Tapmad OTT: 0→5M Subscribers, Payment Cost 50% → ~1%

Owned monetisation for Pakistan's leading OTT platform and built the billing infrastructure that turned near-zero revenue into a commercially viable business. Launched Direct Carrier Billing across all four telcos, diagnosed the ~50% telco revenue share as the core constraint, and led the migration to wallet-based billing that pulled payment cost to ~1% — scaling to 5M+ paid subscribers, +70% ARPU and $10M+ ARR, then expanding DCB and wallet billing into UAE and KSA.

The subscription business was being eaten alive by payment cost: operator and aggregator margins consumed up to half of revenue, capping growth and ARPU. Acquisition needed a billing rail that reached users without cards, and the unit economics needed a structural fix, not a pricing tweak.

• Direct Carrier Billing across all four major telcos, reaching subscribers without cards
• Wallet-billing migration that moved subscription billing off high-cost operator rails
• Retention improvements: faster refunds, wallet-native subscription management, reduced payment failures
• Pricing, bundles and wallet promotions that lifted ARPU 70%
• DCB and wallet-billing expansion into UAE and KSA with regional telco and wallet partners

Owned payments product strategy, telco and wallet partner negotiation, and the cross-functional migration with growth, finance and engineering. Direct accountability for subscriber growth, payment cost and ARPU.

• Scaled 0 → 5M paid subscribers in under three years
• Pulled payment cost from ~50% of revenue to ~1% via the wallet-billing migration
• Grew ARPU 70% through pricing, bundles and wallet promotions
• Reached $10M+ ARR and expanded DCB + wallet billing into UAE and KSA

• Prioritised DCB reach for acquisition first, accepted the high operator margin early to unlock scale, then migrated to wallet billing to fix the economics
• Ran the wallet migration cohort by cohort rather than a hard cutover, slower headline shift, protected retention through the change

• Payment cost is a product variable, not a procurement one. The rail mix decides whether a subscription business is viable.
• DCB wins acquisition in card-light markets; wallet billing wins the unit economics. You need both, in that order.
• Retention levers — faster refunds, wallet-native management, fewer failures — compound with ARPU pricing to make the model work.

Every subscription, streaming and creator platform inside Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Adyen portfolios eventually faces this: reach users without cards, then fix the rail economics before margin disappears. The playbook ports directly.