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Venmo Five Years Ago
- kloncks 11y agoIn summary- it’s so awesome to see how they went from scrappy to a must-have product that does around $700mm in annual transactions. Where is this from? Venmo should be doing much higher than this figure.
- mnewberg 11y agoMy bad... fixed now. That was from a slate article last year. They are doing much more than that on a quarterly basis.
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- josephpmay 11y agoFor those who are older, Venmo is used today probably more than cash by college students (for things like paying a friend back, paying membership dues, paying to get into a party, etc.)
- bigdubs 11y agovenmo is used more than cash by my late 20 and early 30 friends as well.
- dplgk 11y agoWhat are the 30's people using it for?
- imjared 11y agoI bought concert tickets and a friend paid me for one of them. I need help moving and my friend let me use her zipcar membership. I venmo'd her money for the cost of the van. A few friends and I wanted to send flowers to a friend who had a baby. One person bought them and charged us each the split amount. etc.
- harryh 11y agoI am 37. My last couple venmo transactions: Paying off a bet about who would become CEO of twitter Paying someone for my portion of a bar tab. Fantasy Football league dues Receiving money from someone for their portion of a bar tab Paying someone for movie tickets
- stevesearer 11y agoI use it for just about everything I would have previously had to write a check to an individual for. Most of the time this ends up being some form of paying someone back for my portion of a split bill or if they purchased something on my behalf. Even though I have had paypal for years, most people cringe when someone doesn't yet have Venmo and offers to send via paypal.
- yvesmh 11y agoSome people use it to meet minimum spends for credit card sign-up bonuses.
- nommm-nommm 11y agoI'm in my 30s. Today is the first day I've ever heard of Venmo. I think the reason why I never heard of it is cause of the way my friends and I handle money. One person will grab drinks one day and the next time the next person picks up lunch. If someone buys a pizza everyone just gives them whatever bill from their pocket. None of us really "keep track" in specific dollar figures. Nobody says "this is only $5, you owe me $6." Of course this kind of thing doesn't work out for every group.
- RankingMember 11y agoI'm weird but I feel like cash is superior for those applications and doesn't require me to hand my credit card number out to yet another company.
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- untog 11y agoBut it does require you to walk to the nearest ATM, withdraw the nearest round amount to the amount you need, then somehow try to get change from your friend (or just call it even) then walk around with the remainder. I get what you're saying, but it isn't difficult to see why people find Venom a better option. What is exactly that bad about Venmo having your credit card number? You're protected from fraud anyway.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoWrite check, friend deposits with mobile check deposit app. Everyone has a bank of some sort, I have yet to meet anyone who is using Venmo.
- HaloZero 11y agoYou then have to write out a check to the right person, the amount, the other person has to sign it and then take two pictures. Venmo just reduces all of that to. Send $10 to X
- toomuchtodo 11y agoPerfect example of the HN bubble.
- mojowo11 11y ago
- kedean 11y agoDepending on where you live, at least. In my section of the midwest, I've never met someone who uses Venmo for anything.
- Keats 11y agoSo is it useful in countries with good banking systems? In the UK transactions are pretty much instantaneous and only require account number/sort code. I had never heard of it until I saw that post
- paxtonab 11y agoI'm really surprised that Venmo started as an SMS service, not a mobile app. It blows me away that the product has been around for that long and evolved to the point that it's at now. Funnily enough this is also how Shazam started. I think it really speaks to the execution aspect of a startup - be good at doing 1 thing, create a committed user base and then scale. According to the article Venmo's target audience was originally college kids who didn't have cash on hand to pay food trucks... Now they're doing $700mm in transactions.
- mlrtime 11y agoIt is spreading like a virus (in a good way) in corporate as well. We use it to pay each other for lunch. I now use it to pay my cleaning lady.... I'm glad to support something that isn't paypal. Hopefully Venmo stays small and lean.
