I've got a great interview for you today! Gabriel is the co-founder for Creem, a merchant of record and Stripe alternative. He move from his home country of Brazil to Estonia to chase his startup dreams. Thanks to Creem for sponsoring this feature and helping support High Signal.
Can you introduce yourself?
I'm Gabriel Ferraz, co-founder and CEO of Creem. I'm originally from Brazil, and I moved to Estonia in 2019. Classic immigrant story: came for a job, met my wife, never left. People say she's more Brazilian than me and I'm more Estonian than her, which is probably accurate.
There's something about the cold, the dark, the quiet that just flips a switch. I can sit down, look at code, and do ten hours of focused work without noticing. Then I step outside, see the fields and the forest, and it resets everything. It puts problems in perspective. The things that feel scary in business aren't actually scary. A bear showing up on your walk is scary. A bug in production is not.
I've spent my whole career between crypto and fintech. I started in crypto around 2012-2013 with an agency in Brazil, which opened a lot of doors. I worked on crypto payments, identity infrastructure on Ethereum, and eventually traditional fintech. Creem is where all of that converges.
Can you tell us what you’ve achieved so far as an entrepreneur?
Creem launched in September 2024 after about three months of building. We went from zero to live pretty fast because both me and my co-founder Alec have been building payment systems for years. Boring systems, but that experience meant we could move quickly when it mattered.
We launched on Product Hunt and hit #2 Product of the Day and #1 Fintech Product of the Month. We timed the launch one week before our Antler investment committee because we wanted to walk in with market validation, not a pitch deck. Instead of "trust us, this will work," it was "look at what the market already said."
Today we have over 20,000 stores on the platform, 1000+ active merchants, processing millions in GMV monthly and near hundreds of thousands of transactions per month. We raised a pre-seed round, secured funding, and built the team to five people. Our merchants are growing, we're growing.
Before Creem, Alec and I built Armitage, a project inspired by Google's PageRank but for open source contributions. It used a graph-based system to calculate the relevance of contributors inside GitHub repositories, helping DAOs allocate tokens fairly based on actual work. Cool project, but we realized the real opportunity wasn't in the crypto DAO space. The most interesting builders were indie hackers and the build-in-public community, and they needed payment infrastructure first. So we pivoted to Creem.
Why did you become a founder?
Honestly, it comes back to an article I read in 2014 called "Meditations on Moloch" by Scott Alexander.
It reframed every major human problem as a coordination failure, viewed through game theory and anthropology. The classic example: ten banana farms each spend $10 on bug spray. One stops to save money. Then everyone stops. Then everyone's crops fail and everyone makes less. That's Moloch. Nuclear war, climate change, broken financial systems, they're all the same pattern.
That article got me obsessed with coordination mechanisms. Money is just a coordination tool. Crypto makes that tool programmable. You can design incentive systems where people can't deviate from the long-term goal without hurting themselves. That's what pulled me into crypto originally, and it's what eventually led to Creem.
I became a founder because I genuinely believe the infrastructure for how people work together and get paid is broken, and it's a solvable problem. Not by one company, but the right foundations can unlock a lot.
What’s the big idea behind starting Creem?
The short version: we saw that the payment industry stopped serving small builders. Stripe revolutionized payments 15 years ago with seven lines of code. Today, depending on your use case, that's become 5,000 to 7,000 lines. Their focus shifted to enterprise. Documentation got overwhelming. Indie hackers are asking themselves "am I an Express account or a Custom account? What's a payment intent? Why is everything asynchronous?" and getting lost.
Meanwhile, thanks to AI and no-code tools, there's an explosion of people who can now build digital products but have no idea how to handle payments, taxes, or compliance. These aren't 10x engineers. They're marketers, designers, creators who can now ship products. They need something simple.
But the bigger vision goes beyond payments. We want to build coordination infrastructure. Imagine a developer in Brazil and a designer in Malaysia wanting to build a project together. Right now they have no infrastructure to split revenue, manage payouts across borders, or collaborate financially without setting up a company. They're forced into being solopreneurs not because they want to work alone, but because the tools for financial collaboration don't exist.
We see a future where someone can say "work with me for 3% of revenue for three years" and that revenue share becomes a real, tradeable, transparent instrument. Maybe even collateral for a loan. Secondary markets for revenue shares. That's where crypto comes in, not as the product but under the hood, powering transparency and programmable splits.
Creem the payment platform is the foundation. The long-term vision is a "Company of Record," one layer that handles payments, employment, banking, compliance, so small teams can operate globally with zero operational overhead.
What are the benefits of using a Merchant of Record like Creem?
When you sell software globally, every jurisdiction has its own tax rules. Sell one transaction in the UK and you're technically required to register, collect VAT, file returns. The US is even messier: each state has different thresholds, different product classifications, different collection methods. Start selling in three or four countries and the compliance work compounds fast.
