I'm building a tool that recovers failed Stripe payments. The hardest part isn't the tech — it's trust.

I'm building Lirova — a tool that recovers the revenue SaaS quietly loses
to failed Stripe payments (expired cards, declines, bank hiccups).
Pre-launch, sharing the journey here because I keep hitting one wall I
didn't expect.

First, why this problem is bigger than most founders think:

• 20-40% of all churn is involuntary — the customer never chose to leave,
  their payment just failed
• Expired cards alone cause ~42% of failed payments
• Stripe's default retries recover around 35%. The rest lapses silently
• For most subscription SaaS that's 5-9% of MRR walking out the door every
  month, unnoticed

The tech was the easy part. Decline-code classification (each failure
reason gets its own retry strategy), smart retry timing, a recovery email
sequence, and money-safety logic that stops on hard declines so you don't
burn card-network limits.

Here's the wall: trust.

I'm asking founders to connect their Stripe — their actual money and
billing. Even with read-only access first (it can't charge cards or move
money until they explicitly turn automation on), the hesitation is real and
100% rational. Why would anyone give a brand-new, no-reviews tool access to
the most sensitive part of their business?

I'd hesitate too.

So my question to the community — especially anyone who's sold
infrastructure, fintech, or anything touching payments or sensitive data:

How did you get your first few customers to trust you with sensitive access
when you had zero track record? Free pilots? Hand-holding? A specific
guarantee? Open-source? Something else entirely?

Genuinely trying to learn, not pitch. If anyone runs a subscription
business on Stripe and wants to poke at the demo (sample data, no signup),
it's at lirova.app/demo — would value brutal feedback on whether the
value/trust balance lands.

Thanks 🙏

(For context — my profile here still shows Pillwise, an earlier project.
Lirova's the new thing I'm heads-down on now.)