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- pkamb 11y ago> It was riding the twitter wave in letting you interact with handles (usernames) over SMS. I'm curious, were any of these SMS service comparies successful as interactive SMS services? It seems like most of the services like Twitter, Venmo, etc. "started" as SMS services but quickly moved to apps once the iPhone appeared. And only then did they blow up. But maybe I'm wrong about that. What does Twitter/Venmo non-notification SMS usage look like today? Are there any big/popular interactive services today that are mainly accessed by SMS?
- roymurdock 11y agoNot really big/popular but GoButler seems to be an interactive personal assistant "app" through SMS: http://www.gobutlernow.com/ http://www.gobutlernow.com/
- dublinben 11y agoM-Pesa moved over a billion dollars by SMS in 2014.
- daxelrod 11y agoMagic made a huge splash on HN when it debuted, not sure about its current popularity. https://getmagicnow.com/ https://getmagicnow.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819
- habosa 11y agoVenmo was started by UPenn alums so it was popular among my friends long before it was a phenomenon (one of my good friends interned there and wrote the BlackBerry app). I used to use it exclusively by SMS starting around 2011. It used to be smart enough where I could text in "Pay John $5 for food" and it would figure out which John I meant and do it. I loved that. It's been amazing to watch Venmo grow to what it is now. If I could only keep three apps on my smartphone, I would choose Uber/Lyft, Venmo, and Google Maps. I can't navigate my life without all three of those. In my last year of college my Venmo year in review showed that I had spent $17k on Venmo and received $18k. So not a huge net, just a constant movement of money in and out among my friends (rent, food, parties, etc). If I had to use cash we would have never been able to make the small things work, and if I had to use PayPal I would have accrued $100s to $1000s in fees. So basically: thank you Venmo. You make my life measurably simpler.
- habosa 11y agoQuestion: does anyone know how/if Venmo makes money or is it just a loss-leader for Braintree/PayPal? I use it for thousands of dollars of transactions a year but I have never paid a penny in fees or seen an ad. People claim that Venmo acts as a bank and invests my carried balance but I can't imagine that's lucrative enough to pay all the bills.
- stevesearer 11y agoThey also charge a 3% fee on money sent using a credit card. Many of my friends just have a balance sitting in their Venmo account because they use it so often to pay for things from rent to groceries to splitting a bill at a restaurant. No idea of the metrics of how much can be made from the interest on those balances though.
- ennuihenry 11y agoThey don't make the 3%, probably like a 1% spread after interchange fees. But they have a huge team, lots of software developers. So they most likely don't make a profit.
- b1naryth1ef 11y agoThey don't.
- ahstilde 11y agoVenmo, I believe, invests the money it holds. This is why it takes 3 days to cash out.
- habosa 11y agoI tend to get cashouts in 24h now.
- sushid 11y agoI believe they had a series of ads on NYC subway stations a year or two ago. Not sure if they've done anything since.
- superuser2 11y agoVenmo is an objectively worse experience to Square Cash in every way. Bank accounts rather than debit cards, difficult Facebook-linked discovery, stupid social networking integration, obtuse UI. Square Cash is beautiful, elegant, and effortless. I encourage my friends to use it over Venmo whenever I can. Unfortunately, Venmo is wildly more popular among people I know.
- mojowo11 11y agoVenmo is not "objectively worse in every way." Example #1A: It's absolutely insane for Square to have an app targeted toward sending money to friends, splitting bills, etc. that doesn't have a built-in calculator. It's inexcusable that if I'm paying two even shares of a $213.42 bill split between seven people, I need to either do some mental math or leave the app to use another calculator. This is one of the most common actions I take in Venmo. Until they get their act together on that, there's just no way I'm switching. It's a classic example of thinking that simplicity is the same thing as removing features.
- scragg 11y agoSquare Cash definitely has acute UI. ;)
- siong1987 11y agoYes, Square Cash is beautiful but I don't agree with you that the app is elegant and effortless. 3 annoying parts about the app: - lack of built-in calculator, the Venmo's bulit-in calculator makes it really easy to calculate the split between friends. - constant prompt for security code in order to pay someone. - expired requests, there should be a way for me to see all the requests instead of going to each friend page to see the request.
