[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":183},["ShallowReactive",2],{"labs-index":3},[4,76,125],{"id":5,"title":6,"body":7,"cover":56,"description":49,"extension":57,"meta":58,"navigation":59,"order":60,"path":61,"role":62,"seo":63,"stack":64,"status":70,"stem":71,"summary":72,"url":73,"year":74,"__hash__":75},"labsProjects\u002Flabs\u002Fpayd.md","Payd",{"type":8,"value":9,"toc":48},"minimark",[10,15,19,22,26,29,32,36,39,42,45],[11,12,14],"h2",{"id":13},"why-it-exists","Why it exists",[16,17,18],"p",{},"Every freelancer working across borders pays a tax on their existence. Wire fees. Correspondent banking spreads. Three-to-five-day settlement. Minimums that make a $200 invoice not worth sending. The tax falls hardest on people in markets where it hurts the most — African designers working with European clients, Southeast Asian developers working with American agencies, Latin American researchers working with global NGOs.",[16,20,21],{},"Payd was built to remove the tax.",[11,23,25],{"id":24},"where-it-sits","Where it sits",[16,27,28],{},"Payd is the flagship of B3n Labs. It proves what a Labs company looks like when it compounds — distribution, rails, and partnerships all adding up over time without requiring the studio to keep pushing.",[16,30,31],{},"Inside Labs, Payd is not a side project. It is Benaiah's primary operating responsibility. That is the trade-off that makes the whole studio credible: the operators inside Labs are actively running their own companies, which is exactly what makes their operator thinking worth paying for in Innovations engagements.",[11,33,35],{"id":34},"what-compounds","What compounds",[16,37,38],{},"Two things compound monthly, without anyone pushing.",[16,40,41],{},"Distribution compounds. Every business customer brings 50 to 5,000 end users, who become their own viral loop. The WhatsApp interface turned every user into a distribution channel because referring a friend happens in the same thread they send voice notes in.",[16,43,44],{},"Rails compound. Each new corridor, each new mobile money operator, each new stablecoin added to settlement makes every existing customer more valuable without any product update. A payroll client signed twelve months ago is meaningfully more useful to themselves today than at signing.",[16,46,47],{},"Payd is what Labs is for. Not a product. A compound.",{"title":49,"searchDepth":50,"depth":50,"links":51},"",3,[52,54,55],{"id":13,"depth":53,"text":14},2,{"id":24,"depth":53,"text":25},{"id":34,"depth":53,"text":35},"\u002Fbrands\u002Fpayd.png","md",{},true,1,"\u002Flabs\u002Fpayd","Founder, Chief Maverick",{"title":6,"description":49},[65,66,67,68,69],"USD \u002F EUR virtual accounts","Multi-chain stablecoin settlement","Mobile money rails (M-Pesa, MTN, more)","WhatsApp-native interface","Global payroll + spend management","live","labs\u002Fpayd","A money OS for the global independent workforce. Cross-border payments, local spending, and financial management tools for 30,000+ freelancers, creatives, and borderless businesses across 35+ countries.","https:\u002F\u002Fpayd.money",2022,"KtW-cfGTItNhcrYyKSKU9BOO9L4EjNuqF8W8yRajWII",{"id":77,"title":78,"body":79,"cover":110,"description":49,"extension":57,"meta":111,"navigation":59,"order":53,"path":112,"role":113,"seo":114,"stack":115,"status":70,"stem":120,"summary":121,"url":122,"year":123,"__hash__":124},"labsProjects\u002Flabs\u002Fvabu.md","Vabu",{"type":8,"value":80,"toc":105},[81,83,86,89,91,94,97,99,102],[11,82,14],{"id":13},[16,84,85],{},"Africa has a live economy — events, concerts, gatherings, communities — that runs on WhatsApp group chats, cash at the door, and hand-written guest lists. The infrastructure that supports Eventbrite, Patreon, and Substack in other markets does not exist for the continent's creators, organisers, and communities. The few platforms that do exist were built elsewhere and adapted inattentively.",[16,87,88],{},"Vabu exists because the creators building the continent's live economy deserve infrastructure that was built for them, not ported to them.",[11,90,25],{"id":24},[16,92,93],{},"Vabu is a proof point for something Labs believes deeply: the best new ventures come out of operating companies that discover adjacent problems their existing infrastructure can solve. Vabu began life as Payd Experiences — a way for Payd to route payments for event tickets and creator subscriptions. The product-market fit signal was so strong, and the scope so different from Payd's core money OS, that spinning it out as a separate company was the only honest move.",[16,95,96],{},"Vabu now operates independently with its own team, its own distribution, and its own roadmap. Payd remains a payment partner. The relationship compounds without the distraction of forced synergy.",[11,98,35],{"id":34},[16,100,101],{},"Every event on Vabu brings its own audience, which discovers new events, which find new organisers, which bring new audiences. The flywheel is classic marketplace economics — but the vertical specialism (African live