Venmo Five Years Ago • Hacker News Board

Re: Venmo Five Years Ago

#51

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 7:04 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #41

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write check, friend deposits with mobile check deposit app. Everyone has a bank of some sort, I have yet to meet anyone who is using Venmo.

It's friction. If you have two entities providing the same service (money exchange), but one is easy to use and one is much harder to use, the easier one will win (all other things being equal. Check method: Needed items: Payer - checkbook, pen Payee - phone Steps: Payer Payee Write check Give check Receive check Sign check Use app to photograph and submit check Venmo method: Needed items: Payer - phone Payee - phone…

How do you handle someone who won't install Venmo and sign up for their service? Not pay them back?

Re: Venmo Five Years Ago

#52

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 7:05 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #49

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write check, friend deposits with mobile check deposit app. Everyone has a bank of some sort, I have yet to meet anyone who is using Venmo.

When you say cheque I think "fax", or "betamax" or "pager number".

Unfortunately, America hasn't reached the same level of financial sophistication as the UK regarding money transfers. It will eventually, obsoleting hacks like Venmo.

Re: Venmo Five Years Ago

#53

Post by Jtsummers » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 7:07 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #46

superuser2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to meet anyone under 30 who knows where their checkbook is.

Meet "the Venmo line": http://qz.com/277509/read-what-happens-when-a-bunch-of-over-... Your kid's school doesn't take Venmo for field trips. Or school lunch programs. Or extracurricular activities. That's just to name a few "adult" things Venmo doesn't support, and requires a checkbook. Great, you can pay friends back for rent, drinks, or eating out. #millenialproblems

It seems more like #twentysomethingproblems, not #millenialproblems. As a GenXer this was stuff I dealt with far more in college and just after than I do these days. I imagine it was similar for my Boomer parents.

Re: Venmo Five Years Ago

#54

Post by mojowo11 » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 7:09 PM UTC

wil421 wrote: post #39

superuser2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's surprisingly hard to settle a dinner bill between 8 people who only have $20 bills, and no one actually goes inside the bank branch to get other denominations (or buys anything with cash to get change).

Its not very hard to ask for change from a restaurant or get change from a bar later on in the night. If everyone got $20 from the ATM earlier what's to stop them from using their debt card to pay the bill? I was a server for many years and splitting the bill is standard for most younger people.

Let's take a specific example, then. Last week I ordered ~$140 worth of pizza for a party at our office. I paid with my credit card on the website of the pizza joint. Everyone owed about $12-13 in the end (yeah I know, it's an expensive local pizza chain).

Getting paid back with cash would've been a nightmare. Instead I opened Venmo, put in $150, entered the names of my colleagues who were partaking, and hit request. Venmo did the math and requested each person's portion with a push notification. They each confirmed, and I was paid back in full in a few minutes, without even needing to talk directly to most of the people involved.

There are so many situations like this. "But you could do it another more inconvenient way instead" or "you could continue to deal with recouping for hours afterward" aren't especially compelling arguments once you've had the convenience.

Re: Venmo Five Years Ago

#55

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 7:10 PM UTC

mnewberg wrote: post #37

kloncks wrote: post #11

In summary- it’s so awesome to see how they went from scrappy to a must-have product that does around $700mm in annual transactions. Where is this from? Venmo should be doing much higher than this figure.

My bad... fixed now. That was from a slate article last year. They are doing much more than that on a quarterly basis.

[deleted]

Re: Venmo Five Years Ago

#56

Post by nemothekid » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 7:11 PM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #34

Venmo is an objectively worse experience to Square Cash in every way. Bank accounts rather than debit cards, difficult Facebook-linked discovery, stupid social networking integration, obtuse UI. Square Cash is beautiful, elegant, and effortless. I encourage my friends to use it over Venmo whenever I can. Unfortunately, Venmo is wildly more popular among people I know.

I'd have to argue with "objectively" - many of your gripes are subjective.

