When/how does mint charge $2.99 a month? I've never paid anything.
Sorry to be unclear: it's IHasAMoney.com that charges you $2.99 a month. Mint charges advertisers who-knows-what for your financial data.
How not to get acquired
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: How not to get acquired
#72The 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 g…
So true! First Data is the grandpa in the room. Their site doesnt render properly on Chrome even :(
Re: How not to get acquired
#73Re: How not to get acquired
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is really uncool how quickly other startups are to snipe at each other. You abandoned your paying B2B clients, and left them holding the ball with annoyed customers and damaged cash flow. Isn't it unfair then to complain that they are badmouthing you? Out of professionalism (if not contractual obligation), this situation should have been better handled. Finance is all about trust in questions such as: will they…
Reminds me when a bunch of Minnesota nurses walked-out on their patients in protest of conflict with their union negotiations claiming "We're doing this for our patients, because we are understaffed and the hospitals need to staff more but are unwilling." Complete BS. You care soooo much about your patients (customers) that you walk out on them... not cool [and highly hypocritical].
This is nothing of the sort.
I would feel genuine sympathy for FeeFighters if they were shutting down their program because it didn't pay well---bankruptcy, and the need to feed your family are reasonable obstructions to delivering an orderly shut down.
However that's not the case. They got acquired, and on the eve of their pay day they decide to begin ignoring the very customers responsible for their valuation.
Re: How not to get acquired
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a great experience with Sean and FeeFighters before they were acquired. I can understand being in a crowded market and eyeing the exit. It could certainly be handled more gracefully. GroupOn should either support the product, or at the very least support people trying to migrate their data away. That's the really frustrating part of this. I lucked out to have this come to a head early on, with only 25 cards vau…
> I lucked out to have this come to a head early on, with only 25 cards vaulted. If you have 250 or 2,500 ... :-( I'm stuck with a merchant account provider I detest, that's raised my rates just about every month for 3 years, because there's no way to get my customers' info back out of the payment gateway. It's either keep wasting money on rates nowhere near what I initially agreed to, with lousy support, or lose eve…
Transfer away as many customers as you can.
To those who don't respond the first time, give them an offer for an X% discount for loyalty or something of the such. When they try to take advantage of it, then ask them to give you billing information once again.
You should hit 99.9% with that, and either take a loss on the custoemrs left over or more likely keep the legacy customers alive for years on to come.
Re: How not to get acquired
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it'll be a horrifically bad XML API for years and years :)
You should try WorldPay if your looking for shit but consistent. WorldPay will be around for ever, as will their dog-rough "web service" written by someone who hates the web and where verification tokens are optional. Checkout this FAB API http://www.worldpay.com/support/kb/bg/recurringpayments/rpfp...
That's not really much worse than Authorize.net.
Don't get me wrong. I hate Authorize.net and don't plan on using them for anything in the future. I'd rather refactor code than write comma separated string code once knowing it will work forever.
Re: How not to get acquired
#77Hello everyone -- this has been an interesting and painful conversation to watch. I am Sean, co-founder of FeeFighters. Integrating the acquisition of a small company into a large company is hard. I suspect there are very few acquisitions where customers do not experience at least some pain. I am deeply sorry for customers who have had support tickets get dropped or experienced slow responses during this period of in…
I have tried contacting you guys at least 10 times (emails to help, support, sean, sheel and left VM at the 855 #) during hte last 2 months after completing my merchant account process for Samurai. I have NEVER received an email back, even a courtesy note saying "due to the Groupon acquisition, we are not processing new accounts" or "we have received your email, can we reply back on ". I guess the bottomline is when…
I was in the exact same situation, unfortunately. Had everything built out, with a final nagging notFound error. No response for two weeks, tried twitter, email, phone - nothing. Eventually I learned of their acquisition issues when Sean responded to a post I made here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101870. If customer service comes down to responding to angry HN submissions, something is seriously wrong. At the VERY LEAST turn on an auto reply for support requests that explains the situation.
Anyway, best of luck.
Re: How not to get acquired
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alas, I cannot although I wish I could. I was not interested in working for a big company post-acquisition...hence the name "startup stella." I do hope the guys respond as we always respected the HN community and depended on it greatly. Whatever happened, hopefully the situation can be rectified.
Thanks for weighing in, Stella. I've just heard from Sheel via email with an apology, and now I've just gotten off the phone with Sean. He apologized for the support requests that have been dropped during the transition to GroupOn. At his request, I've removed the "Reflection" part of my piece, which admittedly engaged in unfounded speculation. I apologize. I'd also like to apologize to Sean and the team for not tryi…
I'm with the side of people saying you shouldn't have to apologize. That's like saying you apologize for not finding Tim Cook's personal email when iCloud is down and they ignore your calls, support tickets, emails, inquires at the genius bar, posts on their support forum, etc.
It's THEIR responsibility as representatives (and owner) of THEIR company to make themselves available via the information THEY provided, on the site you signed up for THEIR services.
They deserve the zingy blogpost and don't deserve your apology.
This is bad business and frankly I would stay far away from them despite your newfound guilt.
Edit: Switched out Steve Jobs for Tim Cook and removed the 2nd repetitive analogy.
Re: How not to get acquired
#79Hello everyone -- this has been an interesting and painful conversation to watch. I am Sean, co-founder of FeeFighters. Integrating the acquisition of a small company into a large company is hard. I suspect there are very few acquisitions where customers do not experience at least some pain. I am deeply sorry for customers who have had support tickets get dropped or experienced slow responses during this period of in…
It's really uncool to blame your poor planning on other people. This is a business not a frat party you forgot to text somebody about. You're the owner of a company that is taking other peoples money for a service. You dont get to say "Sorry guys, I was moving". I mean, are you serious? That's your excuse. You could have easily delegated some time or had an employee handle support and offset your move dates in order to offer seamless support and not put peoples trust and their own customers relationships on the line. If i was your customer I would immediately jump ship.
Also: 3 weeks of no response is far from "quickly" becoming snipe. I could understand if that mans blog post was after 3 days, but 3 weeks? Come on. You guys fucked up.
Re: How not to get acquired
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alas, I cannot although I wish I could. I was not interested in working for a big company post-acquisition...hence the name "startup stella." I do hope the guys respond as we always respected the HN community and depended on it greatly. Whatever happened, hopefully the situation can be rectified.
Thanks for weighing in, Stella. I've just heard from Sheel via email with an apology, and now I've just gotten off the phone with Sean. He apologized for the support requests that have been dropped during the transition to GroupOn. At his request, I've removed the "Reflection" part of my piece, which admittedly engaged in unfounded speculation. I apologize. I'd also like to apologize to Sean and the team for not tryi…
My impression of Fee Fighters was pretty low before I read this, but after reading your apology I can't even begin to imagine how terrible this company must be.
It's one thing for them to disregard the utter failure of letting a billing service unattended and broken for three weeks, but another thing to contact their clients and force them into a public apology. The tone of your message ("I'd also like to apologize to Sean and the team for not trying harder to contact them personaly...") really makes it seem like you're being threatened here.