Tell HN: Stripe Destroyed Our Business after 7 months of building our product

I'm going to be brutally honest. I don't know if your business is fraudulent, but it looks fraudulent.

For one thing, your home page is full of little English errors. I'm not saying that makes it fraudulent, but I wouldn't trust you with my money.

Next thing: your HN post is unintelligible. You "advertise for other Stripe accounts and get them clients." What does this mean? You run ads?

Last: you're blaming Stripe and you want us to know the real face of Stripe. Who are you? The leader of this company? Did you run this statement by your team? You want to be between the customer and Stripe. You are not presenting a Stripe alternative I want.

It seems as though you made a Stripe epiphyte company and insisted that Stripe play by your rules. I don't know who's morally right here but you're not playing with power very well.

We basically bring you new users by running ads, email marketing on your behalf without charging you any upfront fees

Example, you have a task management software and you are looking for web developers, we bring you those clients without any fees upfront and only charge you application fee (% of your sales) after clients we brought pays you

We usually do b2b sales with each connected account, so landing page does not play a big role in our sales

Going through Stripe's forbidden business list, sounds like you fall under:

> Sales of online traffic or engagement

And, imo, also this one:

> No value added services including sale or resale of a service without added benefit to the buyer

One thing that doesn't help is that you have a founder name on your about page, but I'm unable to find that person where I would expect. I also don't see your company registered as an LLC in Colorado.

I'm sorry, everything about this looks like a scam.

Our company is registered in Delaware, we do have remote-office in Colorado where I live It is not a scam, almost all startups uses Delaware incorporation to be able to raise money

Also of note, the address you list in Colorado does not have your name on the property.

I live there personally, I can provide any documents requested if Stripe needs

I'm inclined to believe you (as putting your name out, and having a random address is fine). But I'm used to seeing profiles for founders on a website. You have a name listed on there that I can find no payments or tech history for (I could just be terrible at searching). Normally there are other nuggets on the internet that would help provide credibility to your history/profile, which helps establish some trust.

Just looking at your site my first impression would be that the whole business model seems very shady. You're saying that you're somehow bring new users to my shop and charge 30% for that. Which would be fair if you can actually do that. But you're not even restricting this to any particular domain, you do that magic for every possible shop. And I just can't believe that you can reliably advertise for any kind of shop as a service without knowledge of the domain.

I mean maybe there's more to this, but that is the impression I get from the landing page.

Yes you need to connect your Stripe account, provide us all the requested information and then we prepare the campaign for you with no cost and then we bring you customers. You have the option to increase 30% to reinvest back another x% to do more marketing and get clients faster

Our tech worked and made 20k sales in 3-4 days for our clients after 7 months of work but now Stripe closed our business for no reason

why does lead generation, a very normal and well understood business, require any of this payments technology? Why are you involving stripe instead of just taking a cut after the fact?

We provide this to existing Stripe accounts, and we use Open AI API to automate the most processes of lead generation and advertising and innovative business plan which is not charging you any upfront fees

The system your website describes sounds very sketchy. Payment providers are very nervous about sketchy behaviour because the cost of failing to detect it can be very high. They’re risk averse. The fact that you went live and immediately pushed tens of thousands of dollars through the system… I’m unsurprised it was flagged. Your best bet is to switch to a different payment provider and get approval for your plan before going live.

We have been planning and working for 7 months. We created our Stripe account on Feb, and since then we have been planning for this launch. Also we have not processed card payments ourselves, we bring clients to other Stripe accounts and they process payments the way they prefer and we only take application fee by using Stripe Standard Connect

Your website describes a system where you’re making payments into Stripe through your system (“We take an extra 1.5% if the customer's information is already saved through our system.”) and one that will “follow up with them to assure you that they will keep coming back and you get to keep all profit”.

What you’re describing isn’t how Stripe Connect is usually used. Who submits the payment details to Stripe, the purchaser or you?

