kevinholesh

Couldn't have said it better myself.

We don't have any plans to make a hardware system for taking payments. Only online.

Square is not a business I want to be up against right now :-)

We're purposely not trying to compete on price. There are always going to be cheaper solutions out there.

We're aiming to be the best. We're aiming to be the absolute easiest checkout process and the simplest experience for the merchant.

We cap our Forge fee at $500 a month. You'll always pay the 2.9%+30 cents per transaction, but you'll never pay Forge more than $500 a month.

I don't see us competing with Stripe. If you're a developer and have the time to write and maintain a payment solution around Stripe, then Forge definitely isn't for you.

We're going after the people who don't want to code all of that themselves and just want to sell something and get money deposited into their bank account.

That's certainly a valid point. We're trying to convey that you're forging a lasting online business and doing the hard work to be independent from a corporate job.

If the name turns out to be losing us business, then we'll have to address it.

Absolutely. If you're doing enough business, that 2% really adds up. At that point, it is financially worth it for you to build your own backend payment solution using Stripe or Balanced to save money.

But when you're first starting out selling something, it's a huge capital investment to build that payment processing code on top of Stripe/Balanced, likely $5,000+ if you do it right. We're trying to make it as easy as possible to get started.

Thank you for the feedback :-)

Believe me. We're bummed about that too. We're working as hard as we can to get into other countries, but we had to start somewhere.

You are correct. We are more expensive than Stripe if you're just looking at money.

But we look at it from a time and capital perspective. With Stripe, you have to code and maintain your own payment solution on the backend and your own checkout form. You also have to worry about a million other things like emailing your customers when they place an order, and handling refunds. If you don't have the coding skills to build that yourself, you have to hire an expensive developer to build and maintain that for you.

If that extra 2% cost savings is worth it to endure the hassle above, then Forge isn't for you. We're aiming at people who don't want to deal with all that and would rather concentrate on growing their business doing things like launching a new product and marketing their current ones.

Designer at Forge here.

Those are both great questions. We're aiming Forge at people who cannot write their own backend payment processor to use Stripe, and only know basic HTML. If you have the skills and the time to code and maintain payment processing and a checkout form, then Forge isn't for you. We're aiming it at non-techies who want to sell something online.

PayPal certainly has its advantages, but we're trying to solve two main problems: the checkout experience and the withdrawing of funds. The checkout experience on PayPal has 5 or 6 steps and redirects you away from the merchant's site to complete a payment. Ours is on one page and is embedded directly in the merchant's site. Click "buy product", checkout form pops down, fill out 6 or so fields and click "buy now." Done.

Also, we automatically deposit your profits into your bank account every Friday. Our goal is to get this down to the next-day. You sell something Tuesday morning, ship it Tuesday afternoon, and the money is in your bank account on Wednesday morning.

I didn't mean that programmers and "people who barely understand HTML" were the same person. Sorry for the confusion.

We're aiming Forge at people who can't code their own website from scratch, not really you or me. These non-techies can manage a Wordpress install or a Squarespace site, and just want to sell something online.

I think that selling online shouldn't be about the logistics of running a website and handling payments. It's more of a product and marketing problem. Forge takes away some (but not all) of the technical hurdles of selling things online.

We appreciate all the feedback and we'll try to clear things up based on your advice with the homepage. Thank you.

I agree. It would be better if we had storefronts for these people, and product pages they can link to.

That's on our todo list.

That's a great point. Perhaps a demo video explaining how it works would show the "easyness" of it.

Easy enough for programmers to use, but not people who barely understand HTML. That's the market Forge is serving.

Designer of Forge here.

We're aiming to solve the problems of the non-techie market. People who just want to sell something online shouldn't be worrying about payment gateways, payment processors or designing a checkout process. Forge handles that.

With Stripe, it's fairly easy for a programmer to write their own payment processing backend and build a checkout process for it. We're not trying to serve the people that have the development skills to use Stripe. We're going after the people who use PayPal Buy Now buttons.

Were these high quality users in the sense that they converted to paid from a free account? What source lead to the highest quality users?

From the source of the website: "<!-- Are you looking at the source code? Like we'd put the answers here. Creative tho... -->"

It was worth a shot.

I don't think filling in a form online will ever be glamorous. The thing I strive for when designing a form is that it is usable by anyone and instantly recognizable as a form.

This is a great plugin, but consider the consequences of using non-browser-default form elements and the potential to confuse your less technical customers.

"I suspect that what want they’re really pursuing is recognition, either from Facebook or in court, that they were the brains behind Facebook."

In my mind, these twins will never be the reason why Facebook was successful, no matter what some court decides. The value of a new website is not the idea behind it, it is the hard work of adding some kind of value and the tough task of getting people to use it. The idea that Connect U could be a "website that connects college friends" is not what made Facebook successful; it was the hard work of Zuckerberg and those around him.

I hope the twins are granted their chance to appeal and lose everything. I also hope they're never mentioned by any news story again.

I've been using Things since it came out for the Mac and I've been wanting OTA sync since the iPhone came out, but it isn't completely necessary. It is a nice to have feature, but I would rather have it done right than rushed to production.

By his logic, Apple waiting months before letting the iPhone have 3rd party apps should've killed it; or Apple not having copy+paste until version 3.0 should've killed it. But neither of those happen because Apple was patient enough to do it right the first time.

Why not put it up on Github so we can help you finish it?

I'm currently a full time jQTouch developer, but I would much prefer a working environment like the one you're describing. I would certainly be willing to help develop it.

Though I disagree with Arrington quite often, congratulations on the acquisition. He worked his ass off to build TechCrunch to where it is today.

Or use a 3D printing service like http://cloudfab.com/ if you just like making the 3D .stl files.

It's great to see Apple taking on the problem head-on. I'd much rather see honesty from a company than have them deny it and sweep it under the rug as if it were never a problem.

He's using CSS media queries, similar to what's being done here:

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/using-css-media-queries...

Check out the code he uses to make this happen near the bottom of his main CSS file:

http://hicksdesign.co.uk/css/layout.css

I give my projects a deadline of about 6 months of part-time work. That doesn't mean Google has to buy them within 6 months, but they have to be profitable after that time. Profitability is my ultimate gauge of success and determines whether or not I'm continuing the project.

Interestingly enough, I was thinking about how I would do a case study this morning and here's what I came up with:

* Tell a story. This would be in the form of an interview. Basic questions from my company and let the business do most of the talking. Get to the heart of how the person uses my product.

* Use basic data and charts.

  - Show how the bottom line increased

  - Show how productivity increased with the use of my product

  - Show how my product improved conversion

The best case studies are done by 37signals. I actually enjoy reading them and peeking into how other companies work. For example: http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2010/05/make-sport...

How is it a proof of concept website if no one can sign up for it yet?