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How not to get acquired
- tocomment 14y agoCould he use Stripe instead?
- whit537 14y agoThat's who I switched to.
- tocomment 14y agoSo problem solved? (BTW I liked your lightening talk at Pycon)
- whit537 14y agoWe'll find out tomorrow. :-) https://www.gittip.com/about/stats.html https://www.gittip.com/about/stats.html And thanks!
- tocomment 14y agoBy the way, I just thought of a killer feature for your site. How about if users can link the amount/frequeny tipped to the developer's activity on a github project? Maybe the user could set metrics to link the tips to like tests added, LOC removed (refactoring), issues resolved. Well just a thought.
- antidaily 14y agoWeird acquisition. FeeFighters didnt even build Samurai. And Samurai had nothing to do with Groupon grabbing em. It was some other thing they were building apparently. We're (Fleapay.com) getting ready to integrate with Braintree. So far, they've been very helpful. Nice people.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoWhat are you talking about? FeeFighters is a Samurai project. And Groupon bought them out.
- antidaily 14y agoFeeFighters didn't build Samurai. As I understand it, they acquired the team/project who did.
- vailripper 14y agoI believe it was a partnership between FeeFighters and Arizona Bay (one of their funders)
- mvkel 14y agoThe lesson learned here isn't that FeeFighters fucked up their acquisition. It's that you should be especially wary building businesses that depend almost entirely on another startup. Put another way, you should only use services that are pretty obviously going to stay around and aren't just a few years old with no solid track record. A service may be perfect for your business to hook into, but is it really realistic to expect something like Samurai to stick around for 5-10 years? EDIT: I would also say that yes, FeeFighters _did_ royally eff up the acquisition process in that they threw their customers under the bus. It lends credence to the idea that they probably had no customers to begin with. Also, GroupOn is not the enemy here. They acquired technology, talent, whatever. It's in their best interest to negotiate terms that are favorable to GroupOn. If FeeFighters didn't go to bat for their current customers, why would GroupOn volunteer to take on that burden?
- whit537 14y agoYeah, no kidding. I ended up with a merchant account with fusty old FirstData out of the ordeal. I look at FirstData and their portal, www.mymerchantoffice.com, in a whole new light now. It may suck, but I can expect it to suck consistently for years to come. It also feels now like I should be vaulting cards with multiple vendors to avoid a single point of failure. As mentioned I went with Stripe, who are similarly green. I'm in the process of moving my merchant account over to Braintree. Also looking at WePay and Dwolla. Who else?
- polyfractal 14y agoBraintree is pretty great, I like working with their API and customer service (always ready and willing to talk on the phone, which is great). Avoid Authorize.Net like the plague. Horrifically bad XML API that will make you want to claw your eyes out.
- jmathai 14y agoBut it'll be a horrifically bad XML API for years and years :)
- mhp 14y agoI just discovered that FeeFighters got acquired due to this post. I'm so disappointed. This product does not belong at Groupon. We've been emailing Sean recently to ask him about Samurai and I guess this explains the no response. I really loved what he was doing and sung the FeeFighters praises from the mountaintops whenever I could. I really wish that product had stuck around. All the info that they were producing on their blog was really just gold for businesses. The education they were giving on interchange plus pricing, etc, was really important (but I guess becoming less important now that places like Stripe are hiding all those complications behind their simple pricing).
- whit537 14y agoI had a great experience with Sean and FeeFighters before they were acquired. I can understand being in a crowded market and eyeing the exit. It could certainly be handled more gracefully. GroupOn should either support the product, or at the very least support people trying to migrate their data away. That's the really frustrating part of this. I lucked out to have this come to a head early on, with only 25 cards vaulted. If you have 250 or 2,500 ... :-(
- mhp 14y agoI can understand it too, and I'm not sure the VC they had behind them were the enlightened kind (like USV, Spark, Andreesen, etc.) so there may have been some pressure from that end as well. But Groupon? That just says acqui-hire to me, and that sucks because they had really built an awesome product that I've used multiple times for multiple companies. So, I'm with you on the GroupOn Fucker that ruined this. I hope Sean and the gang got handsomely rewarded for their years of work.
- dangrossman 14y ago> I lucked out to have this come to a head early on, with only 25 cards vaulted. If you have 250 or 2,500 ... :-( I'm stuck with a merchant account provider I detest, that's raised my rates just about every month for 3 years, because there's no way to get my customers' info back out of the payment gateway. It's either keep wasting money on rates nowhere near what I initially agreed to, with lousy support, or lose even more money by asking every customer to re-enter their billing info. Just a few percent deciding to ignore the mail and let their subscriptions lapse would be more costly than the fees. These days, in the US at least, there's affordable options for both payment info vaults that can connect to multiple gateways, or gateways offered by merchant companies that will give you your data if you decide to leave them. A few years ago, that wasn't really the case.
