4 ms·
When I started my first small business, I poured my life savings into it. Six months later all that cash was gone and I wasn't making rent or car payments on ti
by primitivesuave 12y ago
When I started my first small business, I poured my life savings into it. Six months later all that cash was gone and I wasn't making rent or car payments on time. PayPal gave me the option for a lump sum of money ($10k) in exchange for a percentage of my sales (30%) - the loan cost me about $750 dollars in interest to PayPal, and saved the business. With enough runway for 2 months, I fixed the business model and cut unnecessary staff/expenses. Six months later, the business was profitable again, all thanks to a small cash infusion.
The point is, I could have been homeless. PayPal's financing gave me enough time to fix a broken business model, which is a situation I'm sure many other small business owners are in.
- beachstartup 12y ago> percentage of my sales (30%) did they take 30% of each sale until the full $10,750 was paid back or... ?
- primitivesuave 12y agoYes - they had a table where they compare loan amounts (anywhere from 1 - 10k) and amount to be repaid (usually around 7 - 10% greater than the loan amount) and the percentage of sales that would be used to repay the loan. Paying a larger percentage of sales significantly reduces the interest rate.
- jusben1369 12y agoAs a side note it's good to hear a positive PayPal story on HN.
- weaksauce 12y agoThe thing about positive reviews of PayPal(and by extension all products) is that they are going to be much less vocal and much less frequent because it's expected for the product to just work. Most of the time paypal does what it should and people are happy with them. fwiw. the ones that I have seen that are negative w.r.t. paypal are the ones that are doing something forbidden by the tos or at least very close to the grey line.