A Merchant of Record like Creem is the legal entity that actually sells to your customer. We're liable for the transaction. That means we handle chargebacks, refunds, tax collection and remittance across all jurisdictions. Your customer transacts with us, we handle the legal complexity, and you get paid.
For a two-person team doing $50K/month, hiring a tax accountant or registering in the UK, the US, and the EU makes zero sense. Even companies doing $5M+ with small teams choose to stay with a MoR because it lets them keep the team lean and product velocity high.
We also take compliance seriously on our end. We do a full two-step verification for every merchant: our own due diligence on top of Stripe's KYC. We visit websites, check terms of service and review refund policies. If something doesn't look right, we don't just freeze an account like PayPal or Wise. We actually call the person, understand the situation, and work through it. That's a deliberate choice.
How does Creem compare to Stripe?
Stripe is a payment processor. You integrate their API, accept payments, and then you're on your own for everything else: tax compliance, subscription analytics, dunning, invoicing, chargebacks. If you want affiliate tracking, license key generation, or revenue splits, you're stitching together three or four separate tools on top of Stripe. Creem is a Merchant of Record that bundles all of that into one platform.
The transparency issue is real too. Every MoR right now advertises something like "5% + 50 cents." Then you start processing and find out international transactions are +1.5%, subscriptions +0.5%, payouts +1.5%. It's all buried in the docs. The advertised fee and the actual fee are very different. We charge a single, flat fee. No surprises for international cards, subscriptions, or payouts.
For European businesses the savings are even bigger. Most MoRs are US-based, so European customers get hit with international transaction fees and payouts across borders too. With Creem based in Estonia, European merchants often go from paying 8-9% in real total fees down to 3.9%.
But beyond pricing, the real difference is what comes out of the box. With Stripe you get a payment API. With Creem you get:
• Revenue splits, so you can collaborate with co-founders, contractors, or partners and automatically divide payouts without building custom logic or using separate tools
• A built-in affiliate program, so your merchants and community can drive sales for you and get paid automatically
• License key generation for software products, no need to integrate a separate licensing service
• Abandoned cart recovery to recapture lost sales
• An AI analytics assistant that lets you query your financial data in natural language instead of paying $10K/month for ChartMogul
• An AI negotiation bot that customers can haggle with for discounts (which has actually shown increased conversion in testing)
With Stripe, each of those is a separate vendor, a separate integration, a separate bill. With Creem it's all one platform, one fee, and you can focus on building your product instead of assembling a payment stack.
What does a typical Creem user look like?
Our typical user is someone building a digital product, often a SaaS, an AI tool, a template, a course, or a browser extension. They might be a solo developer, a two-person team, or a small startup doing anywhere from zero to several hundred thousand in monthly revenue.
What makes them unique is they sit in this interesting space between B2B and B2C. They behave like consumers when it comes to buying decisions and onboarding expectations (fast, self-serve, no sales calls), but they have B2B needs when it comes to tax compliance, invoicing, and global payments. Most of the industry doesn't understand this customer yet.
Right now we're seeing a huge wave of AI builders: people shipping AI photo tools, voice cloning, AI agents, AI-powered SaaS. These are often technical people who can build incredible products but don't want to spend a week on Stripe documentation or figure out UK VAT registration. They want to plug in payments and get back to building. That's exactly who we serve.
What are your plans for growing Creem?
Our north star metric isn't our own revenue. It's the growth of merchants on the platform. We literally measure whether the businesses using Creem are growing month over month. Every feature we build, from abandoned cart recovery to AI-powered analytics to affiliate tools, is evaluated against that metric: does this help our merchants sell more?
For growth, we're investing heavily in content and founder brand. I started a YouTube channel documenting the Creem journey, which serves multiple purposes: it builds trust (important in fintech, people need to see who's handling their money), it's a distribution channel that connects us with the indie hacker community, and it helps in investor conversations because they can immediately understand our vision.
We're also building features that directly increase merchant revenue: abandoned cart recovery, an AI analytics assistant that lets merchants query their financial data in natural language, and an AI negotiation bot that lets customers negotiate prices (which has actually shown increased revenue in testing). Plus affiliates, so merchants can leverage their own communities for distribution.
On the product side, we're working toward being able to offer embedded finance features that only big companies like Uber can currently afford: virtual accounts, revenue splits, programmatic payouts. Democratizing that for small teams is the long game.
Where can people find out more about you and Creem?
Head to creem.io. The platform is fully self-serve, you can sign up and start selling without talking to anyone. But if you want to chat, we have live support in the app and an active Discord community where we help merchants with integration, share product updates, and even debug code together.
You can follow the journey on YouTube where I post vlogs about building Creem from Estonia, and on Twitter/X @creem_io. I'm also on LinkedIn if you prefer that. Come say hi, we're always happy to help builders get their products off the ground.
