zende

This is exactly why regulations exist. MtGox should need to register as a Money Service Business (MSB) in the US and as a Money Transmitter in each state that they support. That needs to happen even if they're not a US company. The same applies to the EU, Australia, Canada, and many other countries that have regulations around this kind of activity.

The purpose of the regulations are to protect consumers for companies that are either malicious or incompetent.

The problem is that the licensing process is expensive, painful, and long. There should be better ways. Nonetheless, there's a reason why the exist.

One of the things to also consider is where you live and if you're effected by Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which is a form of depression. It sounds like there's more going on than just your job, and you have to consider if your feeling about things have changed during the Winter.

It may be worth the effort of focusing on ways to improve your mood by exercising and spending time with friends to get you to a better state. That will let you think more clearly, have more energy for side projects, and seek out new employment or go out on your own.

There's usually a lot more going on with our mood than we initially think.

You can automate the DL verification process using Jumio. You hold your DL in front of your computer's camera, Jumio reads the info, and verifies the information. IIRC, Western Union uses Jumio for this very purpose.

You can also take money from a bank account using an account number and routing number. That's why Donald Knuth stopped sending out checks to pay bounties.[1]

Is it another startup whose usefulness stems in a large part from the lack of ubiquitous free, same-day interbank payments between checking accounts in the US (unlike much of the rest of the developed world)?

Partly but not all.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check

I didn't list the payout time because it varies by bank. It is instant (24/7) when we're able to go through an ATM network like STAR or PULSE. We'll learn a lot more during the development.

... and thanks for the support!

Thanks!

I want to stay away from anything on Balanced v. Stripe though. We're trying to move the market forward and innovate.

(ceo of balanced)

We don't have any plans to offer interchange+ pricing. We found that would create more work for our customers. The predicability in pricing is part of the value that Balanced provides.

I know the part about interest. You can't collect interest on money that's not actually your own, which is the same case with any payments company.

Out of curiosity, why don't you release the money faster?

(ceo of balanced)

Tickets are open on my [relatively popular] software of choice and have been for months; no timetable has been set.)

I'm sorry to hear that. What software would you like to see Balanced support?

We have an apart­ment near our San Mateo office that any­one can use when they’re in town. Peo­ple tend to travel to San Mateo about once every 6 weeks on average.

This is one of the most important parts of the post IMHO. You have to see people at some point even if they work remotely or work occasionally from home. It's particularly helpful to coordinate travel schedules to get as many people in the office at one time no matter how small or large the company is.

MyNameIsMK: We'd be happy to help. We're online right now for chat on #balanced on irc.freenode.net, which you can join online by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=balanced&uio=MTE9OTIaf

You can also email us at support@balancedpayments.com

Generally, we hold to the offered rate even in the case that the card mix changes and becomes more expensive. In the case that the card mix becomes less expensive, we'll decrease the rate as our costs have changed and we can offer a better price. Our pricing is always based on the costs of the transactions, rather than volume alone.

This poses an interesting optimization problem. Given that model, a customer should email you at the beginning of every month asking you to (re)evaluate their rate given whatever period (trailing month? trailing 3 months?) you use to determine the card mix.

If the card mix has changed such that Stripe's cost has decreased, the customer would get a lower rate. If the card mix has not changed or has changed such that Stripe's cost has increased, the customer would maintain the same rate.

The above process could further be improved if the customer keeps track of their own card mix and only emails when favorable to do so. This could even be automated.

There are downsides to focusing rates and adjusting them on volume alone. With the Balanced pricing matrix, if a merchant has a mediocre Q3 in volume, their pricing could increase for the highest volume quarter (Q4), even if Balanced's effective cost per transaction hasn't changed at all.

Yes. It's certainly not perfect. We used to have a tiered model where in each month the first $x was charged at some rate, the next $y would be charged at another rate, etc. It became difficult for customers to calculate their effective rate and project into the future. We'll continue try to improve based on the feedback we get from customers on our current model. Regardless, we'll publish any improvements in our pricing model and make it available to everyone.

I don't want to make this conversation about Balanced vs. Stripe. I asked my question because I was genuinely interested and wanted to see if there was something we could learn from each other. If you do have an internal formula, I encourage you to publish it. If the model is better than the one Balanced uses, it will allow us to learn and for everyone to improve. That is the nature of openness and what we're trying to accomplish.