economy, creator-led, mobile-first, multi-currency) is what makes it hard for a generic Eventbrite-clone to unseat.",[16,103,104],{},"The deeper compound is data. Every event adds signal to the platform's understanding of who shows up for what, at what price, in which city. That signal is not a data moat in the extractive sense; it is an infrastructure moat in the useful one. Organisers who use Vabu do better the more the platform knows.",{"title":49,"searchDepth":50,"depth":50,"links":106},[107,108,109],{"id":13,"depth":53,"text":14},{"id":24,"depth":53,"text":25},{"id":34,"depth":53,"text":35},"\u002Fbrands\u002Fvabu.png",{},"\u002Flabs\u002Fvabu","Co-founder",{"title":78,"description":49},[116,117,118,119],"Events and ticketing","Fanbase and community infrastructure","Live streaming and hybrid-event support","Creator economics layer","labs\u002Fvabu","Infrastructure for experiences that last. A platform for creators, organisers, and fanbases to build events, streams, and communities — spun out of Payd Experiences and now a standalone venture serving Africa's live economy.","https:\u002F\u002Fvabu.app",2024,"AZwBlmzNqYcP9ff7iREXKNzwTpM7W-t5kpidXLN6xYs",{"id":126,"title":127,"body":128,"cover":168,"description":49,"extension":57,"meta":169,"navigation":59,"order":50,"path":170,"role":171,"seo":172,"stack":173,"status":70,"stem":178,"summary":179,"url":180,"year":181,"__hash__":182},"labsProjects\u002Flabs\u002Fshey.md","Shey",{"type":8,"value":129,"toc":163},[130,132,135,138,141,143,146,149,151,154,157,160],[11,131,14],{"id":13},[16,133,134],{},"Every founder carries a second internal operating system that never gets written down. Half-formed strategy. Pricing questions. Decisions about people. Frustrations. Stuck problems. That operating system is where most of the real work gets done, but it usually gets done in fragmented places — a notes app, a Slack thread with yourself, a voice memo, a stack of handwritten pages.",[16,136,137],{},"The problem with all of those places is that they are storage, not thinking partners. A founder needs a thinking partner. Most founders do not have one. Co-founders, if they exist, are often too close to the immediate work. Coaches are expensive and scheduled. Therapists have a different job. Friends cannot be on-demand.",[16,139,140],{},"Shey was built to be the thinking partner. A notebook that reads what you write and marks it up — margin notes, questions, next moves — the way a sharp co-founder would scribble in the margins of your draft while you stepped away.",[11,142,25],{"id":24},[16,144,145],{},"Shey is B3n Labs' first pure AI-first product. Not an AI feature bolted onto a traditional product — a product whose entire value proposition only becomes possible when the AI layer is good enough to be a credible thinking partner.",[16,147,148],{},"It is also the clearest expression of what \"AI-first\" means in Labs practice. The notebook UI looks familiar — cream paper, dot grid, margin space. The reading experience feels like a paper notebook. The thinking experience is something that did not exist two years ago. That is the right side of the product line: AI where it makes the experience newly possible, invisible where it does not.",[11,150,35],{"id":34},[16,152,153],{},"Two things.",[16,155,156],{},"First, the model of how a user thinks compounds across sessions. Shey remembers how you frame problems, where you get stuck, which kinds of questions unlock your thinking. By the fourth or fifth notebook, Shey's margin notes are more useful than the first session's — not because the underlying model is smarter, but because Shey has learned the user.",[16,158,159],{},"Second, the notebook itself compounds. Every entry becomes context for the next entry. A strategic decision written in March gets referenced in June when a related decision shows up. Founders rarely have the discipline to build a personal knowledge base manually; Shey builds it by virtue of being the place they already write.",[16,161,162],{},"The category Shey is in is going to get crowded fast. The product that wins will be the one that founders actually use daily — not the one with the most features. We are betting on the notebook metaphor, the restraint, and the compounding-per-user experience to be the edge.",{"title":49,"searchDepth":50,"depth":50,"links":164},[165,166,167],{"id":13,"depth":53,"text":14},{"id":24,"depth":53,"text":25},{"id":34,"depth":53,"text":35},"\u002Fbrands\u002Fshey.svg",{},"\u002Flabs\u002Fshey","Founder, Product lead",{"title":127,"description":49},[174,175,176,177],"AI-native margin-note system","Multi-model reasoning layer","Notebook-style UI (cream, minimal, dark, dot-grid, ruled)","Cross-session memory","labs\u002Fshey","A thinking room for founders. An AI-native notebook where you write messy, unfinished thoughts and Shey marks up your notebook with observations, questions, and next moves — like a sharp co-founder scribbling in the margins.","https:\u002F\u002Fgetshey.com",2025,"814Br9l6JxkrkF58jD8u22HI-0rVlKrQLjYm5ZpW_Ds",1776610212673]