Owning Payment.ly

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2154591

by entrepreneurial • 15 years ago

3 11 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If you owned Payment.ly and had the funding you needed, what type of business would you create?

jcr• 15 years ago

Do you really think basing a payment service on a domain controlled by Libya inspires trust?

entrepreneurial5• 15 years ago

Sure, why wouldn't it? It would be a US based LLC with the proper US licensing and insurance and hosted in the US.

dsl• 15 years ago

According to the US State Department "Libya remains on the list of designated state sponsors of terrorism."

Since part of the registration fees go directly to the government, registering a .ly domain is about the shortest route you can take to get funds into the hands of terrorists planning attacks on western countries without being subjected to a criminal investigation in the US.

It is fun to play pretend on the internet that your actions have no impact on the real world, but you should take a few minutes to reflect on what your business is supporting.

isakib• 15 years ago

Do you think, Libya has secured DNS management. Check this news, it happened in our country, http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/08/google-bangladesh-hacked/. If it happen again with payment.ly for the careless management of Libya? In that case, people will lost the trust. So, what about that?

entrepreneurial5• 15 years ago

Good points, but Bangladesh isn't Lybia. And if the "worry" was the case, companies/site's like bit.ly or page.ly would have a .com redundancy - like we will as well - just in case.

PHPAdam2• 15 years ago

Competing with Paypal, Google Checkout and the rest would be difficult without major funding. You need to find a USP such as https://squareup.com or http://flattr.com/

If a USP to compete with the likes does not come to mind, then find a niche business activity that makes payments. Then design it around their and their customers requirements, I have a similar project on the drawing board.

entrepreneurial5• 15 years ago

Yes, competing would be and we do have a USP. Some parts of our services are similar with the traditional payment companies (google checkout and paypal) which will allow us to take part of their market share.

komlenic• 15 years ago

I understand why you may have framed your question the way you did, but isn't getting a domain before knowing what kind of business you're going to create a little backwards? If you're going to attempt to compete in the payment space, you'd need a great niche, or else do a bunch of things better/cheaper than the others. There may be more room in B2B, than C2B/C2C.

The .ly domains are attractive, especially considering so many great names under that TLD are still available. However, I'm personally a little wary (whether there is just cause to be or not) and I would be wary x10 for anything commercial/financial.

entrepreneurial5• 15 years ago

I know what we are going to do with it - we have a great idea, I just wanted to see what others would do with it.

True, that is what is holding us back. We're exploring some .coms

Owning Payment.ly

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