The commerce founders who impress us most at Banksia don't arrive with polished slide decks describing an obvious adjacent market. They arrive with a specific frustration — something they experienced as operators that they couldn't adequately solve with what existed — and a counterintuitive view about how to fix it. That specificity of conviction is the first thing we look for. Not a TAM calculation. Not a competitive matrix with green checkboxes. A founder who has felt the problem in their own hands and can articulate why the existing solutions fail in ways that aren't immediately obvious.
Domain depth is the second signal, and it's different from industry experience. A founder with five years in retail logistics doesn't automatically have domain depth in logistics technology — they might have a thorough knowledge of the pain without the technical intuition to distinguish between a real architecture breakthrough and a marginal improvement on a bad system. The founders we've backed consistently are the ones who can operate at both layers simultaneously: they understand the operational reality that creates the problem, and they understand the technical space well enough to see why the solution they're proposing is structurally different from what's come before. That dual fluency is genuinely rare. When you find it, it's unmistakeable in conversation.
The SaaS playbook question is something we spend a lot of time on at the seed stage. The default commercialisation model for B2B software — monthly seat licences, product-led growth, self-serve onboarding, expansion via user count — makes sense for productivity software and horizontal tools. It doesn't automatically make sense for commerce infrastructure. Commerce infrastructure often sits on the transaction path, which means the right commercial model might be usage-based, rev-share, or a hybrid that doesn't map neatly onto the SaaS metrics playbook VCs are trained to evaluate. We're not saying SaaS models are wrong for commerce — several of our portfolio companies operate on SaaS economics. What we're saying is that founders who question whether the conventional commercialisation model fits their specific position in the value chain are thinking about the right things. The best commerce infrastructure businesses often have unusual commercial structures, and that's a feature, not a concern.
One thing that consistently differentiates commerce seed investments from horizontal SaaS is the importance of the first customer. In horizontal SaaS, the first customer is primarily a validation signal. In commerce infrastructure, the first customer is often a design partner who shapes the product in ways that are very difficult to reverse — the data schema you build for their catalogue, the API contracts you expose, the specific settlement flows you implement. We look hard at whether a founder has thought through the implications of their first customer choice. A mid-market Australian retailer as first customer teaches you different things than a marketplace aggregator or a logistics network. The best founders have a clear theory about what they need to learn from their first deployment, not just who's willing to say yes.
At the seed stage, we're not expecting a complete picture. We're expecting intellectual honesty about what isn't known, genuine curiosity about the problem space, and a level of operator credibility that makes us believe the founder will get to the truth faster than we would. The rounds where we've moved fastest are the ones where the founder told us something we didn't know about the market — something specific, mechanistic, and non-obvious that made us recalibrate our own view. That's the bar. Not a perfect plan. A genuine edge.