Venmo Five Years Ago
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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.
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.
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.
The bank account vs. debit card is one time on setup - and has little to do with day to day interaction. Not do I see how the UI is obtuse - it takes 3 clicks to pay someone.
The one legitimate gripe you have (the facebook/social network), is a plus in my opinion - in the sense I can pay anyone by just knowing their name. Friend of so-and-so is throwing a party? I can look up their name and throw in, and there is an in-app log of the transaction.
I use Cash to send/receive money to my mom. I never have to worry about the the amount sent, what was it for and when it was sent and who it was sent to because its my mom. Its rarely the same for my friends.
I like Venmo, but I vehemently disagree here. Every time I recommend Venmo to someone who hasn't heard of it, I have to explain why they should give their banking information to a company they've never heard of. It's an onboarding disaster. I recommend Google Wallet to most people now since it's both a trusted name and doesn't require linking to a bank. My conversation is usually as simple as "Hey download Google Wallet - it's an easy way to zap money between people - and send me $x".
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/safety_net/2015/02/...
On the other hand, my intern at work keeps getting Venmo spam. "So and so asked for $1: Hey, don't pay me $1. Instead of to 'http://foo.bar' and sign up for a job where you'll make $2000 per month from home!" and the like. That sort of stuff is a full stop turn off for me.
My guess is for people who don't bank traditionally, these services make sense even though they come with some weird (to me) tradeoffs. Apparently the spam, reliance on yet another third party, broadcasting of what they're doing with their money, etc is ok for their user base. We're just not their target customer.
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.
In my (Android) version of the app this is what happens if you click the button in the upper right hand corner.
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.
I think if you have roommates you're much more likely to have heard of it. I personally would only need it for dinners/drinks/rides and when I go out socially I tend to fall back on the old approaches to keeping things square among the people in my circle.
That wouldn't work so well if you were always receiving money or always sending it, but if you have a pretty even mix then it works great.
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.
Check method:
Needed items:
Payer - checkbook, pen
Payee - phone
Steps:
Payer Payee
Write check
Give check Receive check
Sign check
Use app to photograph and submit check
Needed items:
Payer - phone
Payee - phone
Steps:
Payer Payee
Send $x to Payee
Cash is a better equivalence to Venmo, but only works when you're physically collocated. And then requires one or both parties to carry around cash (and it's not as easy to be precise, if you care about getting it right down to the penny).
Unless you have some sort of obsolete bank then paying your landlord by check is just as easy/fast as any app.
This is how I pay rent:
1) login to bank website
2) click bill pay
3) put in amount in the right place (this was previously set up)
4) Click make payments
The bank then mails your landlord a check. You can even schedule payments automatically.
If get a new landlord:
1) click add company or person to pay
2) click person
3) Enter person's name, address, and phone number.
4) Click add person.
And do you expect your landlord to pay a premium to take a credit card?
You can also pay every one of your bills at the same time (credit cards, loans, etc...)
Which is why check payments dominate larger transactions. Merchant fees are expensive compared to an ACH check fee (25 cents tops).
EDIT: Oh, apparently we're going to talk about their business model now instead. Jeez, it's hard to keep up.
Good luck with that long term!
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episo... is a Planet Money episode that goes into details of how it works.
And I have never written a check.
I doubt the people in Venmo's demo even know where their checkbook is, if they have one at all.
I think we've had quite a few articles on HN that show that isn't true.
http://qz.com/277509/read-what-happens-when-a-bunch-of-over-...
Your kid's school doesn't take Venmo for field trips. Or school lunch programs. Or extracurricular activities. That's just to name a few "adult" things Venmo doesn't support, and requires a checkbook.
Great, you can pay friends back for rent, drinks, or eating out. #millenialproblems
If you're a parent, you're paying for things that require a check or cash. The check then become's "frictionless" as you already require it.
I can still see situations where I'd prefer this (or similar) to cash. For covers at bars ("oops, forgot to hit the ATM! Can you get me?"), for buying tickets to shows (to ensure we're seated near each other), and other situations. But they're still infrequent compared to a decade ago for me.
If everyone got $20 from the ATM earlier what's to stop them from using their debt card to pay the bill? I was a server for many years and splitting the bill is standard for most younger people.
Getting paid back with cash would've been a nightmare. Instead I opened Venmo, put in $150, entered the names of my colleagues who were partaking, and hit request. Venmo did the math and requested each person's portion with a push notification. They each confirmed, and I was paid back in full in a few minutes, without even needing to talk directly to most of the people involved.
There are so many situations like this. "But you could do it another more inconvenient way instead" or "you could continue to deal with recouping for hours afterward" aren't especially compelling arguments once you've had the convenience.
If everyone chips in a $20 or two, but there's a wide spread in min and max spend per person, getting the correct increments of change to distribute to each diner in the party becomes an efficiency nightmare. Nevermind the fact that it's just plain stupid when reasonable alternatives (Venmo, Square Cash, etc.) exist.
>splitting the bill is standard for most younger people
There are many food and drink establishments with a "no splitting of bills, ever" policy. This is more prevalent in some cities than others.
But that's ok.
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 ticketsEven though I have had paypal for years, most people cringe when someone doesn't yet have Venmo and offers to send via paypal.
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.
I had never heard of it until I saw that post
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.
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.
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.
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?
Where is this from? Venmo should be doing much higher than this figure.