- 1123581321 14y agoI heard a FeeFighters employee speak last year and she recommended objectivism (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged) as a good philosophy for entrepreneurs, saying it worked for FeeFighters. When I heard they sold, I assumed that the deal was bad for FeeFighters customers because FeeFighters staff were so compassionless due to their philosophy. Unfortunately, it seems that I was right.
- whit537 14y ago:-( "I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.'" http://xkcd.com/1049/ http://xkcd.com/1049/
- dmix 14y agoI'm sure there are plenty of good ideas and lessons from reading the bible. Doesn't mean you have to live up to every word of it without common sense.
- WalterSear 14y agoI haven't seen any that weren't stolen from somewhere else and weren't no-brainers to begin with.
- entropy_ 14y ago"The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what every one, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr Johnson said, ‘People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.’ The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk." -- C.S Lewis "Mere Christianity"
- niketdesai 14y agoI appreciate the Author's attempt to empathize with the founders/team on the acquisition results. It's not an obligation for customers to consider anything beyond what they were promised and pay for - so kudos there. That said, the difference between the startup and big co. is so vast that there will never be a single person to be blamed for botched acquisitions. In fact, both parties are at fault - not for initiating the buy - but rather for the failure to commit so fully that an alternative outcome could have been had. In some circumstances it does make sense to shutter a project, but that doesn't mean a good plan to make that happen appropriately can't be had (I understate the complexity of making that happen). Additionally I'd like to note that within larger companies, both the appetite and passion for making acquisitions work is highly variable. And frankly, it requires a lot of broad effort to make it work which is why acquisitions are so hard to do well. Anyways I'm glad that gittip was able to find a replacement solution; these setbacks are only part of the process in building your own entrepreneurial endeavor.
- whit537 14y agoFair enough. In the previous blog post that I quoted, I was thinking in terms of fine-grained things: "A specific human is responsible for the way issues are cross-linked in GitHub. Another specific human is responsible for the slide-out transition on the Tumblr HTML theme editor." You're right that for something as complex as an acquisition, there's unlikely to be a single GroupOn Effer. To open up corporations is a much more nuanced task than simply identifying a scapegoat as part of crisis management. It was probably unhelpful to oversimplify about GroupOn Fucker. Sorry. :-(
- vailripper 14y agoI was in the process of integrating Samurai myself. Luckily, I hadn't yet launched and was able to switch over to Braintree. Thus far I've been really happy with Braintree. The part that I find really offensive is - they're still taking new account signups, with zero support for those users.
- seanharper 14y agoHello everyone -- this has been an interesting and painful conversation to watch. I am Sean, co-founder of FeeFighters. Integrating the acquisition of a small company into a large company is hard. I suspect there are very few acquisitions where customers do not experience at least some pain. I am deeply sorry for customers who have had support tickets get dropped or experienced slow responses during this period of integration. We are working to smooth things out. When we got bought, in addition to some personal stuff, like moving across the country (most of our team moved to Palo Alto, so we could all be together instead of distributed), we had to very quickly build additional functionality and scalability into our product to support the ambitious goals that Groupon has for our technology. Since we have been more focused on development and since Marc and Stella, who were doing a lot of our customer service, did not come along with the acquisition, our customer service has suffered. It is really uncool how quickly other startups are to snipe at each other. We started a business, pivoted, built something valuable, sold it at a profit, and are now in an amazing position to solve the customer problems we initially set out to solve. If that resulted in you having a bad customer experience, it is perfectly reasonable to complain about it, and we are listening and working to fix it. But (Fred from Fleapay) why would you insult us by saying that we didn't build our product (we did)? And what do you know about why Groupon bought us? And what does Ayn Rand have to do with this anyway? As always, if you are a customer and you want to talk, I am at sean@feefighters.
- snorkel 14y agoI have to wag my head at the lack of a having a smooth transition plan for customer support. The new Groupon overlords should've insisted on it, or at least supported it.
- jrs235 14y agoSounds like GroupOn might be able to compete with Digital River for crappiest customer experiences.
- mhp 14y agoI have to admit that after reading the post and not getting any responses to emails or phone calls, and seeing other people experiencing the same thing 3 months after acquisition, we assumed the worst. I'm glad you guys are still working on the product and I hope it survives and becomes something even more powerful.
- dowskitest 14y agoA post on this same topic > 1 week ago that didn't get any traction: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101870 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101870
- danielweber 14y agoWhen/how does mint charge $2.99 a month? I've never paid anything.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoHe charges $2.99 for his mint alternative. It was a very poorly worded post.
- whit537 14y agoSorry ... the whole post was poorly worded? I changed the comma to a semicolon, if that helps.
- whit537 14y agoSorry to be unclear: it's IHasAMoney.com that charges you $2.99 a month. Mint charges advertisers who-knows-what for your financial data.