Lots of software talks about money, keeps records about money, does calculations about money, but can't *touch* money.
One of the big promises of software is composability. You can build rich, powerful experiences out of basic building blocks.
APIs add new things to the toolbox. For example: Treasury, which lets an app/platform store, move, and track a business’
Lots of software talks about money, keeps records about money, does calculations about money, but can't *touch* money.
So you generally push work to the operator.
You need to be able to read bank transactions to reconcile. You probably can't. The owner can. So you ask the owner to do mind-numbing work a computer does better.
There is some software to write but it is not rocket science.
But let me speculate a bit:
They can automate its operations.
https://t.co/fMOqHh2Tlv
We made it *better* for your users than many business bank accounts.
"When do I get my money?"
Can you imagine needing to email Google to ask when that email that you know was sent will arrive?
Why is money *so slow* and *so opaque*?
In the U.S., you’ll often be blocked on the ACH network. Fast compared to stagecoach; slow compared to email.
Stripe has an arrangement with the banks that ultimately hold the business users’ funds.
(We are working on making that even faster by default. It’s not called HTTP 200 Check Back In An Hour.)
Putting together fintech products is historically a pain in the keister.
Then your engineering team receives the spec, and the *real* fun begins.
No negotiation required. No bespoke legal work. More of the necessary levels of complexity in touching money businesses depend on; less of the overhead.
You can build all of that on Stripe APIs now.
AAAAAAAARGH.
It is managed at most banks as an offshoot of personal banking, because the userbase is basically the same people who show up at the branch.
But the needs are quite different.
(Narrator: This is not, in fact, an adequate spec for a checking account.)
So do graveyards. And hotels. And landlords. And spas. And tutors. And yoga teachers. And...
Not enough dentists pay not enough dollars for banks to put software teams against dental practice UX.
We can then take that package to leading banks. That reach is *very interesting* to them.
A pizzeria can't walk into Goldman Sachs and walk out with a bank account.
A software company serving pizzerias could if they had, uh, a lot of dough.
And so our partner banks have made great products available, at pricing and terms that small businesses just don't usually get in direct banking relationships.
I know exactly how many times I paid the $14 account maintenance fee for my software businesses, ten years later. That’s how much I hated them.
One way to think of it is that banks have huge expenses to attract SMB deposits, including marketing campaigns and branch networks, and those drive the pricing of SMB banking.
Nationwide advertising, branches, and sales reps aren’t as cheap as cron jobs.
I'm very excited to see what software people do with the Stripe Treasury.
No. This was my number two. You're welcome to your guess at the number one. (Though, who knows, I heard of a new project last week and might steal the zeroth spot for it.)
https://t.co/osjjx8gNM0
Part of the needle threading is making sure that one is still developing some things which are uniquely exciting to developers and smaller shops.
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) September 23, 2020
Which: I can\u2019t spoil it, but one thing in the pipeline is maybe my favorite Stripe product since Stripe Atlas if we do it right.
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On a serious note, it's interesting to observe that you can build a decent business charging $20 - $50 per month for something that any good developer can set up. This is one of those micro-saas sweet spots between "easy for me to build" and "tedious for others to build"
— Jon Yongfook (@yongfook) September 5, 2019
Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.
"Who is the prototypical client here?"
A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.
(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)
"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"
I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
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Here are some Google Chrome extensions that can make you better in 2021. 🔥🍀
(Thread) 🧵👇
1. https://t.co/zGir5E5U0J: https://t.co/PVx1wlX0Se is the easiest way to stay updated on the latest programming news. Get the hottest dev news from the best tech blogs on any topic you can think of.
2. CSS Peeper: CSS Peeper is a CSS viewer tailored for Designers. Get access to useful styles with our Chrome extension. Its mission is to let Designers focus on design, and spend as little time as possible digging in a
3. UX Check: UX Check makes heuristic evaluations quick and easy. The extension will open up Nielsen's Ten Heuristics in a side pane next to your website.
4. Checkbot: Checkbot finds critical SEO, speed & security problems before your website visitors do
Tests 100s of pages at once for broken links, duplicate titles, invalid HTML, insecure pages, and 50+ other
The Great Software\xa0Stagnation https://t.co/A6peSPERaU
— Jonathan Edwards (@jonathoda) January 1, 2021
Progress in CS comes from discovering ever more abstract and expressive languages to tell the computer to do something. But replacing "tell the computer to do something in language" with "do it yourself using these gestures" halts that progress. \2
Stagnation started in the 1970s after the first GUIs were invented. Every genre of software that gives users a "friendly" GUI interface, effectively freezes progress at that level of abstraction / expressivity. Because we can never abandon old direct manipulation metaphors \3
The 1990s were simply the point when most people in the world finally got access to a personal computer with a GUI. So that's where we see most of the ideas frozen. \4
It's no surprise that the improvements @jonathoda cites, that are still taking place are improvements in textual representation : \5
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics -- banning reporting on the Bidens, removing the President, destroying a new competitor -- while US liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
The ACLU said the unity of Silicon Valley monopoly power to destroy Parler was deeply troubling. Leaders from Germany, France and Mexico protested. Only US liberals support it, because the dominant strain of US liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism.
https://t.co/qD9OdwlPbV
Just three months ago, a Dem-led House Committee issued a major report warning of the dangers of the anti-trust power of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. Left-wing scholars have been sounding the alarm for years. Now it's here, and liberals
We wrote a 200 page report on why corporate concentration - including the big tech radicalization engines - worsened under both Democratic and Republican administrations. It has to do with antitrust enforcement, and it's fixable by Biden. https://t.co/K85Kv34t83
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 12, 2021