WePay just built a new feature inspired by and for redditors | Hacker News Reader

WePay just built a new feature inspired by and for redditors

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101 pointsjmintz24 comments

Every time I see WePay claiming to be an anti-paypal I let out such a sigh. Instead of building a business (well, the marketing side) on what they offer, they're building it on how shitty a competitor is, except they're not a competitor.

WePay is to paypal what... Myspace is to Facebook? I have no idea what to compare them to, but WePay offer 1/3rd the functionality of what Paypal offer and are building their business on everyone "hating" Paypal except they don't face the same challenges Paypal do.

Even this comment is ridiculous, everyone is praising them for their "honesty" when this is exactly what companies like Mastercard did, so because they're big businesses they're not allowed to make sensible decisions, but because they're a startup they are? http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/f5vh1/i_founded_the_an...

It's stupid. They mentioned Paypal 17 times in their post, more than they mentioned their own business.

Though there are other merits to your post, I would like to share this relevant article by Jeff Atwood:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/03/whos-your-arch-enem...

Sometimes having an arch-enemy is enough for users to understand your value add.

Definitely, I can fully understand this in the Stackoverflow situation where they were directly competing with Expertsexchange, but what WePay are doing is taking a business that offer 10 things, emulating 1 part of it and then marketing themselves as the "good" guys.

I mean okay if WePay were an equivalent to Paypal then what they're doing is justifiable, but they're riding off the hate for Paypal to launch their own business and then everyone thinks oh hey they're the good they're a startup, woo startups! They're getting free passes too, Paypal avoided the Wikileaks things because they don't want to deal with an angry US government and suddenly they're the devil for not standing up tro the government, but when WePay do it they're heros?

I can't replace my usage of Paypal (which is just sending money to people and buying things on Etsy etc.) with WePay, for me (a simple user at best) being unable to do that with a supposed "competitor" surely proves it's a worthless comparison.

can't replace my usage of Paypal (which is just sending money to people and buying things on Etsy etc.)

You could if Etsy supported using Wepay. They provide billing and an API for just that sort of thing.

No I couldn't.

https://www.wepay.com/about/faq#thirteen

As I Canadian, I can accept that as a MVP stepping stone: planned, but not ready now.

Positioning yourself as "the anti-big-evil-guy" can work really well when you're the little guy. It would be stupid of them not to run with it when it's resonating so well. It doesn't really matter what challenges they face, the story for users is what matters.

The Myspace to Facebook example is funny, because Facebook was the anti Myspace. Not only that, they were the anti Myspace specifically because they stripped out features.

Many successful companies were the anti-something or another when they were small:

* Google was the anti-Yahoo

* 37 Signals was the anti-enterprise (and lately, the anti-funded startup)

* Southwest Airlines is the anti-American Airlines, don't you love their free baggage commercials?

* Reddit is the anti-digg

I commented below with a proper answer (or my attempt at it) but basically, in each of those situations they are actual competitiors. You could replace Yahoo with google, Reddit with Digg, but you can't replace Paypal with WePay. To me at least it seems like they're school yard bullies, identified a "weak" target, one that everyone dislikes and then using that dislike to improve their own position without actually competing. It's the cheats way and for me at least, I wouldn't be happy running a business that way. If I'm going to spend my time bitching about a competitor, I'd make damn sure that I was actually a competitor.

I dunno, I don't think that's true. You can replace the search function of Yahoo with Google, but that was only one of a bunch of things Yahoo was doing. You can't fly Southwest Airlines to Tokyo, but you can on American.

As a matter of fact, Southwest Airlines limited service reach makes many of the things they tout possible. AA could never, for instance, operate with only one kind of airplane.

People love the underdog. You might think of big bad Paypal as being the weak target, but I don't think anyone else does.

Salesforce.com was "The End of Software."

9 times out of 10 when I see Paypal it is as a donate button on some website. This is the primary thing Wepay provides. So for at least a portion of PayPal's business(and 100% of Wepay's business) they are direct competitors. If anything them claiming to not be Paypal's competition is dishonest.

Did you read the post?

I mention PayPal 17 times to explain why the comparison doesn't make sense, and to explain where the comparison came from.

> WePay offer 1/3rd the functionality of what Paypal offer

This is factually untrue. We offer different functionality, like multiple accounts under a single login, the features that make it easy to accept donations and sell tickets, the ability to share accounts, etc.

> Even this comment is ridiculous

What about that comment is ridiculous. The fact that mastercard got bashed for also being honest? Not sure why that would reflect on the quality of the comment itself. Is it ridiculous that I tried to be honest?

"WePay offer" is correct British English. I'd wager the parent is from the UK rather than mistyped.

Silly me. Edited my comment. Thanks :)

they compete with paypal because you fundamentally use paypal to send and receive money. it's a pretty basic function, except paypal sucks for doing that when you have groups. they don't explicitly say "we do group payments" but the fact that wepay works better for sending and receiving payments still makes them competitive.

I go out of my way and will put up with almost anything to avoid PayPal. Their anti-PayPal message is what got me. So what if PayPal has more features? I hate them!

My favourite part:

“Quick question, though: did you or Bill have any programming or web development experience before founding Wepay? A buddy of mine (an investment banker) and I (ex-Army officer, MBA) throw around business ideas all the time while drinking at the pub, but we always are forced to bring ourselves back to earth when we realize we both have no programming experience whatsoever. Is it even worth it to start something tech-related when both founders aren't your typical tech guys? How did you do it?

> I love this question. Bill had a CS degree from BC, but he wasn't a talented web developer or anything like that. His background was helpful, though, since it was good to have least some technical knowledge before starting the company; we weren't operating completely in the dark. I had zero technical background. You could probably get to Bill's pre-WePay level with a bunch of books, long conversations with your programmer friends (you can make some of these friends online - try hacker news), and persistence.

> If you are "relentlessly resourceful" you can find a way to build what you need to build (usually by finding the right person and convincing them that you and your idea are worth their time). It's definitely harder to start a tech/internet company without being technical, but it's not impossible. You just need to be a lot scrappier in the beginning. I have a ton of non-technical friends starting technical companies. Some of them will succeed and some will fail. The smarter, more resourceful, harder working ones will have the best chance of succeeding.”

http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/f5vh1/i_founded_the_an...

While this is all well and good, they need to start...

1. Allowing people to make payments from outside the US. 2. Allowing for people from outside the US to accept payments.

Until that happens, PayPal will continue to reign supreme.

Awesome feature though. Just disheartened that I cannot use it. =(

It's not like Paypal is great outside the US either, though; I have a Japanese account hooked up to my Japanese bank account and it's completely useless. It can't use funds from my Japanese bank, only put them in. What I'd really like to be able to do is use it to quickly facilitate transfers from my Japanese bank account to American services, or to my own account... but I can't.

I'm not even talking about bank accounts. I'm talking about credit cards. I'm not expecting WePay to link up to banks around the world over night.

This is excellent. Not only is this going to roll out a great feature, but they're tailoring it in a way that's going to get great press coverage. Excellent job WePay guys, this was a wonderful move on their part.

Agreed. It sounds like a very useful feature.

Just noticed the awesome thread after my quick comment. Pretty funny :) http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/f5vh1/i_founded_the_an...

I like their energy in targeting Paypal, but is there any statistics out there that shows how many % of Paypal business users are actually unhappy ? I use Paypal quite extensively for business and it seems pretty good.

I suspect that we tend to read/hear the noisy disgruntled Paypal users. My suspicion is that this portion is probably a small % of their user base.

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