chexton

"When I first started looking for things like a ‘standard tank top’ or a ‘standard jersey skirt’, I thought they’d be easy to find."

I find this to be the case too often. Jeans are easy (Levi 501, anyone?) but finding a t-shirt or collared shirt that fits well, is comfortable and that I will likely be able to buy over and over again for the next 10 years is quite difficult.

GAP and Uniqlo sort of do this but even they change things around a lot. I think sites like Everlane.com could do quite well out of this concept: most people like to stick with basics they love. Make good basics and keep them around forever. I've always wanted to be able to login on my iPhone and click 'give me two new t-shirts' and have them delivered to my door, the iPhone app should know where I live, my card number and my favourite stuff...no questions asked!

I interpret this in the sense that your environment is a key driver of your actions.

For me this is most evident when observing where I (/ my friends) live. If you live with people who drink four nights a week, guess what...you probably will too. If you live with people who cook healthy food and go running three times a week there is a much greater chance you will too.

Obviously you can rise above your surroundings but if you have a goal then you should put yourself in an environment conducive to getting there.

Over the past few weeks we've been building a SaaS product that makes it easy to send event-based emails to your customers. When we initially started our company in mid-January we were building something completely different. Whilst working on that product we quickly found that setting up emails based on the events we were capturing in our analytics software was not a simple task.

We did some searching and talking to other startups and realised that we weren't the only ones with this problem (see this great post by stammy - http://bit.ly/LcIGTL). We began work in earnest.

What we've built allows you to drop in a JS snippet, pull in your customer data and events and start creating automated emails. We're in private beta and are keen to share what we've done with the startup community. We think it has some potential. What do you guys think?

Plus, we thought this landing page might be fun for a friday afternoon :).

I hear pin.net.au are attempting just this, FYI.

reminds me of this blog post by patrick collison (pc) that i've always liked (it's stuck in my head, so there you go): http://patrickcollison.com/blog/2009/10/surprises

The best example of this theory is, for me, Dropbox.

Looks interesting...my main concern with these apps is always battery life. My battery gets slammed even without location updates running in the background.

Indeed. Any startup handling incoming vs. outgoing payments is going to have special issues to deal with. Always walking a fine line.

Great answer. This is essentially what most startups do, it's how Groupon handled things for a long time too (from what I understand).

Checks are fine but as a foreigner they seem really clunky and don't work once the company has a greater reach. Shame PayPal flagged you so early on.

I wonder how many other startups are in your position.

Definitely it would. Sending a check seems clunky to me, just curious what other options exist. It seems the answer is none (essentially).

Absolutely agree. One of the prime reasons I asked this question was that although PayPal's chained payments would work it does require you to accept incoming money via PayPal. This isn't ideal in many cases, especially once startups start to see a little scale.

Food for thought.

Cool. How about we talk about it face-to-face :).

I think there is really something in this. It does look like a very streamlined product with nice touches...but they must have executed very effectively.

From what I've read there are a bunch of startups in this space, doing very similar things. Even here in Australia there are a few I can think of that are doing pretty well. As none have yet been bought by Google for $50m, I'd be curious to know more about the kind of traction Punchd had prior to the acquisition (how many users did they have, were the pulling in revenue) - it's always interesting to know more about how a startup with this kind of success executed!

Also, hats off to the Punchd guys...I remember the thread about the acquisition and there was a lot of praise for the founders themselves, as people and as founders.

Thanks Patrick.

I am curious as I am in fact an Australian citizen and know that a lot of people have a hard time here when trying to open a merchant account. From what I've read and heard it's traditionally a similar in the US and it is obviously one of the killer features of Stripe.

Was it hard for you to work with a bank (Wells Fargo) on this? From what I've heard banks are the main driver behind the 'shotgun' approach to information collection, at least here in Australia. I could well be wrong on this, hence I ask the question.

You are already doing a much better job than traditional companies on both accounts, it's great to watch and I'm sure you guys will continue to do great work.

Note: I just realised my spelling error in my previous post...iPhone autocorrect got the better of me!a

Cool. I'm not a US citizen but it's great that you can do this and that Wells Fargo is on board as this is a killer feature in my opinion :).

