Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I'm a little surprised to see this for two reasons:

1. Doing anything financial in Australia is hard. For better or for worse (IMHO it's mostly better) there is strict financial regulation in Australia (mostly due to the Corporations Act revamp under the Howard government as well as the longstanding Trade Practices Act, which is one of the most consumer-friendly pieces of legislation I think in the world).

I'd be interested in knowing the story and how high compliance costs are for something like this.

2. It was done (based on comments here) at least in part in Perth. Perth is my home town and has become increasingly tech unfriendly for three reasons:

- a lot of the bigger employers got bought out and consolidated their software development over East;

- the state as a whole is very focused on digging stuff up from the ground (or under the sea to be pedantic) and selling it to the Chinese. The startup scene is tiny; and

- cost of living in Perth is terrible in wage-adjusted terms. Honestly it's cheaper for me to live in New York (I moved here about 2.5 years ago to start a job with Google). Housing is a huge part of it but food, utilities and, well, everything is expensive in Perth now.

I'd certainly like to here more about the development story and the team (the site is scant on details on this).

As for the service itself, I'll echo the comments of others and say the FX and other fees coule make this quite expensive.

Still, good to see this coming out of Australia and good luck guys. I'm also glad to hear about more tech things happening in Perth. I might have to check out the meetups and stuff next time I visit.

From Brisbane, Queensland here and it's a similar story here. The company I work for is causing ripples in the Australian pond but as a whole the Australian tech scene is way behind that of the states and other parts of the world due to our tight regulations, expensive Internet connections and slow Internet connection speeds.

For every successful Australian company I can think of, there are thousands not so lucky. Atlassian and Envato are the only two companies I can think of off of the top of my head who have had major success spawning web based businesses in a country as small and somewhat lacking as Australia as Australia is. Melbourne and Sydney are definitely two locations you're most likely to start a successful business in. Good to see Pin tackling payments because in Australia you have two options: Paypal or a propriety expensive bank solution with horrible API.

Big Commerce?

Bigcommerce moved to the US (Austin), just as almost every successful tech company (and tech individual) out of Australia ends up doing.

You can't blame Australia too much for that. It's a tiny market, and the US is an abnormally large one. It's logical.

Did they really move though? My understanding are both co-CEO's are still in Sydney. I understand they opened a major office in the US but what growing Aussie company wouldn't?

That's possible, I'm just going by what someone at the company told me. Haven't looked into it further.

I work at Bigcommerce. The development, QA, design and product teams are here in Australia; the sales, support and marketing teams are in Austin.

(There is some mixing, eg. a few devs in Austin, a few support guys here.)

On the emergent 'Australian regulators are pain' meme, I actually emailed one of the bodies and requested documents regarding the decision not to adopt IIBAN, a useful and intelligent account identification scheme now used throughout Europe, Israel, and a growing list of other countries, within Australia. Their reply was essentially 'it happened in some meeting', followed by 'ignore' when I pushed for further information.

I suspect the real reason the status quo was protected was something to do with a brilliant track record of globally high fees and unending profits for Australian banks.

Hopefully the Wikileaks Party can put the fear of transparency in to these people!

There's almost nowhere with low COL and good access and reasonable amenities, though. Whereas in the US, small towns are still pretty well connected to the rest of the country with a solid interstate highway system and excellent freight rail, with decent basic amenities available everywhere, and high speed internet access, small towns in Australia can have crippling remoteness in an already remote country. For example, family in Ballarat, which is a regional Victorian town about an hour from Melbourne (it's not very remote; many people commute to Melbourne every day via rail), can only get wireless 3G internet access to their suburban house. I know the NBN will change some things, but they will most likely remain wireless.

And the smaller cities aren't going to be much cheaper, either. The median house price across all of Australia is around $500k (!).

As someone who lives in Perth, I can concur with the ridiculous cost of living here at the moment, and am also surprised that this seems to have been developed at least partly here. However, the meetup/tech/startup scene is developing here (albeit slowly). Check out some spacecubed events when you're next here.

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