What happens if a customer's card mix changes?

This is dead on. Here's a few other things to keep in mind:

1. A Durbin Regulated Debit Card include any bank that has over $10B in deposits. That's most debits cards by volume.

2. We've been lucky in being able to negotiate with our processing banks (also called acquiring bank) to receive very favorable rates to pass on those savings. You have to factor in this cost in addition to the interchange defined by the card brands.

3. Amex is more expensive than most other cards, but Amex is also the only card brand that will negotiate on their interchange based on volume and other factors.

abalone: thanks for writing this up. It's a more detailed answer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7033534

It's not.

+1 for openness

(ceo of Balanced)

This is great feedback!

Is this essentially what you're looking for?

  require 'balanced'
  Balanced.configure('ak-test-2ficCWmYvpRBBSzC7Me62ZTX0Y2DPGjgt')

  card = Balanced::Card.find('/cards/CC4TsBYO9E4IRQqg0jvrEg9i')
  card.debit(
    :amount => 5000,
    :appears_on_statement_as => 'Statement text',
    :description => 'Some descriptive text for the debit in the dashboard'
  )

The state monitors transactions first for illegal activity under mechanisms like the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). Any payments or financial services company follow Know Your Customer standards including running OFAC checks to ensure that the recipient is not a known terrorist.

Monitoring for taxes comes second.

BSA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_secrecy_act

the expectations of the people who made a bet on us either with their money or their hard work that we feel we've let down, even as we know that most startups do not achieve this goal.

I'm sorry to hear that you feel like you've let people down. That's a terrible way to feel and live your life. Investors and advisors back you early on because they believe in you. Embracing that philosophy is liberating, and actually, allows you to take more risks and become more success (and happy) from my experience.

I'm sure they'll be supportive of your next venture.

Thank you for sharing your experience with everyone. I'm sure this wasn't an easy blog post to write.

they always say you should eventually be embarrassed of the first version of your product.

Definitely! If you're not embarrassed of your first version, then you waited too long to launch.

You should try listing a product. The flow is actually pretty good, especially given the product indexing, tagging, and categorization that has to happen behind the scene.

You should check out adding a product. The flow is actually different from both Svpply and Fancy.

Ashton is also an investor in Fancy and understands the space well.

I would compare A+ more to Wanelo, which has massive growth. There's a lot of space for other players in the area.

Sorry to say this but if Ashton Kutcher's name wasn't on this it would have not even made it to the front page of HN much less been worthy of people commenting on it

That's possible, but you could argue something similar about repeat entrepreneurs. Ashton is an incredible marketer, which is a HUGE part of a consumer product like this.

The card was declined because it was an invalid card number.

"No such issuer" means that the first six digits, Bank Identification Number, are incorrect and card was declined as a result.

We (Balanced) should be doing a better job to make this error more understandable or mask it by returning some invalid card number error.

People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers but put them in shitty positions. Then bitch about them not being good enough. It's like buying a sports car and putting shitty watered down gas in it and complaining about how the car doesn't perform like it should.

Beautifully said!

I’m not sure what made them rethink their [remote employee] policy, but Balanced again asked me to come work for them, this time as their first remote developer.

I can answer that. We changed the policy to allowing remote team members as long as they are primarily contributing to open source projects.

The problem with being remote is how much you lose in communication when working on a project. You don't have that problem with open source projects. The design mocks, discussions, etc. on Github are the same as anything someone in the office would see.

Also ... it just got to the point where it was stupid not to hire remear (Ben).

I work at Balanced.

I have to imagine that validating their features before even building them does wonders for their development schedule.

More so than I could have imagined.

Here's the source: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-docs

I suppose a simple way, without getting involved politically, would be to stop using any service which is hosted in the US or by a company that falls under US jurisdiction.

I'm not sure it's that simple, nor is that entirely practical. It's not the companies you need to put pressure on. I would image that some of them aren't entirely excited at the idea of working with the NSA, but they aren't given much choice.

The unfortunate truth is that lobbying DC is the most effective way to enact this kind of change. You can do this online to some extent by using services like Votizen.com. Lobbying by Silicon Valley and others in tech certainly worked for the JOBS act.

Similar to how the VIP feature works but in the consolidated view that you've created. I want to see everything in one place.

It's too easy to get distracted by other emails once I open Mail.app or, in my case, Mailbox.