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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Not all B2C is the same. If you make a product for professionals you won't get random chargebacks, incoherent emails, or general rudeness. One great way to filter for professionalism is by simply charging more. Another strategy is making it harder to purchase the product. For example by disabling the checkout process until people have completed the tutorial, or only allowing purchases after the free trial has expired.

These strategies don't maximize revenue, but you don't have to maximize revenue. You can optimize for revenue/agony instead.

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> You can optimize for revenue/agony instead.

That's a great way to put it. I'm going to start using that one.

Tangent: I'm a programmer at a small company, which has three programmers total. I make a decent wage, but one that's significantly smaller than I could make at a larger company. I often get questions from people who can't believe that I'm not jumping at these other opportunities, but I make nearly six figures, my team and bosses trust me, I have nearly unlimited flexibility to choose what I work on and shape my software the way I feel is best, and I get to work full remote and basically make my own hours, giving me all the time I want with my family. It would take an incredible raise to give this up just for better pay.

An agony-per-dollar ratio is a perfect way to frame the calculation, and it factors into so many places in life. Many forget that it's not just optimizing for the most revenue possible, but a balance of maximizing revenue and quality of life, and often getting diminishing returns when pushing hard on the former.

Sounds great. Also, if you went to work for BigCo and got a big pay rise, you would probably very soon get use to it and it wouldn't make you much happier. I wrote a bit more about this topic at: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/11/06/lifestyle-programm...

It's better but this is not uniformly true. For one, people use random sites to test cards to see if they can get away with using stolen CC details at every stripe-integrated company I've seen, target audience irrelevant.

The proportion of negative/wild interactions with support and chargebacks is always going to be in an uphill battle with positive correspondance unless you are selling multi-seat deals with support as part of it. I speak a little out of my area of expertise here but from my friends experience, the downside to professional services is that a small proportion of people, or people on bad days, see it as a service, not a SaaS, and will willingly throw threats, insults, etc at you. A small error on your service can stop their whole business which is different for B2C - it's the difference between fear and frustration.

> people use random sites to test cards to see if they can get away with using stolen CC details

I already addressed this. By forcing people to use the product before allowing them to purchase you make drive-by fraud impossible. We use stripe and we have 0 fraud to deal with.

Do you allow purchasing based on time or are there other factors, like features used?

You didn't read my comment for what it meant, I think.

This isn't automated, it's people in 3rd world countries signing up to random sites that have CC as a method of payment and seeing if payment goes through.

You probably pay for Stripe Radar and don't see these payments but are also silently missing out on legitimate payments, or you run KYC or have too few or only western access to your site otherwise. Have you spoken to the people who manage your Stripe about the disputes and how many are fraud and the Fraudulent payment detection numbers you have? It won't be 0 for any substantial business.

You really are not hearing me. Our legitimate traffic looks nothing like fraud traffic. Legitimate users don't sign up for a free trial, ignore our application, zoom straight to the payment form and purchase. 0% of our legitimate customers do this. Everybody wants to try before they buy! You can literally lock the payment form making it impossible for people to purchase until they have used the product for multiple hours over multiple days.

Nobody in a 3rd world country is going to spend 5 hours clicking around in a product over multiple days just to test if a credit card works. If card testers don't find the payment form within 2 minutes they're going to move on to a weaker target.

People who struggle with fraud in SaaS usually make no attempt to distinguish real user behavior from fraud-y behavior.

Agree with all of those, and such a business has B2B potential also. That describes mine pretty well. And while I’d love to make more B2B sales, I hate dealing with purchasing departments. Dealing mainly with professionals definitely has its upsides.

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