When I saw the title, I thought it is the video game Braid[1]. I really want the Anniversary Edition. [1]: http://braid-game.com
Imo, it's the best game ever made. It's the Rembrandt of games.
Braid is dead, long live Braid
21–30 of 99 posts
Re: Braid is dead, long live Braid
#22Well written, I guess the key takeaway for me was to be a little wary about being dependent on building businesses on partnerships, there are few .. I have personally seen some business teams in incumbent partners using small startups for their pumping their own metrics and once their motto is over they can pull the plug.
Re: Braid is dead, long live Braid
#23> Initially, we thought leveraging third-party software would help us move faster and focus on our core offering.
> What we found, instead, was every additional partner had the potential to break big, important parts of our stack.
Sounds like a, literally, very expensive lesson to learn
And the other side of this is also worrying, I wouldn't put it past Braid being one of the biggest customers of this 3rd party, (unless it's a big one like AWS) and then you shoot yourself in the foot with a non-planned deprecation making your customers migrate.
Re: Braid is dead, long live Braid
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ve had good experience using Stripe with extremely aggressive Stripe Radar settings, and using a manual review queue to avoid false positives. We also don’t enable payment methods that automatically accept disputes (e.g. SEPA Direct Debit).
Stripe is who I'm playing with now, but I just do not like having to include their JS library on every page just to use their fraud detection.
The signals they get from you including that library are a big part of what makes the fraud detection effective
Re: Braid is dead, long live Braid
#25> Every dollar a startup can raise is a gift. For a time I lost sight of this, and I won’t make that mistake again.
This seems like too general of advice. If you are profitable without raising, that in itself is a gift. Why take on debt if you don't need to? This might apply to fast-growth ventures that need to outpace competition to have a chance at existing, but not every company is structured like this or is in a market that requires this.
> A regulatory rug pull can and will outstrip any early traction or compliance gold stars that you think might save you.
Interestingly, this reminds me of all the apps built off Facebook's APIs in the early days. They would regularly remove one feature that was catastrophic. It's difficult to base your existence on some whale's whims, but in some ways often inevtiable too.
> A critical third-party informed us that they’d changed their mind on a key technical decision.
I'm so curious who. I got sick of dealing with Plaid's ceaseless API changes and ended up writing my own scraper for Wells Fargo transactions. I doubt they were using Plaid though XD.
Overall a really interesting writeup and I'm thankful to the author for sharing.
Re: Braid is dead, long live Braid
#26I can some what sympathize with part of what it sounds like here getting crushed by people committing credit card fraud. I had a small little company online in the early day's of the interweb's online payments. We had a very niche retail site, and for a few months we were increasing sales month-to-month. We'd get sales, the merchant company would approve them, and we'd ship out the product. Right up until the point w…
If only there were some good and fast internet payment mechanism without middlemen or gatekeepers, where the person getting paid could be immediately 100% sure that they were in possession of the money. Maybe someone will invent it one day.
I assume you're implying some kind of cryptocurrency, but it's impractical to use those without middlemen and you forgot to say "without huge fees".
Also instant 100% certainty is a bit too much in the face of fraud.
Re: Braid is dead, long live Braid
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only there were some good and fast internet payment mechanism without middlemen or gatekeepers, where the person getting paid could be immediately 100% sure that they were in possession of the money. Maybe someone will invent it one day.
I assume you're implying some kind of cryptocurrency, but it's impractical to use those without middlemen and you forgot to say "without huge fees". Also instant 100% certainty is a bit too much in the face of fraud.
> but it's impractical to use those without middlemen and you forgot to say "without huge fees".
It seems your information is quite a bit out of date. These hasn’t been true for a long time.
Re: Braid is dead, long live Braid
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume you're implying some kind of cryptocurrency, but it's impractical to use those without middlemen and you forgot to say "without huge fees". Also instant 100% certainty is a bit too much in the face of fraud.
> but it's impractical to use those without middlemen and you forgot to say "without huge fees". It seems your information is quite a bit out of date. These hasn’t been true for a long time.
I didn't say that the huge fees are unavoidable, but they're the norm.
And okay, tell me about how I get some cryptocurrency in a practical way without big middlemen.
Re: Braid is dead, long live Braid
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only there were some good and fast internet payment mechanism without middlemen or gatekeepers, where the person getting paid could be immediately 100% sure that they were in possession of the money. Maybe someone will invent it one day.
In the Netherlands we have such a system called iDEAL. People use the app/site from their own bank to authorize the payment and the money arrives on the receiver's bank account instantly and irrevocably (without a judge stepping in). It's also very cheap (like 25 cents fixed). Merchant fraud doesn't appear to be a big problem. Probably because the merchant requires a Dutch bank account, which requires a lot of identi…
I’m not knocking it for Dutch people, but the internet needs a trustworthy global payments system that works for more than the 20 million in .nl.
It also sucks that you have to provide strong identity to the payer or payee, sending or receiving payments should not require disclosing identity. That’s a bug, not a feature.
Re: Braid is dead, long live Braid
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but it's impractical to use those without middlemen and you forgot to say "without huge fees". It seems your information is quite a bit out of date. These hasn’t been true for a long time.
I didn't say that the huge fees are unavoidable, but they're the norm. And okay, tell me about how I get some cryptocurrency in a practical way without big middlemen.
The lightning network works great, as does Ethereum.
The incumbents successfully lobbied to get easy on-ramps to this competing system regulated basically out of existence. It’s a tragic story.