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Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

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Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#31
post #10

We’re Aditya and Karan, the co-founders of Warrant ( https://warrant.dev/ ). We build APIs and infrastructure to help developers implement authorization and access control in their apps. Implementing flexible authorization that grows with your application is difficult. Many products only need authentication early on but eventually require authorization; however, adding complex authorization to a mature, high usage pr…

While I think this is a cool idea, the thought of hitting the network via an API call at minimum once per request sounds ... less than ideal. That's a lot of latency add just to check authorization. And you go to all this effort to configure authorization in Warrant per-user and per-resource, why not just put it into your own tables?

Edit: and I just saw the pricing... 1k API calls a month? I'd quite literally hit that in minutes. :)

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#32
post #7

We are Anta and Karthik of Inai ( https://www.inai.io/ ), a platform for setting up and operating your payment stack. We let you offer local payment methods, support multiple business models (e-commerce, subscriptions , platforms) and localise the checkout experience by region of operation. Setting up and maintaining a payment stack, especially if you operate in multiple regions, takes months of developer time. Most…

Hi, very interesting segment of the market! How do you compare yourself to Spreedly? How would you compete with their offering? I think these solutions are really neat, but I wonder how you can handle some edge cases which I think are really difficult. For example, let's say I want to use credit cards with Adyen. Now after a year of this, I have a lot of customers with their credit cards connected to my business via…

Hi, Paul here - head of engineering at Primer.io. There are a lot of "payments orchestration" companies floating around, but we think of ourselves as an automation platform for payments - Similar to Zapier in many ways.

I previously worked for Braintree/PayPal where I worked closely with Spotify, Uber, Ticketmaster and many of PayPal's marquee merchants on their payments integrations and payments strategies. We think about these things in terms of end-to-end payment flows.

You're outlining a scenario in which another PSP may give you better pricing at some point down the line. So typically, you'd rip out the Adyen integration and then go about integrating Stripe.. and you'd also need to request that Adyen migrate raw payment information over to Stripe, and hope they'd pass along all the respective network transaction information as well as any 3DS/SCA data that has been stored to ensure you don't see a drop in auth rates, or need to re-authenticate with 3DS or request CVV information on subsequent payments (lots of friction, lots of drop-off).

And that's just for cards. Apple Pay and other mobile wallets now enable vaulting, as well as other payment methods such as PayPal, Klarna, etc.

So you see that the issue here is bad separation of concerns for engineers. You should have custody of your payment method data, and be able to decide when and where to process payments (or indeed, pass payments data to other, independent downstream services). With Primer, we've decoupled every single area of traditional payments acceptance, enabling you to connect any number of payments, and non payments specific services using drag-and-drop workflows.

In your case, you'd simply change this route on your workflow from Adyen to Stripe, and voila.. everything just works - even the checkout! You may decide to get more detailed than that. Over time, you'll discover some PSPs perform better than others, that you can improve conversion or reduce risk by introducing third-party fraud providers, that you can optimise for cost and reduce cross-border fees with more refined routing and conditions... the list is endless!

In that sense, we've designed something akin to a developer framework for payments. A unified way of integrating and reasoning about payments completely decoupled from any specific providers. There are tons, and tons of security, infrastructure, and payments specific considerations that need to be made when building an agnostic platform such as this and would be happy to take any questions you may have about it.

Not to cause a fuss, but the reason for my posting this here is inai "borrowed" their concept from us after they signed up for a Primer account under their previous business, and set about ripping off every part of our product from the website to the job board! (All since updated... partially.) It is what it is :/

But Primer is built by payments folks and engineers who have experienced first-hand the complexities of payments as companies scale, and I'd be super happy to answer any questions you might have on solving more complex use-cases.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#33

GamerPay ( https://gamerpay.gg/ ) is a scam-free marketplace for gaming skins and assets. 46% of gamers trading skins have been scammed more than once for either their money or their skins (survey of 5,000 gamers). 50% of gamers are under 18 and this their first online trading/cash experience. We solve this problem by integrating with Steam and making use of escrow, validating all trades. We are regulated by European…

changing currency doesn't seem to work for me, stuck in EUR.

Anyways, this is great. Between lootbear, csmoney, and steam marketplace, I think i like your model best since it translates directly to cold hard cash. However, last I seen this model in the wild, it got banned.. re: OPSkins. How are you circumventing that?

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#34
post #28
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its a service that acts as your roles table. So your service would query warrant with a user and an action and it would return whether that's authorized? I'm also a bit confused why someone wouldn't use something like Ory[0] at any scale where modularizing this out was important. [0] https://github.com/ory

That’s correct, Warrant would act as your authorization service, where you can store access rules for your system and check against them at runtime to protect access to your application. Roles are a common access control model, but you can model much more complex use-cases like fine-grained access control as well.

