Crunchfund VC
crunchfund.vc
crunchfund.vc
Woke up to a really nice surprise here, especially having made this page two months ago. Submitting it to HN wasn't my plan; someone else randomly found the page and did that. Yes, indeed, it's Kout.me...if you care more, here's a short description:
Kout is a dead-simple eCommerce platform that enables anyone, anywhere to be a merchant across any platform with ease, elegance and simplicity. We make it fast & easy to both sell items and collect money online and do this by generating a simple one-page checkout that corresponds to a unique URL. We're also doing really cool things with dynamic pricing, payments, as well as social & mobile commerce.
Ah. I love HN.
1. why don't you mention kout.me on the page?
2. how does your product differ from every payment processor that already provides a link for a single product checkout?
hope your stunt goes ok :)
We're not a payments processor. What we are is very simple selling (payments included; part of the simplicity) that enables you to sell across any number of different platforms, like Facebook, WordPress blogs, Twitter, Craigslist (with checkout implementation), emails, etc etc. The only reason we deal with payments is that it's a crappy experience for the end-user to handle payment gateways and merchant accounts on their own. We get you up and running in seconds/minutes, not hours/weeks. There's not a lot of ways to sell cross-platform with ease, elegance and simplicity.
Does that make sense?
2. We merge in the ecommerce platform with the payment processor. We really just process payments so we can control the whole experience, but if you have your own gateway you can just plug the api keys in. Most ecommerce platforms require you to go signup with a 3rd party payment gateway, and the quick hack for most people is to go with paypal.
Our focus is really on the ecommerce side. eJunkies lame. 1shoppingcart's lame. Yeah a few others have poped up this year (quixly & gumroad) they just really validate the need. If you don't need a fully fledged frontend store your options are pretty limited.
Crazy traffic and a nice collection of emails so far.
(found it in css image link to www.ihany.com which is about kout.me, main image is also from kout :)
If it weren't Arrington, I might find it a little skeezy, but .vc domains aren't that desirable anyway.
Anyway.
Just wanted to cover a few points people have mentioned...
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We merge in the ecommerce platform with the payment processor. We really just process payments so we can control the whole experience, but if you have your own gateway you can just plug the api keys in. Most ecommerce platforms require you to go signup with a 3rd party payment gateway, and the quick hack for most people is to go with paypal.
Our focus is really on the ecommerce side. eJunkies lame. 1shoppingcart's lame. Yeah a few others have poped up this year (quixly & gumroad) they just really validate the need. If you don't need a fully fledged frontend store your options are pretty limited.
We're not targeting big head merchants (shopify style merchants). We're targeting micro merchants, the long tail of ecommerce; think the blogger who's still using ejunkie and paypal to sell online, or the kickstarter style sellers who just have one product and need a quick simple way to sell it. www.mmfixed.com - is a prime example for a merchant we are targeting.
That's pretty much the current MVP. We've been live with around 200 merchants for just over a month, and we've processed a few k, again in the first month. We have a couple thousand on a waiting list, but waiting lists never convert at 100% :(.
And yeah. This is just initial build (mvp), our "linked based selling" app wont disrupt the industry, but what we want to build and our vision will... Well, it gets us up in the morning, which is the important thing, so we'll see how everything plays out.
shoot any questions or whatever to devan [at] kout.me
D.
At this stage, it doesn't matter how similar or different you are from competitors, outside of the effect it will have on real customers. There's plenty of room for more e-commerce platforms and I'm sure you'll make money.
Good luck!
Edited to fix a typo.
Product aside, I'll give the guy credit for an innovative pitch mechanism. That said, I can't help but detect a bit of sleaziness there.
They charge a ridiculous rate? 2.75% for swiped and 3.5% for virtual terminal. That is more than double what typical rates go for swiped and cnp transactions.
So the more volume you do the more you lose to them, for what, a fancy card swiper? I get it maybe if you are a small mobile vendor at a place with no connectivity, but once you have a brick and mortar I think you are probably better off doing a regular setup since those percentages eat into your margins.
The ease of extracting money is also an excellent feature.
My bet if that you've used neither square nor tried to accept credit cards for your business.
Nicely done!
The business idea is in a highly competitive space, with some businesses that have been around for over a decade. (pg co-founded one of them in 1995.)
That said, it might be workable if they specialize in making e-commerce sites for a specific under-served niche with specialized needs?
I see a new trend in naming web services:
chipmunk --> hipmunk
checkout --> kout
- Labels below the input are going to be a mess. I made the same mistake because I copied wufoo, but moving them to the top cut the time to fill out the form, and the number of errors significantly. Just trust me on this one.
- County/State/Province should be State/Province. (County and country look the same, and only the UK uses county in shopping carts, but it is unnecessary.)
- I am getting a mixed content warning: I see a <img src="/">, which loads https://chec.kout.me/ which redirects to http://kout.me/ which causes the mixed content warning". You need to fix the code so when there is no flag, it loads something like "blank.gif" through https.
- The credit card expiry year is way too long. I think the official limit is 4 years, but double check that.
- the security code question mark doesn't seem to do anything and you should be aware that the code is on the front of Amex cards, though pretty much everyone knows by now.
Hope that is useful.
It's silly to assume that it's competitive therefore they have to carve a totally unique niche to win. There is always room for innovators and competitors if they can execute a good product.
New e-commerce platforms appear all the time and build profitable businesses.
Please post a follow-up, if you can!
Regardless, great hustle. Love seeing people willing to stick their neck out.
From Mike's blog "ABOUT"
My name is Michael Arrington. I'm the founder of TechCrunch and a general partner at CrunchFund. This is my blog. You can also find me on Twitter, Facebook, CrunchBase and About.me."
I covered it in a comment above. We're an ecommerce platform for micro merchants, we just handle payments (for those who want us to) so we can provide a seamless experience.
Here's the reply.
"We merge in the ecommerce platform with the payment processor. We really just process payments so we can control the whole experience, but if you have your own gateway you can just plug the api keys in. Most ecommerce platforms require you to go signup with a 3rd party payment gateway, and the quick hack for most people is to go with paypal. Our focus is really on the ecommerce side. eJunkies lame. 1shoppingcart's lame. Yeah a few others have poped up this year (quixly & gumroad) they just really validate the need. If you don't need a fully fledged frontend store your options are pretty limited."
What space, asking for an introduction? There is no product on that page besides this.
I have to say, getting money from Angel (and others) and still having to do this for an introduction might be a story in itself about the relative utility of incubators & VCs beyond cash.
Our vision and what we want to do over the next few years is what wakes us up in the morning.
He'll just let the domain drop
Most of our beta testers agree.