The bank account vs. debit card is one time on setup - and has little to do with day to day interaction. Not do I see how the UI is obtuse - it takes 3 clicks to pay someone.

The one legitimate gripe you have (the facebook/social network), is a plus in my opinion - in the sense I can pay anyone by just knowing their name. Friend of so-and-so is throwing a party? I can look up their name and throw in, and there is an in-app log of the transaction.

I use Cash to send/receive money to my mom. I never have to worry about the the amount sent, what was it for and when it was sent and who it was sent to because its my mom. Its rarely the same for my friends.

Re: Venmo Five Years Ago

#57

Post by Jtsummers » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 7:12 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #51

Jtsummers wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's friction. If you have two entities providing the same service (money exchange), but one is easy to use and one is much harder to use, the easier one will win (all other things being equal. Check method: Needed items: Payer - checkbook, pen Payee - phone Steps: Payer Payee Write check Give check Receive check Sign check Use app to photograph and submit check Venmo method: Needed items: Payer - phone Payee - phone…

How do you handle someone who won't install Venmo and sign up for their service? Not pay them back?

Switch back to cash, check or another transfer mechanism. Or have them buy the next round at the bar and call it good.

Re: Venmo Five Years Ago

#58

Post by moron4hire » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 7:18 PM UTC

They were the darling startup of Philadelphia for a while. Proof that Philly could compete and grow successful technology companies. Our hackerspace used them to manage membership dues because PayPal was such a pain in the ass, and we really liked supporting a local business. One of our members was supposedly good friends with one of the founders, got us setup as a non-profit with them so we didn't have to pay transaction fees. A lot of us started using Venmo to share lunch costs both in the space and with our coworkers back at our jobs. I even convinced my landlord to start taking payment through Venmo; he loved it.

I remember hearing Venmo talk in one of the local tech press blogs about how much they loved Philly and were never going to move. Then literally a month later they had moved to NYC.

And then they conveniently "forgot" about our non-profit status, but didn't email anyone about it, and didn't report on the transaction fees in the same data stream as the rest of the app. I was treasurer at the time, and couldn't figure out why my spreadsheet balance tracking all of our accounts didn't match Venmo's balance. I had to do a special data export to find the transaction fees. And that data export was just to a CSV file, one that didn't quote fields with commas or escape newline characters correctly. I seem to remember the export wasn't even on the account page, you had to go find it under some obscure settings page.

I quit using them after that, and haven't looked back. When you're a non-profit, community-owned-and-operated hackerspace (as opposed to a for-profit fab-lab like TechShop), it's really hard to get people to pay their dues on time (or at all). Literally all we needed was money for rent and internet, the management was rotating volunteer basis, nobody got paid. Any amount of money that is expected and doesn't come through is a huge hit to the bottom line.

Re: Venmo Five Years Ago

#59

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 7:18 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #53

toomuchtodo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet "the Venmo line": http://qz.com/277509/read-what-happens-when-a-bunch-of-over-... Your kid's school doesn't take Venmo for field trips. Or school lunch programs. Or extracurricular activities. That's just to name a few "adult" things Venmo doesn't support, and requires a checkbook. Great, you can pay friends back for rent, drinks, or eating out. #millenialproblems

It seems more like #twentysomethingproblems, not #millenialproblems. As a GenXer this was stuff I dealt with far more in college and just after than I do these days. I imagine it was similar for my Boomer parents.

I think that's my point. Once you get older, this problem drops away. You probably don't have roommates (no need to split rent or utilities) and you probably eat out less often (and when you do, you can split the check).

If you're a parent, you're paying for things that require a check or cash. The check then become's "frictionless" as you already require it.

Re: Venmo Five Years Ago

#60

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 7:20 PM UTC

mojowo11 wrote: post #42

toomuchtodo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect example of the HN bubble.

Yep, I bet Venmo processed $1.6 billion in transactions in the last quarter of 2014 entirely from Hacker News users. EDIT: Oh, apparently we're going to talk about their business model now instead. Jeez, it's hard to keep up.

[deleted]