11–20 of 27 posts
I'm still waiting on support for outside the US & it would be nice for them to support transactions & become a full-fledged paypal competitor, but with leadership thinking things through this well, I'm really hopefully we'll finallY have another alternative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
stay tuned...
... for support outside the US! =) I kid, I kid! Much love from someone whose spent 10 years now dealing with banks and the credit card companies.
Not many consumers (besides people collecting donations) need international, and very few merchants would be happy without it.
It's been made clear to us that this is a pretty big opportunity.
I posted this as a comment on the blog, but it kind of disappeared... so whatever. I mentioned that sometimes the 800 pound gorilla isn't as slow or bureaucratic as you would think. With PostageApp, we have several large competitors (SendGrid and MailChimp) and they are frighteningly good at pivoting and offering new and exciting features. I'm having a really fun time watching the developments of all the players in o…
I counted 18 people on the "team" page of SendGrid, and MailChimp's website lists them as having about 70 people working for them. I haven't been able to find exact numbers of employees at PayPal, but I know it's easily into the thousands, and very possibly into the tens of thousands.
I think you have a good point: that relying on being able to move faster than your competitors can be dangerous if your competitors aren't actually slow. I don't think you can really make an accurate comparison between SendGrid/MailChimp and PayPal though. The scale (and culture) is just completely different.
It's also not easy for big companies to change course, add features, iterate, or experiment. PayPal can't simply decide to shift its focus toward consumers, nor would they want to. This reminds me of an outstanding article I read some time ago which advised: "Attack your competitors' strengths , not their weaknesses." In other words, WePay might have failed if their goal was (for example) just to provide better custo…
It's also not easy for big companies to change course, add features, iterate, or experiment. PayPal can't simply decide to shift its focus toward consumers, nor would they want to. This reminds me of an outstanding article I read some time ago which advised: "Attack your competitors' strengths , not their weaknesses." In other words, WePay might have failed if their goal was (for example) just to provide better custo…
I'm incredibly intrigued by the advice from that article, I'd love to read it. Do you remember where it's from?
You can obviously frame "lack of privacy" as a weakness of Google, but the important part is that it's a weakness that can't be addressed without huge changes to work around their established strengths.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
... for support outside the US! =) I kid, I kid! Much love from someone whose spent 10 years now dealing with banks and the credit card companies.
the two requirements are pretty related. Not many consumers (besides people collecting donations) need international, and very few merchants would be happy without it. It's been made clear to us that this is a pretty big opportunity.
Great description of when they realized how valuable the comparison with PayPal could be: "The first time we actively embraced the PayPal comparison was when PayPal froze the account of the Flux foundation – a non-profit arts organization – just a few days before the Flux Crew headed to the desert to build their famous Temple at Burning Man. The Flux Foundation and a bunch of other people and organizations collecting…
It seems like every other week on Reddit there is someone who says they have disease X or is raising money for disease X and would you please PayPal them some money. This is immediately followed by a bunch of people digging internet dirt on that person and declaring them a fraud, which is then immediately followed by another group of people telling the first group that the person is legit and that they made them cry.
I don't even know how you start to deal with that situation as a financial entity. Do you call the person up and ask them if they have cancer? Do they fax you medical records?