We use Stripe Standard Connect, which means you can connect your Stripe account to ours, and we work on your campaign with no upfront costs and bring you clients by using marketing tools we built. We also leverage Open AI to automate the most marketing efforts which is the reason it took us 7 months to go live and when we bring you the customer based on negotiate we take application fee (% of your sales)

At any point did you reach out to Stripe during those 7 months?

Age means nothing. A simple email to `sales@stripe.com` could get you a meeting with an account rep to help understand your risk.

it says "This inbox is not actively monitored."

C'mon. Put some _freaking_ effort into this. Are you actually trying to build a business or are you just looking for people to stroke your sob story?

"Contact Sales" is on the home page, directly next to the login button...

No I already did contact sales via the form, I meant via maybe email, I even emailed to everyone I can think of working at Stripe, we have been none stop contacting Stripe for last 7 hours, asking update every 15-20 mins

In terms of contacting sales, should I specifically explain this issue or contact to get account manager? The only thing I need is to get our account re-enabled and get back to doing actual business

Did you contact them in the last 7 months, not last 7 hours when you got banned.

Abusing a "Show HN" for a complaint about a company does not really signal that you can be trusted to stay within the boundaries of what is allowed and ethical.

Not taking the time to use proper spelling and punctuation in your text does not really signal that you care much about others.

I am showing HN what Stripe did to us and I thought this is the best tagline for this case

It did not cross your mind to read the rules of Show HNs?

Having worked in the fraud space for a large fintech, I understand that it can be hard to determine if transactions are legitimate or not. Bad actors has strong financial incentives to find any and all loopholes to move dirty money. It sucks that businesses (especially new businesses with few transactions) get swept up in algorithms and have their accounts impacted.

I get why financial companies don’t want to give out their reasoning, because it would help bad actors work the algorithms. On the other hand, it’s an awful experience to be banned when you are a legitimate user and have no recourse.

Maybe we need some sort of regulation that requires fintechs to provide an audit service where a user can have their transactions reviewed for legitimacy by a human?

Sorry y’all had to go through this.

I'm not a lawyer and have no experience with the area.

What I can at least advise here, as someone who is a developer, but, also used to writing a lot of “copy” for my company, is that you hire someone who is a professional copywriter and who can fully proofread your texts.

I'm speaking as a European, non-native English speaking/writing person: there is something that feels extremely “sketchy” when reading English written content that doesn't feel “native”-ish. Maybe this is just my perception as a foreigner, but, it can truly, really affect the traction you get versus what you expect or could get.

Our developers build the website, I would not say they are best at copy, we solely focused on building the backend product than copy or marketing aspects and in terms of getting clients, we get it manually by doing b2b sales

Regardless of who built the website, someone needs to proofread it. Both your website and comments are poorly written -- both exhibit a lack of professionalism, which does not inspire trust.

I'm not sure your story is like the other stories we see on HN.

> Why make things so complicated when checking-out? We help you provide the fastest way for your ONline users to checkout as fast as possible wherever they’re located -- It only takes ONE click!

This is the line from your website, I see two major problems:

* Your building a product that essentially competes directly with Stripe. I'm not sure on Stripe's specific terms, but most companies do not allow you to use their platform to compete with them. If they don't explicitly disallow it, it's often in some ambiguous term. I don't see how you ever expected to build directly on Stripe (or another "developer friendly" service). You need to work at a lower level where the provider doesn't offer a directly competing service.

* Caveat. I don't fully understand what your doing. "It only takes ONE click" screams "we're extremely risky and don't take proper measures to ensure transaction validity". Fraud is a major problem for Stripe (and all online transaction services). This line reads a lot like you'll be bypasing Stripe's protections and enabling risky transactions. Stripe can't allow that type of risk.

I know it's easy to be an armchair critic, but these seem like pretty obvious risks of the business you went into. Complaining that Stripe killed your business is not genuine. This is basic risk management that failed.

we have not build even on click portion yet, but it is basically for returning customers. Currently we are only doing bringing new clients to other Stripe accounts. We work with Stripe, we don't necessarily compete with them

> yet

So...either:

* You're advertising a service on your website that you cannot provide. Shady...but maybe not fraud

* Or, you're planning to compete directly with Stripe

Being blunt, it's extremely hard to understand what you're trying to say to anyone on this thread. Your sentences are broken and you're referring to a ton of things that nobody knows what they mean.

