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The Next 1,000 Start-Ups
- davidedicillo 14y agoWhat about those startups that already have an account but not generating revenues since they just launched a week ago?
- sethbannon 14y agoAs with most promotions aimed at user acquisition, you're unfortunately out of luck.
- klynch 14y ago@sethbannon- This is not most promotions. Our goal is to help startups get off the ground. @davidedicillo- We're happy to help recent signups who qualify, shoot an e-mail over to support@braintreepayments.com and we'll set things right. -Kristi from Braintree
- jacquesm 14y agoYou don't speak for braintree.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jobu 14y agoThe promotion is only available to "eligible merchants", but it is not clear what qualifies one as eligible. Anyone from Braintree willing to clarify?
- mvboeke 14y agoMichael from Braintree, here. The idea behind this offer is to help launch more startups. We aren't policing this with specific limits, but we're asking that you only use this if you are truly a pre-revenue start-up or just started to collect fees for your product. If you’ve already got your start, then congratulations - we would love to work with you and help you grow. And you'll probably find that our standard pricing works well for you.
- white_devil 14y agoI'm happy that you changed your pricing to 2.9% + 30¢ - it did actually feel too expensive before. Thank you for supporting The Rest Of The World too! If I needed a payment gateway right now, your service would be a total no-brainer.
- jbevain 14y agoInteresting move. Too bad it's US only for now. We're currently using FastSpring but both the recent opening of Braintree towards Europe and the price getting a clear 2.9% + $0.3 are making it pretty interesting. Make a similar promotion for Europe and I'll probably switch.
- sbashyal 14y agoTo provide some perspective, I did a calculation using their pricing information and assuming the average transaction size of $10 - the waived fee amounts to $2950. edit - changed language to make it more meaningful
- pdenya 14y agoIs this literally the next 1000 braintree signups or is that a marketing term?
- caitlins 14y agoHey, it's Caitlin from Braintree. Yes, this is literally the next 1,000 merchants who signup through this page: https://www.braintreepayments.com/next_thousand_startups https://www.braintreepayments.com/next_thousand_startups
- emeltzer 14y agoThe "instant signup" page says I have to wait one day for underwriters to assess the app, is that normal?
- klynch 14y agoMost applicants will be approved instantly. There are some circumstances, such as the specifics of your business model, that may require a brief manual review. At most this will take 1 business day, but many reviews will be much quicker. The good thing about doing this upfront is that you don't have to worry about running into any issues (like unexpected shutdowns) as your processing ramps up.
- scottkrager 14y agoWhat about existing startups using braintree that haven't hit that level yet?
- klynch 14y agoThe idea behind this offer is to help launch more startups. If you are a pre-revenue start-up or just started to collect fees for your product, then shoot us an email at accounts@braintreepayments.com, and we're happy to help.
- mcrittenden 14y agoI wonder if Braintree has been suffering since Stripe launched and this is an effort to get things moving again.
- levifig 14y agoWas thinking the exact same thing. Another evidence of how (quality) competition benefits the customers… :)
- littlegiantcap 14y agoAwesome! Payment processing is probably one of our biggest headaches, and this just gave us enough of a reason to try you guys out. Excited to try it out.
- thehodge 14y agoyes yes yes! "Note: we’re only able to offer this to start-ups with a presence in the US today. We recently launched in Europe and Canada and hope to be able to do something similar for international start-ups soon." Oh... maybe later
- kami8845 14y agoA cute marketing trick. No you're not doing this just because you want to "help new startups". That's a nice way of rationalizing it, but really 1) Braintree is suffering from the competition, especially on HN, Stripe is loved like no other 2) They're not giving away 2 million dollars. With so many startups failing to ever generate significant revenue, I wouldn't be suprised if less than 10% of companies that are the first 1000 to register actually wind up generating $50k in revenue through their service. I'm sure Braintree have their own internal calculations about how much this will cost them and that number is certainly no where near 2 million dollars. 3) The primary purpose of this is to bind new businesses to Braintree. The scenario of "getting their free processing here and then going somewhere else before they pay us a nickel." is cute, but misleading. At that point in the company's development switching the entire payments system is much more expensive and would not make any economic sense. Props to Braintree for coming up with this, I think in the end it's beneficial to the startup community, though I dislike the "second coming of jesus christ"-vibe of the announcement. They're doing this for business reasons, not because they woke up yesterday and felt a little charitable.
- highace 14y agoWhy is this getting downvoted? It's cynical, but definitely a legit and structured response.