So Stripe is in fact opening a merchant account fir each user that signs up?

I am curious that a social security number is all that is required...why is it such a pain to get a merchant account with a bank or other acquirer? I am curious how Stripe can make it so simple.

Awesome. I have been waiting to have a better look at Stripe, it sounds so great.

I have a question for someone who might know: how can Stripe operate without requiring it's users to sign up for a merchant account? Do they hold what is known as a 'master merchant account'?

I am just curious as these sound notoriously difficult to get and might explain why it's US only for now, not to mention the AML considerations of letting users sign up and accept payments so simply.

This all just makes what they are doing even more impressive :).

Absolutely agree. Drawing this parallel is something I haven't considered before but it definitely makes one think.

The new music sharing features are obviously reminiscent of Last.fm. I was an avid Last.fm user at the start but I found I quickly tired of wanting everyone to know everything I listened to.

It will be interesting to see how it pans out.

+1 on this question...I can't see why they wouldn't allow it though.

I would love to know the approach you are going to take for expanding to include consulting and the specific things you plan on targeting to consult on...I am also a web developer and have considered expanding to do the same but am not sure where to begin :)!

I am in Australia so have to watch from afar, but I am really keen to see exactly how Stripe operates.

As far as I can work out (I obviously don't have a login) part of what will make them brilliant is they enable you to accept payments in minutes, I.e don't require you to hold a merchant account / create one for you.

Is this correct? Keen to know more as PayPal are really the only other service that do this and their increasingly difficult fraud protection barriers must be a result of the complexity of managing such a service.

I think starting anything in the coupon space is difficult as it's not about the technology, it's about the sales. Groupon has an extremely simple website...it is merely a platform to display the deals: their success is essentially totally driven by the massive sales force they have at work them.

I think that technology in this space will play a greater role in the future (mobile, targeting, etc.) but for now the winners are those who sign up the most businesses and the most consumers.

I don't think the author should give up on startups entirely; it sounds like they have indeed learnt some skills and can apply those to any number of future projects. At least they have worked out this space is not for them!

Despite the potential conflict surrounding the leadership quote provided in the post I found that overall the post resonated with me.

As someone starting down the entrepreneurial path I have found that it's easy to get caught up reading the countless startup news sources, scouring endless books on how to succeed or attending the large number of conferences pitched at people like me. All have their merit in moderation but, particularly as someone who has decided to bootstrap my current startup, I find I get the most done and feel the best about what I'm doing when I focus on what my startup is building and how we're building it, rather than getting caught up in "all that noise".

In writing it down here it seems pretty obvious that focusing on what you're building should be the priority but it can be surprisingly easy to lose focus.

I'm tempted to move to IRC...does it persist messages? I assume so, based on the discussion above. I'm quite sure that when I've used IRC in the past I haven't been able to see what has occured after I've left a channel but I imagine if I run my own server there is a simple solution to this problem. Anyone care to share (though I'm Googling as we speak)?

SEEKING WORK - preferably in Sydney or Australia but open to remote work also. RoR, JS, web site design and graphic design jobs are our favorite right now yet we also have iOS app development skills in house. http://semblancesystems.com.

Thank you. I agree re: the search bar; not such a big deal. YouTube will be much nicer now.

YouTube is very clean. I don't suppose you would share your CSS? If not, I'll do it myself...but it's always nice not to re-invent the wheel.

Definitely agree that it'd be a nightmare for small business owners. Although this implementation does seem relatively easy to game it's a starting point. When it gets to selling to small businesses, simplicity of use is pretty damn important.

Firstly, congratulations to the Punchd guys.

Secondly, it is interesting because there are indeed a bunch of other punch-card replacement apps. Even here in Australia I know of at least two. If it's a pure talent acquisition (which seems to be a logical conclusion) then it is indeed quite a large sum.

I can't imagine Google wouldn't already have begun development of a similar concept when creating Google Wallet.

It's fantastic for the founders though. Not having met them, and just based on what I've read here, they seem like great guys.

That looks like quite an interesting piece of tech. I'd be keen to see it in action.