From $0 to $10M monthly GMV: How HOLYWATER built a global payments stack with Solidgate
$0 → $10MMonthly GMV growth
+5-7%Approval rate lift
Industry
Media tech & digital subscriptionsRegion
US, EU, LATAMUse case
Subscription billing optimization, global payment infrastructureFeatures used
Orchestration, acquiring, prevention alerts, Merchant of RecordAt a glance
is an AI-first media tech company behind two of the most-downloaded digital content apps in the US and Europe: My Drama, a vertical micro-drama streaming platform, and My Passion, a romance audiobook and e-book app.
Founded in 2020, the company has reached 55M+ users, secured a strategic investment from Fox Entertainment, and become #1 in EU and US vertical streaming.
The commercial numbers behind that growth are striking. HOLYWATER went from zero to $10M in monthly gross merchandise volume (GMV), scaling two subscription products across the US, EU, and Latin America in under three years.
Solidgate has been part of that journey since 2022. What started as foundational payment infrastructure grew into a full-stack partnership that fueled the company's growth.
Three things HOLYWATER needed to scale
Building payment infrastructure from scratch for a product that didn't exist yet
When HOLYWATER partnered with Solidgate in 2022, there was no payment stack to optimize. There was no GMV. My Drama hadn't launched. My Passion was early-stage.
The challenge wasn't fixing a broken system but building the right foundation for a subscription-first media business with global ambitions, without a large payments engineering team or the runway to get it wrong.
For a business that would live and die by paid acquisition economics, every billing failure at scale meant real revenue lost and real CAC wasted. Getting the infrastructure right from day one wasn't optional.
An approval rate ceiling ahead of a critical growth window
By late 2024, HOLYWATER had scaled fast. My Drama had reached 1M users within months of launch and was accelerating across the US and EU. But approval rates had plateaued. And at that scale, every basis point of friction compounds.
The standard optimization levers like routing, cascades, MID configuration had already been worked. The remaining gap pointed somewhere less obvious: MCC classification.
As HOLYWATER scaled into new markets and product lines, Solidgate identified that realigning their MCCs to better reflect their transaction profiles could unlock meaningful approval rate improvements.
That misalignment had a compounding cost. For subscription-based digital media businesses processing at volume, even a partial misalignment creates an invisible ceiling: issuers risk-score transactions based on MCC, and an imperfect fit produces unnecessary declines baked into every billing cycle.
The math was straightforward: a 5-7% approval rate gap meant a meaningful share of acquired, converted users lost to friction at the billing moment. With Q5 approaching, this needed to be resolved fast.
MCC alignment across a fragmented multi-acquirer stack
HOLYWATER's payment stack with Solidgate included Adyen, Checkout.com, Nuvei, Worldpay, and JPMorgan – a distributed architecture built for resilience and routing flexibility. That breadth created a coordination problem.
Fixing the MCC on one acquirer while leaving others misaligned would produce inconsistent issuer signals across billing attempts. Solving it properly meant owning the conversation across all six providers simultaneously.
Building the payment stack that could keep up
Laying the foundation before there was GMV to protect
Solidgate's role with HOLYWATER started well before there was a performance problem to solve. From 2022, the team built the foundational infrastructure that would underpin HOLYWATER's entire commercial operation:
- Orchestration – smart routing across payment providers to maximize approval rates and minimize transactional cost
- Solidgate Acquiring – direct acquiring relationships to support EU and US transaction volume
- Fraud prevention alerts – real-time monitoring to protect against chargebacks at scale
- Merchant of Record (MoR) setup – handling the compliance, tax, and liability layer so HOLYWATER's team could stay focused on product and growth
This infrastructure scaled with HOLYWATER as they grew – from pre-launch through My Drama's rise to $10M in monthly GMV.
Fixing the approval rate ceiling across every acquirer at once
When the MCC gap was identified ahead of Q5, Solidgate ran a structured testing process across both products. Rather than testing MCC codes sequentially, multiple candidates were evaluated simultaneously – across live transactions, including the recurring billing leg, which behaves differently from initial authorizations under issuer risk models.
Testing ran for approximately one month. Rollout across all MIDs followed in the next.
The result was a consistent, optimized merchant identity presented to issuers across every acquirer in the stack – eliminating the cross-provider inconsistency that had been suppressing approval rates.
New MIDs with clean descriptors for the US
In parallel, Solidgate onboarded new MIDs in North America with payment descriptors aligned to the optimized MCC from day one, working with JPMorgan and Worldpay US. Each is configured correctly at launch – no legacy misalignment to clean up later.
This expanded HOLYWATER's routing flexibility and gave them the acquiring foundation for their next phase of geographic expansion.
From $0 to $10M monthly GMV – and still climbing
HOLYWATER's commercial growth and their Solidgate partnership are inseparable. The company scaled from pre-revenue to $10M in monthly GMV – with Solidgate as their payment infrastructure every step of the way.
With the full platform in place, the impact compounded across every layer of the business:
- +5-7% approval rate lift across both My Drama and My Passion, driven by MCC optimization, smart orchestration, and new MIDs launched with aligned descriptors from day one.
- $0 to $10M in monthly GMV, with improved unit economics on every billing event, enabling HOLYWATER to scale paid acquisition more aggressively.
- Acquirer portfolio expanded from 4 to 8+ active providers, with new MIDs covering the US and LatAm markets, reducing concentration risk and increasing routing optionality.
- Faster market expansion into North America and Latin America, with JPMorgan, Worldpay US, Ebanx, and Bamboo onboarded and configured correctly at launch.
"Once payment acceptance improved, we saw it flow through immediately – higher conversion, better LTV. It's one of those changes that looks small on paper until you see what it does at scale." – [Name, Title], HOLYWATER
Beyond the growth metrics, the partnership changed how HOLYWATER's payments and marketing teams think about payment infrastructure. Solidgate is no longer just a processor, but a lever for growth that directly affects CAC, LTV, and market expansion velocity.
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