It's nearly impossible to dig yourself out of a hole when nobody can understand what you're telling them.

we do email marketing powered by Open AI but when we built our landing page we did not even had the product and our developers basically built in couple days, you can even check this on webarchieve and see our site never changed since then. I will ask our team to update if that's huge problem

It feels—and I fully understand feelings are fishy—like this has become an extremely common problem.

If someone asked me what to use for payments on a new project, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable suggesting Stripe, based solely on what I keep reading about the company on HN. That itself also feels a bit weird, especially without a clear alternative.

I myself have used Stripe for a few tiny things over the years, and have never had an issue, but I’d be surprised if I’ve put more than $100 total through the platform.

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Edit: The comments some have about the legitimacy of the OP’s business may make this particular case a non-issue, to be fair.

The frequency of these kinds of threads makes me hesitant to use Stripe in the future. Thanks for sharing your experience. I wouldn't be surprised if some Stripe support monitors HN and will now look into this. Hopefully, they share some high-level information to assuage concerns, otherwise this just makes me think that if I must use Stripe, I need to be prepared to make a desperation post on social media to get support.

It shouldn't. Look into the vast majority of these complaints and you'll feel reassured.

eg this -- they're trying to, per their site, get lots of credentials from Stripe's other customers. It's pretty obvious why Stripe is saying no, and extremely reasonable to limit things like that to established companies.

Quoting myself from 2 months ago:

The last time I paid attention to one of these complaints, someone was using stripe to sell cellphone accessories (and yes, at least on my Stripe application, they asked what I was selling.)

After selling accessories for a while, he then used it to sell a minivan, and had a tantrum when Stripe -- quite reasonably -- said this flags all the flags, and Stripe was going to hold onto the money until they were sure things were kosher.

Getting dollars before multiple months post transaction basically leaves someone holding a bag of risk, and if you act shady AF, you can't be surprised if Stripe declines to hold that bag of risk for you.

We were not even selling anything ourselves or accepting credit cards, we were simply bringing customers to other Stripe accounts

I don’t think that’s the case. Each time I’ve seen one it’s been a business that’s sketchy and violates the terms of service.

I also had a similar issue with Stripe, years ago at this point. I got it resolved partly by posting here, so this is a good first step. I'd also search HN for threads about Stripe, and there are often a few folks from the HN community who work at Stripe who offer to help. I'd reach out to them as well, let them know about this thread here, etc.

I know how frustrating and scary this is, I wish you luck in resolving it!

do you know who can I reach out?

Your main website is filled with copy errors and you don’t really explain how the product works.

How are you sourcing leads/customers?

We basically bring you new users by running ads, email marketing on your behalf without charging you any upfront fees Example, you have a task management software and you are looking for web developers, we bring you those clients without any fees upfront and only charge you application fee (% of your sales) after clients we brought pays you

We usually do b2b sales with each connected account, so landing page does not play a big role in our sales

Well.....given you can't offer your product, it seems like it's playing a massive role in your sales.

Think about this:

* Stripe banned you

* You appeal

* Some support person at Stripe has to make a judgement. They know nothing about you. They go to your website.

* That support person gets a page that reads like a quickly built scam site.

* Support person goes "Yep, looks like the system flagged this correctly".

-----

I see you making excuses why your BE team can't manage the website. Stop.

Why is the BE team managing the website? Why aren't you using squarespace, wix, weblflow, any of the point and click website builders? Why aren't you moving that responsibility to somewhere else? Sales? Founder? Literally anyone but the developers.

we needed backend to be built for the site and with Squarespaces, Wix and others you cannot have strong backend system. I will ask our team to fix the landing page but we don't even sell via landing pages, our own sales process is manual and we recruit clients manually, doing zoom calls with them and qualifying them

Oh. Wow. There's a lot to unpack with this.

