Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Brex (YC W17) – Corporate Credit Card for Startups

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 128 posts

Re: Launch HN: Brex (YC W17) – Corporate Credit Card for Startups

#91

Post by kenneth »

cperciva wrote: post #50
hdubugras wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 - Today with Brex if you signup and have Brex be your primary card you get: $5k of AWS, $105 in Doordash and $105 on Instacart. Although we're building a new rewards program that will launch later this year, would love to hear your thoughts on what a great rewards program looks like for you. 2 - Interesting thought on the payment! Will investigate it. On the AML/KYC by regulation we can't rely on another party, we…

we're building a new rewards program that will launch later this year, would love to hear your thoughts on what a great rewards program looks like for you. Honestly, dollars are fungible. For less sophisticated customers, points which can be redeemed specifically for travel are attractive because people anticipate getting better deals than they end up with; but I'd be disappointed if that works well for the audience…

I disagree. I have no interest in fungible dollars when the alternative is miles which can be used to get outsized return on experiences.

I have plenty of ways of making money, and trying to optimize for a %age of cash back is not particularly interesting.

Miles and points on the other hand can be used to get experiences that would otherwise be completely out of question due to their price. It adds something meaningful to my life.

Flying to Australia in first class on Emirates is more memorable than making $1,500 of cash-back.

Re: Launch HN: Brex (YC W17) – Corporate Credit Card for Startups

#92

Post by Theodores »

I liked your story and would like to help you with the signup flow, however I live outside the US so I thought I would just run your homepage through Google DevTools Lighthouse Audit for you.

Seems that you have a few easy wins to get your site up to scratch. Compress the images, add a basic progressive web app to impress Googlebot and put in a few of the other minor fixes (e.g. 'uses document.write()') and you should be there with an accessible site that ranks well.

Google's mod_pagespeed will fix the images for you and tidy up the downloads, mushing the scripts together to reduce the js startup time. I think you can also get rid of the polyfills for older browsers.

Maximal accessibility isn't about making the site for blind people it is about making the site work for those that have high data rates and poor 3G connections. However, the ethos of accessibility is on-brand for your product.

I audit everything these days and you are not doing badly compared to a lot that I see. Always room for improvement and premature optimisation is the root of all evil, hence my suggestion of just letting mod_pagespeed do it for you.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/

Re: Launch HN: Brex (YC W17) – Corporate Credit Card for Startups

#94

Post by wenbo »

hdubugras wrote: post #85
wenbo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

was there any particular reason your team went with finicity? You might want to give https://plaid.com a shot. I am not affiliated with Plaid.

We tried - finicity serves intuit so it works better for business/corporate accounts. Plaid is better for consumers.

got it, thanks for replying! Best of luck with Brex!

Re: Launch HN: Brex (YC W17) – Corporate Credit Card for Startups

#96

Post by Spooky23 »

danielvinson wrote: post #42
hdubugras wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's technically a Charge Card, which is a type of credit card that doesn't allow you to keep a balance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_card

How is that better than a debit card?

You’re playing with the banks money, so you have reduced risk exposure.

Debit cards are always dumb. Think of it this way... if some skel gets ahold of your card and has a party, you’re stuck in a world of bureaucracy and problems. In my case, a stolen card or number on the 29th of the month means that my mortgage, car, possibly insurance, as well as one or more credit cards with automatic payment will be rejected for insufficient funds. I have a problem.

If somebody steals my Amex or compromises the number, Amex has a problem. I call customer service and wish them well.

Re: Launch HN: Brex (YC W17) – Corporate Credit Card for Startups

#97

Post by tixocloud »

For most matters, trust is less of an issue but for finances and banking details, it’s an incredibly important aspect of doing business.

I work in analytics/data science at a bank. We’ve been doing lots of great research on fintechs and entrepreneurs.

Re: fintech - Trust comes up a lot so anything you can do (i.e. partnerships, social proof, etc) would go some way. Customers use us as their main account but regularly funnel money to startup banks. However, they’ve mentioned they would never really put large amounts of money with startup banks and are happy to continue with their current setup.

Re: Launch HN: Brex (YC W17) – Corporate Credit Card for Startups

#98

Post by asah »

hdubugras wrote: post #87
bg0 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming it is $5k for the first year? Do these credits expire?

Yes - for the first year

This conflicts with the $20-30k available from most accelerators/incubators/VCs,c which also need to be there first credits.

Re: Launch HN: Brex (YC W17) – Corporate Credit Card for Startups

#99

Post by adamfisk »

hdubugras wrote: post #26
dhirenb wrote: post #20

Love the clean sign up and landing page without endless jargon. Good job! It would be great if you could clarify what the rewards actually are (especially since they are highlighted quite a bit). eg: Are the rewards on AWS double/triple points on your spend? Or do Brex members received some amount of free compute credit?

Also - we're building a new rewards program and would love to know your thoughts on what a great rewards program would look like for you.

For us it’s hard to conceptually free ourselves from our existing points system with Chase. We spend about $125k/month on our card and get something like 1% in points back. So we blow past the $5k AWS thing (which I agree is a cool concept) in about half a month!

I’d encourage you guys to try to keep innovating on the rewards side though (like you are with the current rewards). It seems like one trick is that it has to scale to businesses like ours that are still smallish but have significant spend.

Post reply on HN