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Comment by mndgs | Hacker News Reader

I feel you... I'm still building a banking backend(core, accouting, clients, accounts, payments (sepa + cards), notifications (servicenow-like), sanctions screening, risk/monitoring engine, event flow, reporting), 5 years and counting... Beginning to wonder if I'm crazy or stupid to take on this gygantic undertaking.. and we're yet to design a landing page. With smth like 150k LOC...

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As someone in this space, I highly recommend you start engaging with your potential customers and building trust ASAP. It took us a lot longer than 5 years to gain enough trust to convince our customers over to our core banking platform - despite their existing platforms being fraught with bugs, limitations and insecurities.

We are sort-of scouting the area with a few potential small prospects.. the feedback so far is very positive, but none have committed cash on the table. Hard sales process is expected and at the same unnerving: we're in b2b market and a narrow, highly specialized niche - finding the right clients is tough (and we don't have the cash and/or time for that).

Have you got some text describing the process of building trust, by any chance? I'm going through a similar challenge (but it's on agriculture instead of banking): 3 years in, trying to build trust with large clients.

I think the thing that helped the most is we built great relationships with our small clients. We convinced them to let us observe their day to day, speak to staff etc. From that we got an intimate idea of all their biggest pain points and we were able to offer complimentary products that worked with their existing core banking (and abstracted it wherever possible). Things like secure communications, document management, form builders - things we were planning on building after our core banking but were actually a bigger pain point for them. It made such a difference to the actual staff that they would be bragging about us at conferences and networking events. Eventually the word spread in the community/industry and soon enough the big clients went from ignoring our calls to asking for "exactly what they have" (referring to the small clients who took the risk innovating).

TLDR: Try starting with easier to sell, complimentary products. Focus on the smaller clients as they're more willing to innovate. Do such a good job that they can't help but brag.

This resonates with the strategy I've been trying to pivot our project to: instead of trying to sell all-in-one solution for large-/mid-size bank (easily 100K+ in revenue per case), rather "productize" smaller tools, make them understandable and easily accessible to a wider, smaller range of clients. Example: FATCA/CRS reporting - a thing that any fintech/bank/insurance company needs to do (and hates ); we give a tool which eliminates 80% of the hassle, just get your reportable client list.

So, I on the right path?

I built an ecommerce solution with payments, REST messaging, email servers(imap/smtp) and affiliate advertising(with its own payments, reporting, ACLs etc) as well. I managed to get an alpha state for the full solution with both a desktop and mobile web frontend(SPA and all that).

But then the mobile apps became a thing so I started working on a native app as well...that was just too much..I burned out and got bankrupted as well so I would advise against giga projects. At some point it becomes just too much work...

I learned a lot but the waste is just not worth it. The time is too important to reinvent so much.

Now I work only on "small" projects only(max 6-12 months)

You're building a banking backend as a side project? I'm interested. Is this more of a fun project, or is there a commercial end-goal?

Any chance it's open source?

End goal has been commercial all along, else we would never found the stamina to keep going. If interested, how could you contribute - any special skills/experiences? DM me.

I've been toying with open source idea for a while - if I decide to shelf it, I'll open-source it, heck with it, some one will benefit for sure. And a lot of crapware sellers, which charge 20-50-100k EUR just for install, will be very unhappy (if not out of business).

Open sourcing something like this would be a good strategy. Financial companies would pay handsomely for custom features, updates, managed services, etc.

Launch. Start with screenshots, a feature list (real and planned as two distinct lists) and a form to collect beta sign ups.

If you cannot launch a basic version (minus everything else you want to add) consider shelving it.

I've built many projects/products over the last 20+ years. 2 or 3 took off significantly, others have thousands of users but no sustained revenue stream. One that has become a profitable business (it launched with the "weekend build" version and has built up from there over 7 years).

Probably best advise in the thread, appreciate the practical bits. Will just have to launch with what we have (and we have way too much for a MVP, to the point that documenting/presenting is a PITA)

I know that I've been deceiving myself with "but we can't launch that when this or that is not working or not implemented..." and got carried away.

"fail fast" is a good advice, but at the same time scary to face the reality that after 5 years, there might not be anyone who really needs it or can pay for it. Scary.

Something to also ask yourself - what would it look like to be successful? After 5 years of no revenue, you’re probably comfortable at that step, and the trap is to always find things that need doing pre-launch because that’s what you’re used to. So it might be worth reframing it in your mind.

Out of curiosity: do you know how banks do their backends were the money is stored?

Like what are the security measures?

Banks use different security measures, ones are better at it, others really superficial to the extent it's scary (seen with my own eyes). There's no standard what they need or must have - rather depends on the size of the risk, resources available at their disposal. Which often is a result of whether they have ever been hacked or not. A lot of banks never have been and feel they are invincible, and that shows in their security/redundancy measures.

"where the money is stored".. that one. In a nutshell, 99% of people (HN crowd including) do not understand, what is money in a bank, imagine it like some kind of electronic vault, which you as a client can access securely and transfer it (semi physically). Money in a bank does not exist. An IT guy would say "it's bits and bites, nothing more". A finance guy would say that it is a web of collaterals and liabilities. Simple example: 100 clients each open accounts with a bank and deposit 100 EUR; bank has 10'000 EUR assets and 10'000 EUR liabilities (it owes 10K to its customers); bank deposits that money, say, with TARGET2 interbank gross-settlement system (which again has accounts with other banks), so its clients can make/get credit transfers. So, as soon as money is deposited, it gets transferred to other parties, pledged, lent or invested - it is almost never "in the bank". So there's little to steal. Even if you do, the trouble is that somebody's asset is typically another party's liability (and vice versa), i.e. stuff is recorded by different actors - and all that can be traced back, you can't hack into all of them. Hence, stealing bank's funds without a trace is close to impossible. Keyword - "close" ;)

You're wasting your life dude.

You only get one.

True. But tell this to Columbus, Amundsen or Armstrong, when they were half-way there. It's cocky even to try to stand in their shadow, but it's always darkest before the sunrise.

Stand on their shoulders instead.

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