> we needed backend to be built for the site and with Squarespaces, Wix and others you cannot have strong backend system.

You don't need those to be coupled to each other. Build them as separate systems?

You have a super easy migration path:

* Your currently using a root url for onclickcheckout.com. Not convention, but not necessarily problematic.

* Setup Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, etc on "www.onclickcheckout.com" (e.g. "www" sub-domain).

* Have the root for "onclickcheckout.com" redirect to "www.onclickcheckout.com". Now, your serving your app and marketing site separately.

* Even better, you're small. Migrate your "app" to "app.onclickcheckout.com"

> we don't even sell via landing pages, our own sales process is manual and we recruit clients manually, doing zoom calls with them and qualifying them

I literally cannot believe this statement. I can't believe you believe this statement either. The only way I could possibly imagine this being true is if you do your sales under a different brand.

Let's say I'm a prospect. I get one of your messages. I'm intrigued, but I'm also busy. Before I schedule a meeting with your team, I want to figure out if it's worth my time. How do I get more information?

It sure as hell isn't by replying to your outbound sales reps. That's only going to encourage them to bother me even more.

I'm going to your marketing website. I'm figuring out what you sell and how it works. The fact that your marketing site _sucks_ means I'm not even getting to the point that I want to follow up with your sales rep.

So far we have only recruited early clients by hand, from the people we know and referrals and landing pages don't play a role there. Have you seen Stripe's first landing page called /dev/payments?

I hate to be that guy, but this is super common for stripe

Is Stripe fraud? I heard a lot of good things about them from other YC companies

Not any more than any other payment processor. They basically all are lazy and want to reduce fraud, which is insanely out of hand. They attempt to do this by not doing much review, most of which is heavily automated and the end result is what happened to you.

It's a common growing trend that as long as something mostly works for 95% of people nobody will care and all those who fall between the cracks will fall on deaf ears.

> Is Stripe fraud?

No, they're just in a position where they can afford a percentage of false positives.

Similar to PayPal and others, they are firm to minimize their risk and protect themselves too.

we have 0 disputes, 0 payments and we only make money by collecting application fee from the sales of connected Stripe accounts. We technically don't even carry a risk to Stripe

"XYZ destroyed my business and there's nobody I can talk to" is a recurring theme, that's not specific to any one platform. Every complex system needs a manual override process.

If I understand correctly:

- you run advertising and lead gen on behalf of clients using their CRM (their domain email/outreach)

- and require Stripe for attribution, and to remit payment from client to you

That's most likely triggering Stripe's TOS.

For something so core to your business, did you have a discussion with Stripe if this was allowed?

Unfortunately if you had searched Stripe on HN to see a long, detailed history of them ruining businesses like this.

is there an alternative to Stripe Connect? Also do you know why Stripe is like this, like what is their issue, why they don't solve problem, it is clearly major issue

Switch to Revolut payments: https://developer.revolut.com/docs/accept-payments

but we don't process payments ourselves, we take application fee of the payments of other Stripe accounts

It sounds like the typical thing of these companies having no customer support unless you are a big fish.

We had whole sales pipeline and we could have brought $4-6M monthly sales for all connected accounts combined to our platform

Well you were right in coming here, this is basically the only Stripe customer support desk.

they flagged our post, any opinions why?

All users with at least 31 karma can flag post. With enough flags, the post gets marked as [flagged] and with more flags it gets marked as [dead].

You can email the mods to get an official answer, but it's almost sure they will just reply that.

how do you get karma? or prevent getting one?

there are a few links at the bottom of HN that can help you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - these are guidelines on what is and is not appropriate on HN. they can help guide you toward what are appropriate posts and comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html - FAQs that answer a lot of the questions that you've been asking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html - the (very specific) rules on what "Show HN" is, and why and why not you would post to the special "Show HN" section of HN.

I would recommend reading them thoroughly before continuing to respond, as it might help temper some of your comments and the responses to them.

Would you please refrain from creating new accounts to post duplicates of this? That's in the guidelines as well. HN has an e-mail address down at the bottom if you want to get in touch with them to potentially get this one changed.