- kami8845 14y agoOut of the 19 comments in this thread, 3 were by 3 distinct Braintree employees. In all of my time reading HN, I don't think I've ever seen so many employees of a company post in a single thread. I'm not really surprised there's a few initial downvotes for negative responses. I initially wanted to ask the downvoter to explain their reasoning, but decided not to as it would probably just read "people reading this response goes against the interests of parties I'm associated with" :)
- ry0ohki 14y agoI downvoted you because I dislike that attitude that is prevalent here... "You're not our preferred vendor so this is a cheap attempt at getting our business!". If you think this is spam, flag it as so, but it's annoying to me that the crowd has favorites, and when those favorites have promotions people glow about how great they are, but if the competition does something similar it's an evil attempt to gain market share. We know this is marketing, no one is being duped. (Disclaimer, I'm a Stripe user!)
- siculars 14y agoThis is classic competition at work. Along comes Stripe that forces companies that are not asleep, like Braintree, to compete on price or innovation or some other axes.
- fratis 14y agoWhen I was doing research on this for my startup a few months ago, we found that Braintree easily beat Stripe on price. This is just icing on the cake. Braintree's not as glamorous (I think), but if you're doing a large number of transactions, Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢/transaction is quite high.
- jusben1369 14y agoYour analysis is true although now Braintree's pricing is that of Stripe's - at least for startups who can't or don't want to spend cycles getting a stand alone merchant account. So it's good to make that distinction. I suspect the value with BT is that once you get real traction you can opt out of the more expensive rate into something more competitive - probably as soon as when you're doing a few thousand dollars per month.
- desigooner 14y agoDon't the rates match for Braintree & Stripe now?
- desigooner 14y agoDon't the rates match for Braintree & Stripe now?
- xoail 14y agoSo 1000 startups, meaning 100 real new startups (I doubt startups that are already into payments using other platforms would switch), of which 10 or less startups could really do 50k in transactions, meaning 10x50000x0.027 = $13,500 (tops and not $1M) in loss for Braintree... But I am sure they are getting way too much marketing out for this.
- bpick 14y agoNot to mention you need an account with them in the first place and Braintree is well known for having a ludicrously strict risk team. So yes, this is just a marketing gimmick.
- klynch 14y agoKristi from Braintree here. Admittedly, our legacy bank relationships left us as the middle man to their risk departments. This may be what you are referring to when you mention the "ludicrously strict risk team." This is no longer the case. Starting with the launch of our instant product, we brought risk in house. We are able to use our years of experience working with startups to develop risk processes that help us build relationships, not get in your way.
- jusben1369 14y agoThe funny thing is that if you went in as the VP of Sales/VP of Marketing to the CFO of Braintree and said "Our exposure is just $13,500!" he'd beat you with a stick. The good news is the alignment is right here. The more in actual lost transactions fees that occur during the promotion the happier Braintree and the startups will be. As noted Braintree has its eyes further down the road.
- Murkin 14y agoPlease fix headline to: "Braintree Waives All Fees On First $50k in Transactions For Next 1,000 US-Based Startups" Might be a good idea to do this always, just a little thing to acknowledge the other 95% of the world..
- jusben1369 14y agoAgree. It should be at the top not at the bottom of the post. Cruel tease to many who'll see this.
- myelin 14y agoBoo -- someone changed it to the much less informative "The Next 1,000 Start-Ups" :( Mods, please prioritize informative versions of titles!
- _delirium 14y agoYeah, I clicked on this expecting a piece about the medium-term future of startups (the next 1,000 startups, say). A title indicating it was a promotion targeted at startups would've been more informative...
- callmeed 14y agoGood move by BrainTree. As much as I love Stripe and their innovative moves, the bulk of my business's transactions have been handled by BrainTree over the last 4 years. That includes both SaaS subscription billing and third-party payment aggregation (we do niche ecommerce, take a transaction fee, and ACH to customers). Our transaction fee is below the (now seemingly) standard 2.9% which adds up when you get to hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in processing. BrainTree's support is great ... I'm talking Rackspace-level great. Some of you talk like BrainTree is an old-school behemoth which is being disrupted by Stripe, which is silly. News flash: BrainTree is not PayPal. Obviously they are all competitors, but I see nothing to indicate that BrainTree can't keep pace with Stripe moving forward. I do use Stripe for things–and I do love it. But we wouldn't be where we are today w/o BrainTree.
- polyfractal 14y agoAgreeing with everything here, and adding the fact that Braintree has incredible support. There have been several occasions where I couldn't figure out a bug on my side, or there was a gap in our database records while testing a new feature, and I was able to get on the phone with a customer service rep and get it sorted out in minutes. I've never had such a pleasant customer service experience before, doubly surprising because it was with a financial service. Braintree is pretty awesome.
