Funnel teardown: Lemon Squeezy (Payments and Merchant of Record)
Founder(s): JR Farr and team (acquired by Stripe in 2024)

Lemon Squeezy sold a category swap (MoR), not a feature. The funnel reframes payments into compliance relief.

TL;DR: Lemon Squeezy's funnel never competed with Stripe on payment processing. It sold a category swap: Merchant of Record, which means the platform handles sales tax and VAT compliance on the indie founder's behalf. The lesson for indie founders: when the incumbent owns the category, your funnel must reframe the buying decision into a different category entirely.

What they sell: A Merchant of Record payments platform for digital products and SaaS, where the platform legally sells to the customer and handles global tax compliance.
Who it's for: Indie founders, solo SaaS operators, and small teams selling digital products globally who do not want to register for VAT in every jurisdiction.
Pricing: Percentage-plus-fixed-fee per transaction, with the MoR service included. Higher per-transaction cost than raw Stripe in exchange for compliance offload (verified 2026-05-17).

Hook pattern: Category reframe
The hero does not say 'cheaper than Stripe' or 'easier than Paddle'. It says 'we sell on your behalf', which moves the buying decision from payment-processor evaluation to compliance evaluation. The reader who lands the reframe never compares the per-transaction fee directly.

Story pattern: Pain narrative tied to a specific indie audience
The funnel speaks to the specific founder who sells globally and has hit the first VAT letter or sales-tax registration prompt. Story carries an emotional weight that pure feature copy cannot, because the reader has felt the pain.

Offer pattern: Bundled compliance plus tooling
Pricing bundles checkout, subscriptions, licensing, customer portal, and global tax compliance into one fee. The bundle hides the per-feature comparison and lets the buyer evaluate on outcome (compliance handled) rather than parts.

What's working:
Category reframe (MoR) escapes the Stripe-feature shootout entirely.|Branded as 'Lemon Squeezy' with playful design, which differentiates against the deliberately-boring infrastructure aesthetic of Stripe.|Indie-founder testimonials on the homepage, not enterprise logos.|Pricing page front-loads what is included rather than the percentage rate, which delays the comparison shopping until after value is communicated.|Self-serve onboarding with no sales call required for the indie buyer, matching how indie founders prefer to buy.

What to adapt:
If you cannot win the category your competitor owns, do not enter that category. Reframe the buying decision into one where you ARE the category.|Bundle features so the buyer evaluates on outcome, not part-by-part comparison.|Use a distinct visual identity if your category is dominated by 'serious infrastructure' aesthetics. Indie buyers respond to personality.

What to avoid:
Do not adopt the playful brand if your category buyer expects gravitas (e.g. enterprise security tooling). Match the buying mood.|Do not bundle features you cannot deliver well. Lemon Squeezy could bundle because each feature was production-grade.

Brunson lens:
Hook: New Opportunity (Brunson Expert Secrets) — the reader is not buying a better payment processor, they are stepping into a new category (MoR) that solves a different problem.
Story: Pain-led story aimed at the specific indie founder who hit the global-tax wall.
Offer: Bundled outcome offer — compliance plus checkout plus subscriptions priced as one outcome, not a feature list.
Value ladder tier: Unboxing funnel (transactional core) with sticky subscription mechanics on top.