Sorry, w.r.t my second thought, how would this differ from something like Ory Keto[0] or Oath Keeper[1]?

[0] https://github.com/ory/keto

[1] https://github.com/ory/oathkeeper

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#35

Hello HN! We are Antonio, Felipe, Joaquin and Francois, founders of Chipax ( https://www.chipax.com/ ). We are helping SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) in Latin America handle their finances. Chipax is self-serve online software that works with real-time data collection from the IRS and banks. We all know how painful and time consuming it is to manage finances and keep payables and receivables up to date. So we are…

Congrats folks! With that much data you'll be able to build a great financial health profile of your customers. Are you planning to offer loans?

Viva Chipax!

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#36
post #34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s correct, Warrant would act as your authorization service, where you can store access rules for your system and check against them at runtime to protect access to your application. Roles are a common access control model, but you can model much more complex use-cases like fine-grained access control as well.

Sorry, w.r.t my second thought, how would this differ from something like Ory Keto[0] or Oath Keeper[1]? [0] https://github.com/ory/keto [1] https://github.com/ory/oathkeeper

Keto + Oathkeeper together seem to be similar to what Warrant provides. One of our main focuses is providing great developer experience. We're continuing to build out the tooling around this, so stay tuned!

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#37
post #19

We are building Titipku ( https://titipku.com/ ) which is "Instacart" for local markets in Indonesia, where we help households to buy daily groceries from nearby local markets in their residence areas. The Covid 19 has made people unable to buy their daily needs from local markets, meanwhile merchants in local markets are also suffering and need help to sell their goods. We solved this by helping to on board all merc…

This is amazing. I just forward it to my SO and we probably will try it. We've been shopping weekly at a supermarket groceries store, think like Giant, Hypermart, or Lulu Hypermarket. We realized even though the experience is fine, this is not ideal. There are million small merchants that rely on daily income to be able to feed their family, so my purchases could be significant for them.

Thank you, Karim. We are very happy for your support. Please give us some feedback. Let me know the name of your family or college so we contact them and monitor their order.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#38
post #10

We’re Aditya and Karan, the co-founders of Warrant ( https://warrant.dev/ ). We build APIs and infrastructure to help developers implement authorization and access control in their apps. Implementing flexible authorization that grows with your application is difficult. Many products only need authentication early on but eventually require authorization; however, adding complex authorization to a mature, high usage pr…

This is the right idea. Implementation is necessarily going to evolve, but this is the right problem to be solving and doing authz as a service is the right way to do it. I've hacked around on a related concept (different implementation, guided by UMA2, unique use cases, etc.) and it's one of those services that is just necessary and will adapt to SaaS well.

Will watch progress closely. Key business piece imo will be getting libraries and plugins out for enterprise development platforms, and possibly creating a private tenant concept. Can absolutely see why this was included in the batch.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#39

We are Ali and Omair of Abhi ( http://abhi.com.pk/ ). We are a financial wellness platform in Pakistan, focusing on providing early wage access to the salaried class. Most employees in Pakistan live paycheck to paycheck, not having savings for emergencies or random bills. Many pay their bills late, as payroll disbursement often does not coincide with bill cycles, incurring hefty payment fees. Fewer than 20% of the po…

congrats and best of luck! really happy to see pakistani startups getting in through yc.

Couple of questions:

Some amount of businesses in Pakistan are known to delay paying out wages too. Do you intend to deal with this problem?

It's hard to gather ground truth data in Pakistan. How did you go about gathering/verifying data?

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4

#40

Hi we're Nishant and Pranav of Nino Foods, which creates and operates cloud kitchen brands in India focused on the premium market. Food Delivery in India has an average order value (AOV) of 4$ vs the U.S which is >30$. This makes it hard to run a profitable food delivery business In India. Our brands target the customers in India that order food above 7$ - which accounts for 50% of industry revenues and a majority of…

Congrats on getting an actual business out of the ground!

A few comments :

- On your delivery website, the first step is to choose a city, but you operate just in mumbai, so I can just select mumbai. If you could remove this choice before you open in new cities, it will make the flow of ordering one step shorter. It will also allow you to better market your local brand as the wording could be : order a burger in mumbai, ....

- The pizza ordering page offer images of the items to order, the burger page does not. Is it a deliberate choice? When ordering food I generally don't choose from unknown shop with no picture (but it's maybe a cultural difference as I am not based in india).

- You are operating on top of platforms (Swiggy/Zoomato), that can decide to move into the black kitchen business. Your only edge against that seems to be your brand, what are you doing other black kitchen are not doing to ensure that your brand get strong enough?

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