- corkill 14y agoTell you the company that will get my business out of stripe, braintree and the others. The one that works out how to let us open an account without an SSN. Currently we are with SAASY for that reason, they charge 5.9%.
- mvboeke 14y ago@corkill - I work on the signup and application process for Braintree, and I would be curious to know why SSN is a deal-killer for you. Do you not have a SSN, or is it just something you would rather not share? Feel free to email me at mboeke@braintreepayments.com if you would like.
- LukeHoersten 14y agoThis promotion doesn't apply to third-party payment aggregation businesses.
- twodayslate 14y agoIt looks like they can't handle the traffic. Not a good sign for them.
- klynch 14y agoBraintree here. Can you elaborate? We're not seeing anything slow down on our end.
- juddlyon 14y agoAmidst all the weird negativity and to-and-fro, just wanted to say "DEATH TO PAYPAL API INTEGRATIONS!" Go Braintree. Go Stripe. Go Recurly. Go CheddarGettar. Go Spreedly. Go whomever has the guts to tackle this beast! Apologies to my friends at PayPal in case they read this....
- bravoyankee 14y agoThis needs to be voted up to the top :)
- TomGullen 14y agoExcitedly rushed to sign up as we're interested in offering alternative payment solutions - disappointed as we're in the UK we can't and this wasn't immediately obvious! Either way looks like a very cool offer!
- justincormack 14y agoany company naming themselves after a town in the UK ought to be available here...
- mvboeke 14y agoBraintree's service is available in the UK, we just can't make the free processing offer outside of the US. Check out https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international for more info. Also, our company name comes from the town of Braintree, Massachusetts, which is the home of the American revolutionary John Adams. I hope you won't hold that against us.
- justincormack 14y agoAh I guess Braintree MA is named after the original!Will have a look, thanks.
- rkalla 14y agoThere are multiple aspects to payment processing with basic payment processing and integration being the minimum -- Stripe currently has the most beautiful story here. Things get more complex on the back end of the payment being processed at scale, namely fraud detection and risk mitigation. This is where some of those behemoths in the industry actually shine more. Stripe passes the risk directly through, you are on your own. For a lot of folks here working on startups with their first few-hundred customers, that isn't the problem -- the problem is accepting payments and getting back to work. I don't see anyone beating Stripe in that game. For the folks that have huge customer bases, mitigating risk and dealing with fraud is a much more frequent/costly problem and having a processor help out there is why companies like PayPal (and BrainTree?) are still in people's vocabulary even though a good majority of their experience on the front-end suck. This is one of those problems that doesn't matter to you at all, until it does... then it is a huge nightmare and you scramble around looking for a solution and suddenly realize why "everyone doesn't just use Stripe" -- or some equally hot new processing startup.
- callmeed 14y agoI'm not sure I agree with you. I've had to deal with plenty of fraud issues. How is Stripe passing the risk on any more than other processors? [1] The end-result of fraud (at least, the kind I'm familiar with) are chargebacks. Those are going to fall back to you regardless of who your payment processor is. We've had major fraud issues on our system which is powered by BrainTree. When you hit a certain chargeback rate, you basically get a call from the underwriting processor/merchant who says "Get your crap together or get lost". PayPal is a slightly different animal IMO. https://stripe.com/help/disputes https://stripe.com/help/disputes
- LukeHoersten 14y agoMy guess is that it depends on your business model. (1) The risk to a TPPA model would be a fraudulent payment merchant signing up with your service buying from themselves with stolen cards. Charge-backs would occur here once the card owner discovered the card was stolen. (2) The direct sale model risk would be selling and delivering a good or service and then the card holder (stolen or otherwise) charges-back to get the good/service for free. In case (1) fraud detection would help detect the stolen card and mitigate the risk. In case (2), legitimate charge-backs from non-stolen cards are probably sometimes the bigger risk. I most likely didn't hit all the cases here but it certainly seems to be the case that PayPal or the like would not always help your business model with fraud prevention, supporting what callmeed said here.
- jcampbell1 14y agoI have 900 different startups all with a variation of the name GiveMe50000FreeAmexPoints.com I wonder if my startups are eligible. :)
- snambi 14y agoCouldn't agree more.
- wia 14y agoLooks good for starting out. Reminds me, has anyone heard back from startuppack.org?
- practutor 14y agoWow its was really great.. Mike, http://www.practutor.com http://www.practutor.com