[HN Gopher] Lessons Learned from Payments Startups
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       Lessons Learned from Payments Startups
        
       Author : ben_s
       Score  : 33 points
       Date   : 2024-02-07 07:52 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.pgrs.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.pgrs.net)
        
       | tommiegannert wrote:
       | This is a nicely varied list of lessons.
       | 
       | > Often, I will prefer the database to logging
       | 
       | Just don't start writing exception logs to the database, and not
       | tell anyone that you've created a flood gate that will make you
       | run out of production data storage at the worst possible time.
        
       | zeroxfe wrote:
       | I wrote a [1] post-mortem when I shut down my payment startup a
       | few years ago. The vast majority of our challenges were non-
       | technical: navigating regulation, high legal costs, complex
       | insurance requirements, etc. on an uneven playing field with
       | competitors with much deeper pockets than even a well-funded
       | startup.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quid-sudo-shutdown-h-now-
       | mohi...
        
         | algo_trader wrote:
         | Nice write up, and i hope you dont regret the journey
         | 
         | I am surprised you didnt mention fraud - is it because micro-
         | payments are not "fraud worthy" or because it is a manageable
         | problem ?
        
       | umeshunni wrote:
       | These are great lessons from an engineering perspective. From a
       | product perspective, I've learned 3 hard lessons:
       | 
       | 1. Fraudsters will find your product and abuse it before real
       | users do. If you see a sudden spike in usage, it's probably
       | fraud.
       | 
       | 2. Real users are very emotional when it comes to their money,
       | even if it's a "low volume transaction" like $20. Anything you
       | build that introduces friction between them and their money will
       | get your support team yelled at.
       | 
       | 3. Regulators and banks are suspicious of you, for lessons they
       | have learned from 100+ years of balancing lessons 1 & 2 above.
       | 
       | Balancing 1, 2 & 3 is an art and the difference between building
       | a successful product and failure.
       | 
       | All the cute UI and funnel analysis you do breaks when it hits
       | fraud, user emotions and regulation.
        
         | user_7832 wrote:
         | I'm curious, would you say using a third party to handle
         | payments (stripe/paypal/shopify etc) would help avoid some of
         | these issues? I'm not sure I understand point 2, especially if
         | there's a "regular" checkout page by one of these companies.
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-07 23:02 UTC)