Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 332 posts

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#251

Post by SahAssar »

> Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views.

I might just have lucked out, but my random framework made it to #1 (based on http://hnrankings.info/26722051/, didn't know about that site until dang linked it now). HN does not generate millions of visitors/views, even including all the random bots that start scraping your site. I base that on log analysis without any CDN or similar, so pretty sure I'm not underestimating. There might be a large secondary effect based on things shared on other social networks that posts like mine do not get, but just getting to #1 on HN is not millions of views in my experience.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#252

Post by Kye »

CTmystery wrote: post #240
Kye wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see someone who isn't convinced you're a fair operator taking the volume and detail of response as defensiveness, and that can look suspicious in a context like this. They aren't right , but I can understand the perspective.

> They aren't right, but I can understand the perspective. How? I'm curious. If someone makes accusations that you know to be false, wouldn't your best defense be a comprehensive refutation? What alternative do you see that would be more compelling? I, for one, really appreciate this level of detail, because the most common alternative is to attack back mercilessly without evidence. This tactic being commonly employe…

Most of the world's ills would be solved if facts and evidence were enough to convince people.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#253

Post by joshstrange »

I had never heard of Bolt before today that I can remember but since I'm woking on a project that needs CC processing (it has Stripe currently, I'm moving to another provider) I was interested. I looked at their website and immediately felt like it wasn't aimed at me. I don't care about 1-click anything, I want to know about how to use this, api calls, how to capture an auth, etc. I see the developer menu item and I click on "Get Started". Immediately I'm shown a list of plugins for CRM/e-commerce-type tools which, and maybe this is elitist, but that's turn off for me. Don't get me wrong I cut my chops on WP/Drupal and the like but it been a long time and I want docs with an API call to charge a card or similar. I see the "API" and "SDK" in the sidebar and check both out. API docs are swagger, that's fine, but it's not clear at all and the "workflow" to charge a card is. I go look at "SDK" and they only have an iOS SDK, is this a joke? Not to mention that it looks like you need to bring your own payment processor [0] and "The processor implementation timelines average 2-4 weeks.", at this point you are better off talking directly to someone like First Data. Let's not get started on the apparent "contact us for pricing".

Bottom line: Bolt is completely uninteresting to me as a developer and the creator sounds like sour grapes in his twitter tirade. I'm glad to be moving off Stripe for way cheaper processing but I love their docs, dashboard, etc and I'll miss it. Bolt would have been discarded as not a serious competitor almost immediately had I seen it back when I first integrated with Stripe. In fact, they seem to provide something 100% different to Stripe and even have Stripe as a payment processor.

[0] https://help.bolt.com/developers/guides/processor-guides/

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#254

Post by bmc415 »

joshstrange wrote: post #253

I had never heard of Bolt before today that I can remember but since I'm woking on a project that needs CC processing (it has Stripe currently, I'm moving to another provider) I was interested. I looked at their website and immediately felt like it wasn't aimed at me. I don't care about 1-click anything, I want to know about how to use this, api calls, how to capture an auth, etc. I see the developer menu item and I…

just curious - why are you moving away from stripe?

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#255

Post by dang »

skinkestek wrote: post #250
dang wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405 ? It wasn't flagged. (More precisely, it was, but the flags were dropped by HN's anti-abuse system, and wouldn't have affected the story's rank in any case because the upvotes were massively dominant.) The post spent 13 hours on HN's front page. This seems like things working the way they should—am I missing something?

OK, you are probably right again. It is just that I spend quite a lot of time on HN and I missed it until I checked /active. So either I didn't notice it at first or I had a 13 hour break from HN ;-) That said, doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days? Am I mistaken? (And if not - do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this o…

You might be surprised how much stuff you miss on HN. At least I am, and there can't be many people who monitor it more than I do (at least I hope there aren't! as I'm paid to). If you look at the front page links on past days (https://news.ycombinator.com/front, linked as 'past' in the top bar), you'll see that there are a lot of significant front page stories in a day. You need to click "More" at the bottom at least once or twice to see them all.

It's actually kind of a shocking exercise to do, because it brings home how there is no "real" HN - we all think we're seeing "the" front page, but it's a Heraclitus (Heraclitian?) river.

> doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days?

That should be very rare. The software downweights any story that has been on the front page for more than 15 hours, unless we specifically tell it not to (which we might do if the community was particularly enjoying it). If the upvotes are massive enough, a story can linger on the front page despite that penalty, but then moderators will notice it and push it below the front page.

> do you have time to explain why I can find a

I have time, but I don't understand the question!

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#256

Post by joshstrange »

bmc415 wrote: post #254
joshstrange wrote: post #253

I had never heard of Bolt before today that I can remember but since I'm woking on a project that needs CC processing (it has Stripe currently, I'm moving to another provider) I was interested. I looked at their website and immediately felt like it wasn't aimed at me. I don't care about 1-click anything, I want to know about how to use this, api calls, how to capture an auth, etc. I see the developer menu item and I…

just curious - why are you moving away from stripe?

Pricing and pricing only. The flat fee is one of the biggest killers. $0.30/per makes it near impossible to offer certain features and 2.9% is decently high (and that's before you turn on any other services). Instead I'm able to get ~2% (varies by card, some are higher, some are lower, but I'm just paying the interchange fee + a small percent to the processor) and zero flat fee on the transaction.

EDIT: Just to expand on what I'm doing, it's software for food festivals where people pre-load their accounts with money and then spend it at the vendors. It means we only need in-person CC terminals in a few places and vendors can use their smart phones to charge someone's account. It also means all transactions go though our software and the festival can take it's cut. Without this vendors would provide.... creative records of how much they sold (festival takes X% so if the vendor can hide some sales it can keep 100% of those sales). Because of this there isn't a ton of room for more percentages/flat-fees to be taken out. If someone wants to buy something and needs 1 more dollar in their account then we give up over 30% to Stripe. Even on a $5 charge we give up close to 9%. If I can get rid of the flat fee we could do a number of things like just linking a card and charging it on the fly with every purchase instead of first loading money onto your account. I'd be killed with fees if I did that with Stripe since we are talking about $2/3/5 items (it's a food festival, the portions/prices are small so you can try a bunch of things). Also things like "auto-reload if your account dips below $X", with Stripe I'd need to make the reload amount minimum decently high to avoid taking a bath in fees.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#257

Post by wglb »

parhamn wrote: post #10

I think if you get over the drama here and implied "dirtiness", the main result is still a bit interesting. Even if you exclude the implied carteling and take everything he said with a grain of salt, the outcomes of this incentive structure are clear: once SV (i.e. the YC centered VC machine) gets into a space and has a main horse, SV can no longer incubate new innovation/competition in the space. It can also very li…

I know of at least one instance in which direct competitors were accepted to YC in the same batch. So your implication that SV can no longer incubate new innovation/competition in the space. is untrue.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#258

Post by cududa »

0______0 wrote: post #153
nkotov wrote: post #77

To be honest, this feels like a PR stunt since we all know if you add "YC is bad" and share it on HN, people will look and react. I haven't heard of Bolt, I'm not familiar with the space at all. I use Stripe because the product just works and I can trust my business with it. Seeing a CEO who publicly complains turns me away from even wanting to try the product. On a related note - I helped review a little over 100+ Y…

> Seeing a CEO who publicly complains turns me away from even wanting to try the product. Really? That turns you off? What a lame argument. Your criteria for using Stripe is that "the product works" but not using Bolt is "CEO who complains".

Comes off as whiny. Checked out their website, Stripe just seems like a better product.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#259

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dang wrote: post #184

His claims about HN are false. Short version: his post was 2+ hours later than Stripe's, not an hour earlier, and fell in rank because users flagged it, not because moderators did anything (which I suppose is what his mafia/mob language was intended to imply). The longer version is going to involve a tedious barrage of links, but I want this to be something that people can check for themselves if they care to. Quotin…

Would add Bolt's unique fundraising strategy to the equation. They raised at $500mm post in July 2020, $850mm that December, $4.8bn in September 2021 and $11bn just now. If WeWork was the smoke signal for an overhyped pre-pandemic IPO market and Clover Health for SPACs, Bolt Financial is the post child for the runaway valuations of 2021. Blaming Stripe for its fundraising difficulties is absurd.
Post reply on HN