- jvm 11y ago> there should be a way for me to see all the requests In my (Android) version of the app this is what happens if you click the button in the upper right hand corner.
- 11y ago
- moron4hire 11y agoThey were the darling startup of Philadelphia for a while. Proof that Philly could compete and grow successful technology companies. Our hackerspace used them to manage membership dues because PayPal was such a pain in the ass, and we really liked supporting a local business. One of our members was supposedly good friends with one of the founders, got us setup as a non-profit with them so we didn't have to pay transaction fees. A lot of us started using Venmo to share lunch costs both in the space and with our coworkers back at our jobs. I even convinced my landlord to start taking payment through Venmo; he loved it. I remember hearing Venmo talk in one of the local tech press blogs about how much they loved Philly and were never going to move. Then literally a month later they had moved to NYC. And then they conveniently "forgot" about our non-profit status, but didn't email anyone about it, and didn't report on the transaction fees in the same data stream as the rest of the app. I was treasurer at the time, and couldn't figure out why my spreadsheet balance tracking all of our accounts didn't match Venmo's balance. I had to do a special data export to find the transaction fees. And that data export was just to a CSV file, one that didn't quote fields with commas or escape newline characters correctly. I seem to remember the export wasn't even on the account page, you had to go find it under some obscure settings page. I quit using them after that, and haven't looked back. When you're a non-profit, community-owned-and-operated hackerspace (as opposed to a for-profit fab-lab like TechShop), it's really hard to get people to pay their dues on time (or at all). Literally all we needed was money for rent and internet, the management was rotating volunteer basis, nobody got paid. Any amount of money that is expected and doesn't come through is a huge hit to the bottom line.
- XaspR8d 11y agoI've yet to see a payment app reach any major usage in my social network, which is extremely fragmented among Google Wallet, Snapcash, PayPal, Square Cash, Popmoney, Simple, bank-specific apps i.e. Chase Mobile... (Weirdly enough I don't know anyone using Venmo, though I'm familiar with it from HN and the like.) It seems like everyone wants a simple payment app, but there's a huge 'sign-up fatigue' from the fragmentation, and no single app has reached a useful saturation. I wish I were seeing the "viral spread" others see and don't really even care much about feature parity. :\
- avn2109 11y agoThat's odd. Literally 95% of my friends are on Venmo, with the only holdouts being the people who refuse to grant account withdrawal permissions to a third party.
- cauthon 11y agoI don't like the "bucket" approach or Venmo's emphasis on linking to Facebook, so I don't have an account and use Square Cash or BofA transfers instead. I'm the exception though, I'd agree that the vast majority of my friends use it.
- aakilfernandes 11y agoThat was me up until a few months ago. A combination of a good track record and not wanting to be "that guy" caused me to switch. Don't make me regret it Venmo!
- aidenn0 11y agoMaybe it's because of age, but I don't know of any of my friends using any of those.
- vocatus_gate 11y agoI always dream of the day bitcoin will reach the point where it's widely used. It's literally the perfect solution for scenarios like this, but like everything else is heavily dependent on the network effect for success.
- silveira 11y agoVenmo is one of my favorite services. A very simple and effective UI. I have been using it extensively since 2011 with a group of friends, and it's amazing how easy it make to split restaurant bills or any other kind of expense. I just wish more people were using it.
- sksksk 11y agoSomething I find interesting about Venmo, Square cash etc... is how they target shortcomings in the US Banking system. In the UK, pretty much anyone with a bank account can go to their bank's website and transfer money to any other bank account in the UK instantly, and for free. Every bank has their own interface, some better than others, but it works well enough that I don't think Venmo could ever take off here.
- boggie1688 11y agoI'm so surprised that Venmo has not been acquired. You think someone like Paypal, Android Pay, or Apply Pay would buy them.
- josephpmay 11y agoVenmo is owned by Paypal