Trevor Galvin

Co-Founder of @ReignEcom

[Trevor Galvin @builtbytrev]

PS: I've processed $500M+ for high-risk ecom merchants over the last decade. Today, I run revenue at Reign, a VC-backed platform that I co-founded, where 1000+ merchants have processed over $1B.

If you're doing $100K+/month and want a revenue engine that makes you ~20% more with every checkout, book a call: https://t.co/6K0se6Vbcn

[Trevor Galvin @builtbytrev]

If your high-risk payment processor is not asking you these questions before onboarding you and going straight for your personal information or business financials, you should probably drop them.

A legit processor should be very keen to know:

- what kind of high-risk business do you run?

- what’s your average ticket dollar amount?

- are you a new business or have prior merchant service account history?

- how many refunds per month occur in your business on average

- ratio of transactions to refunds

- refund policy

Unfortunately, merchant service providers taking advantage of “high-risk businesses” due to the nature of their business models is not unheard of…

What you should know is that high-risk processing done right comes down to due diligence and providing underwriting with as much information, documentation, and detail as possible about a business.

It’s also what helps lower a business's risk factor down the line.

[Trevor Galvin @builtbytrev]

Grüns went from launch to a $1.2 billion exit in just 32 months, selling nutritional gummies.

They:

- Launched in August 2023, sold to Unilever in April 2026
- Crossed $300M in annualised revenue in under two years
- 1M+ customers and 95,000+ 5-star reviews

Here’s a breakdown of how they succeeded:

Before Grüns became mainstream, the industry standard was a chalky powder that tasted like grass that customers scooped into water every morning.

People bought it, felt virtuous for a while, and then stopped.

There was a huge adherence problem in the industry.

But brands have always treated this as a willpower problem on the customer's part.

Grüns changed that entire customer experience.

Users describe it as a treat they look forward to, rather than a supplement they have to remember to take.

This helps run Grüns’ subscription model like a machine.

When a customer puts a product in the cart, it gives them two options:

- Subscribe and pay $23.51 for the product (delivered every 4 weeks)
- Buy one-time and pay $48.32

Customers pay double the price for not committing.

The one-off buyer gets a one-time discount of $5, making subscription the obvious value pick.

Now a bit about their strategy:

- Grüns scaled to massive revenue on just one SKU.

- Instead of marketing the gummies as good for general health, they built messaging around six buyer avatars (such as gut, skin, brain fog, recovery).

- They drop limited-edition flavors. Surveys showed some first-time buyers ordered purely to try a seasonal one, and the strategy also pulls lapsed customers back.

Which brings us to their impressive revenue numbers:

By month 24, the DTC giant was already generating $25M every month in revenue and shipping four million gummies a day.

By April 2025, the brand was available nationwide across Walmart, Target, Sprouts, and Sam's Club, while DTC continued to bring in the majority of its revenue.

Grüns is one of the best examples of how to disrupt an industry by understanding and then solving customer problems (instead of dismissing them).

[Trevor Galvin @builtbytrev]

PS: I’ve processed $500M+ for high-risk ecom merchants over the last decade. Today I run revenue at Reign, a VC-backed platform I co-founded, where 1000+ merchants have processed over $1B.

We route across 30+ acquirers, which lifts auth rates and keeps a declined rebill from becoming a churned subscriber.

If you’re doing $100K+/month and want a revenue engine that makes you ~20% more with every checkout, book a call: https://t.co/6K0se6Vbcn

[Trevor Galvin @builtbytrev]

A friend running an ecom business told me he was stuck at $100k a month and struggling to scale beyond it for six months.

They were testing dozens of UGC videos, copying creative strategies from the biggest brands in their category, and had already rebuilt their ad account twice.

It wasn’t working.

I immediately noticed that they didn't understand their customer avatar as well as they thought.

(fyi… it’s way more common than you think).

Context:

The market they operated in was already product-aware - meaning people already knew their problem and the available solutions.

In a market like this, your focus needs to be on why your product is better than your competitors instead of just stating basic product facts.

Solution:

A simple comparison image ad worked for them.

