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These are great lessons from an engineering perspective. From a product perspective, I've learned 3 hard lessons: 1. Fraudsters will find your product and abus
by umeshunni 3y ago
These are great lessons from an engineering perspective. From a product perspective, I've learned 3 hard lessons:
1. Fraudsters will find your product and abuse it before real users do. If you see a sudden spike in usage, it's probably fraud.
2. Real users are very emotional when it comes to their money, even if it's a "low volume transaction" like $20. Anything you build that introduces friction between them and their money will get your support team yelled at.
3. Regulators and banks are suspicious of you, for lessons they have learned from 100+ years of balancing lessons 1 & 2 above.
Balancing 1, 2 & 3 is an art and the difference between building a successful product and failure.
All the cute UI and funnel analysis you do breaks when it hits fraud, user emotions and regulation.
- user_7832 3y agoI'm curious, would you say using a third party to handle payments (stripe/paypal/shopify etc) would help avoid some of these issues? I'm not sure I understand point 2, especially if there's a "regular" checkout page by one of these companies.
- PeterisP 3y agoIt would help avoid these issues, but if you're a payments startup then you probably want to actually keep some control over your core business instead of just being a reseller intermediary for an actual payments company which holds your customer's money, has all the leverage over what features and policies "your" product will have and gets most of the profit.
- monknomo 3y agoIn some ways it makes it worse, because your users will not understand that you aren't screwing up their transaction, it's Paypal. They'll just yell at you