They need repeat custom.
The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.
“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.
They need repeat custom.
The price point is $1 to about $2.
But the coffee is not very defensible
Enter payment apps.
And since booze and tobacco can’t meaningfully be used...
Family Mart has a closed loop store value app called Family Pay. It is a barcode based payment and does basically what you expect it to.
It is also a coupon platform, and will sell you an anywhere-in-chain “11 drinks for price of 10.”

App tracks progress. 6 more to go!
(I cropped the screen to avoid giving you a barcode that would let anyone snatch my coffee.)

Automating all of this and having funds flow go Corp -> franchisee not F>C>F ameliorated problem.
More from Patrick McKenzie
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.
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.
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.
I like this heuristic, and have a few which are similar in intent to it:
Hiring efficiency:
How long does it take, measured from initial expression of interest through offer of employment signed, for a typical candidate cold inbounding to the company?
What is the *theoretical minimum* for *any* candidate?
How long does it take, as a developer newly hired at the company:
* To get a fully credentialed machine issued to you
* To get a fully functional development environment on that machine which could push code to production immediately
* To solo ship one material quanta of work
How long does it take, from first idea floated to "It's on the Internet", to create a piece of marketing collateral.
(For bonus points: break down by ambitiousness / form factor.)
How many people have to say yes to do something which is clearly worth doing which costs $5,000 / $15,000 / $250,000 and has never been done before.
Here's how I'd measure the health of any tech company:
— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) October 25, 2018
How long, as measured from the inception of idea to the modified software arriving in the user's hands, does it take to roll out a *1 word copy change* in your primary product?
Hiring efficiency:
How long does it take, measured from initial expression of interest through offer of employment signed, for a typical candidate cold inbounding to the company?
What is the *theoretical minimum* for *any* candidate?
How long does it take, as a developer newly hired at the company:
* To get a fully credentialed machine issued to you
* To get a fully functional development environment on that machine which could push code to production immediately
* To solo ship one material quanta of work
How long does it take, from first idea floated to "It's on the Internet", to create a piece of marketing collateral.
(For bonus points: break down by ambitiousness / form factor.)
How many people have to say yes to do something which is clearly worth doing which costs $5,000 / $15,000 / $250,000 and has never been done before.
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On the occasion of youtube 20k and Twitter 70k members
A small tribute/gift to members
Screeners
technical screeners - intraday and positional both
before proceeding - i have helped you , can i ask you so that it can help someone else too
thank you
positional one
run - find #stock - draw chart - find levels
1- Stocks closing daily 2% up from 5 days
https://t.co/gTZrYY3Nht
2- Weekly breakout
https://t.co/1f4ahEolYB
3- Breakouts in short term
https://t.co/BI4h0CdgO2
4- Bullish from last 5
intraday screeners
5- 15 minute Stock Breakouts
https://t.co/9eAo82iuNv
6- Intraday Buying seen in the past 15 minutes
https://t.co/XqAJKhLB5G
7- Stocks trading near day's high on 5 min chart with volume BO intraday
https://t.co/flHmm6QXmo
Thank you
A small tribute/gift to members
Screeners
technical screeners - intraday and positional both
before proceeding - i have helped you , can i ask you so that it can help someone else too
thank you
positional one
run - find #stock - draw chart - find levels
1- Stocks closing daily 2% up from 5 days
https://t.co/gTZrYY3Nht
2- Weekly breakout
https://t.co/1f4ahEolYB
3- Breakouts in short term
https://t.co/BI4h0CdgO2
4- Bullish from last 5
intraday screeners
5- 15 minute Stock Breakouts
https://t.co/9eAo82iuNv
6- Intraday Buying seen in the past 15 minutes
https://t.co/XqAJKhLB5G
7- Stocks trading near day's high on 5 min chart with volume BO intraday
https://t.co/flHmm6QXmo
Thank you