Two months later, the ecom store had scaled from $100K/m to $1M/m.

The takeaway:

Past $100k a month, a deep understanding of your customer and the market you operate in can bring a radical difference in your results.

Running more ads without that knowledge means you're scaling junk volume.

The spend goes up without the results to show for it.

My advice to any brand unable to break through this level is to go back to customer research.

Look at Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and as many places as you possibly can.

Run customer feedback surveys or, better still, call customers up directly.

When you genuinely understand your customer, even a plain image ad can become your best performer.

[Reign Ben @ReignBenjis]

“My payment processor just shut my account down and is holding my money.”

I hear some version of this almost every day

If you’re high-risk or scaled fast and just got terminated, DM me. I’ll help u get rolling again

[Trevor Galvin @builtbytrev]

tl;dr: Don’t be in a hurry to pull the plug on your high-engagement ad.

First, figure out where the problem is and fix that as you glean data from the ad elements that are working.

[Trevor Galvin @builtbytrev]

If your ad is burning spend right now with no sales, it might still become your next winner.

I've had this conversation with merchants at least five times last month.
(A thread)

[Trevor Galvin @builtbytrev]

Then work out how to keep those elements while making it more conversion-focused.

More often than not, the problem is that you did a poor job of specifying your target avatar in the hook, the image, the text copy, or all three.

[Trevor Galvin @builtbytrev]

PS: I've processed $500M+ for high-risk ecom merchants over the last decade. Today, I run revenue at Reign, a VC-backed platform that I co-founded, where 1000+ merchants have processed over $1B.

If you're doing $100K+/month and want a revenue engine that makes you ~20% more with every checkout, book a call: https://t.co/6K0se6Vbcn

[Trevor Galvin @builtbytrev]

"My payment provider just terminated my merchant account. I don’t know what to do.”

I hear a version of this literally every day.

When this happens, a merchant’s funds are withheld, subscriptions can’t be charged, and customer cards are locked inside a processor they no longer have access to.

These ecom stores get penalized because they:

- are in a high-risk category, and/or
- scaled too fast

As a result, these merchants turn to third-party high-risk processing - which is a completely different ball game.

To enable that, they now have to show their financials (business bank statements, personal statements, and processing statements) and documents like EIN, SS4, and articles of incorporation.

The bank also needs to approve their website (which their previous processor never even looked at).

Because these merchants were terminated from their legacy providers, they don't have access to their processing statements and are forced to go in as a startup.

Meaning a merchant running $200,000/m of volume may only get an account for $30,000/m, making it that much harder to scale.

On top of that, merchant accounts can easily take a month to approve - if at all.

So if you're applying a week before Black Friday, good luck…

fyi…quick background on me.

My dad was an e-commerce operator for 30 years.

I grew up doing odd jobs for him, from customer service to fulfillment to running ads, and have been around ecom my whole life.

In college, I was dropshipping, got a marketing degree, and worked for a payment processor building their funnels.

That led me into high-risk processing.

Then I started my own community of e-commerce merchants for high-risk, dropshipping, and subscription-based companies.

My playbook was simple - land one client, and they would refer me to 100s of others.

This is how I grew my portfolio to thousands of merchants and saw the challenges DTC players face up close.

Which is why in 2024, we built Phoenix.

Here's what we do differently:

→ We give merchants full ownership of their card tokens, meaning a platform change doesn’t cost you a single subscriber.

→ Transactions route across 30+ acquirers. If a card gets declined on one path, it gets retried on another. Across our platform, our auth rates hold steady at 90%+.

→ Merchant scan split test infinite checkout variations and upsell and downsell flows. Every account gets a dedicated Checkout and Upsell Builder Specialist, and build requests get done same day.

→ Real human support that goes above and beyond. We tell merchants what they should be doing on checkout, what's permitted under card network rules, and what trips their acquirer's thresholds.

→ We're in the verticals traditional processors classify as high-risk: nutra, wellness, subscriptions, firearms, and several others with 400+ merchants and over $1B in platform GMV.

tl;dr: merchants never plan for getting shut off, and that's exactly why they’re caught off-guard when it happens.