s how marketing uses Notion to plan their content calendar and upcoming launches

- Here’s how eng uses Notion to find information across scattered tools in the snap of a finger

- Here’s how sales uses Notion to find commonly asked questions for enablement

**Much better what to do it ^^

To have a successful rollout you must define:

1. What is the pain point this tool solves for?
	- and why?

2. How do I use it my day to day role?
    - and how am I being set up for success?

3. What are my expectations around the tool? 
    - how do I use this tool for success not failure

Remember, You don’t have a Notion problem. You have an adoption problem.
The tool isn't the problem. The rollout is.

Stop debating the tool. Start investing in the rollout.
That's the difference between a tool people hate and one they can't live without.

-- 
Pssssst this is exactly what we help with at Optemization, let us know if you need Notion help :)

Just an average Optemization team meeting...

Creating custom agents designed to roast Tem ‎and building Notion sauce.

All a part of our great agentic bakeoff where everyone presented the craziest, funnest, and most useful custom Notion agents they've been working.

It's more fun to highlight the goofy + fun ones but I promise we're cooking up some ones that are going to change our clients' workspaces forever.

Stay tuned 👀

-- 

Want to be a part of our epic team culture? 

We're actively hiring for our next great Notion workspace developer 👀

Check out the full job description (link below) and send your resume + a 90-sec Loom to Natalie Pottie at hiring@optemization.com.

**expecting bangers only in that Loom

https://lnkd.in/evXuHNZi

Just fired off 100 of these cold emails to COOs who went to Villanova.

Think I'll get any takers??

"Skyler, don't hate this personally but we hate Notion" 

Said the Head of internal comms at a 1000-person fintech to me.

Now, normally a statement like that would piss me off. 

But in this case, I couldn't blame them. 

They had been using Notion for the last 3 years but:

1️⃣ They never set up the infrastructure correctly
2️⃣ They didn't have a unified way of working in Notion 
3️⃣ They had over 100,000 loose pages
4️⃣ They had random databases all over the place not tied to anything
5️⃣ They didn't have any Notion champions in charge of governance 

The result?

Their workspace was a "Dumping ground of meeting notes, scattered workflows, links, and out of date docs that no one can trust"

It doesn't matter how good Notion AI is if it's only helping you find outdated info 5x times as fast.

So we ran a workspace audit, created a health report, aligned on a solution and a gameplan moving forward.

And put our hardhats on and went to work.

The result? 

🤩 46,638 pages optimized 
🤩 64% teamspace consolidation
🤩 46% reduction of outdated content

And the best part?

They LOVE Notion again :)

YAY

If your workspace has become a dumping ground over time and it's time for a refresh, know you're not alone.

But also shoot me a note, we'll run an audit for you and create a let's fix it gameplan! 🙏

taplio

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Philip Pages - workspace6

Skyler Birk-Stachon

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taplio

The Battle

Philip Pages - workspace6

Skyler Birk-Stachon

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Philip Pages - workspace6's LinkedIn Performance

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