How not to get acquired
blog.gittip.com
How not to get acquired
1–10 of 86 posts
Re: How not to get acquired
#2Could he use Stripe instead?
Re: How not to get acquired
#3Could he use Stripe instead?
That's who I switched to.
Re: How not to get acquired
#4Weird acquisition. FeeFighters didnt even build Samurai. And Samurai had nothing to do with Groupon grabbing em. It was some other thing they were building apparently.
We're (Fleapay.com) getting ready to integrate with Braintree. So far, they've been very helpful. Nice people.
Re: How not to get acquired
#5Weird acquisition. FeeFighters didnt even build Samurai. And Samurai had nothing to do with Groupon grabbing em. It was some other thing they were building apparently. We're (Fleapay.com) getting ready to integrate with Braintree. So far, they've been very helpful. Nice people.
What are you talking about? FeeFighters is a Samurai project. And Groupon bought them out.
Re: How not to get acquired
#6The lesson learned here isn't that FeeFighters fucked up their acquisition. It's that you should be especially wary building businesses that depend almost entirely on another startup.
Put another way, you should only use services that are pretty obviously going to stay around and aren't just a few years old with no solid track record.
A service may be perfect for your business to hook into, but is it really realistic to expect something like Samurai to stick around for 5-10 years?
EDIT: I would also say that yes, FeeFighters _did_ royally eff up the acquisition process in that they threw their customers under the bus. It lends credence to the idea that they probably had no customers to begin with.
Also, GroupOn is not the enemy here. They acquired technology, talent, whatever. It's in their best interest to negotiate terms that are favorable to GroupOn. If FeeFighters didn't go to bat for their current customers, why would GroupOn volunteer to take on that burden?
Re: How not to get acquired
#7Weird acquisition. FeeFighters didnt even build Samurai. And Samurai had nothing to do with Groupon grabbing em. It was some other thing they were building apparently. We're (Fleapay.com) getting ready to integrate with Braintree. So far, they've been very helpful. Nice people.
What are you talking about? FeeFighters is a Samurai project. And Groupon bought them out.
FeeFighters didn't build Samurai. As I understand it, they acquired the team/project who did.
Re: How not to get acquired
#8The lesson learned here isn't that FeeFighters fucked up their acquisition. It's that you should be especially wary building businesses that depend almost entirely on another startup. Put another way, you should only use services that are pretty obviously going to stay around and aren't just a few years old with no solid track record. A service may be perfect for your business to hook into, but is it really realistic…
Yeah, no kidding. I ended up with a merchant account with fusty old FirstData out of the ordeal. I look at FirstData and their portal, www.mymerchantoffice.com, in a whole new light now. It may suck, but I can expect it to suck consistently for years to come.
It also feels now like I should be vaulting cards with multiple vendors to avoid a single point of failure. As mentioned I went with Stripe, who are similarly green. I'm in the process of moving my merchant account over to Braintree. Also looking at WePay and Dwolla. Who else?
Re: How not to get acquired
#9I just discovered that FeeFighters got acquired due to this post. I'm so disappointed. This product does not belong at Groupon.
We've been emailing Sean recently to ask him about Samurai and I guess this explains the no response. I really loved what he was doing and sung the FeeFighters praises from the mountaintops whenever I could. I really wish that product had stuck around. All the info that they were producing on their blog was really just gold for businesses. The education they were giving on interchange plus pricing, etc, was really important (but I guess becoming less important now that places like Stripe are hiding all those complications behind their simple pricing).
Re: How not to get acquired
#10The lesson learned here isn't that FeeFighters fucked up their acquisition. It's that you should be especially wary building businesses that depend almost entirely on another startup. Put another way, you should only use services that are pretty obviously going to stay around and aren't just a few years old with no solid track record. A service may be perfect for your business to hook into, but is it really realistic…
I experienced great customer service from FeeFighters prior to the acquisition, so in my experience it's not true that "FeeFighters didn't go to bat for their current customers."
The "enemy" to my mind is the chaos that results from not being transparent and kind.