Take a look through the original thread. Lots of hot takes didn't age well. Currently processing $14M per month in gross volume ~ $150K/Month.

AMA!

I always had an interest in design, designing a lot of websites before and during college. My first job out of college was a Java Support Dev, for a health care company, which was soul-sucking. Troubleshooting production bugs and fixing them was not something I wanted to do.

I volunteered to build the interface of a product we were working on and never looked back.

There are several copycat apps that have tried varying pricing structures (some more like 1.3%) and others that tried to go lower (like 0.1%).

Looks like the redirect is broken. Try https://paymentforstripe.com

We have an integration with Payworks for non-US, but mostly hoping Terminal rolls out globally soon.

But, no card reader is required.

So how do you handle chip & pin without a card reader?

It’s handled as non card present, similar to e-commerce. At some point, 3DS will be required.

So if the person in front of your stall has a stolen card, and you are about to sell them some goods. Let us say you are selling them a tv. They play with their stolen card, take the tv, the card owner sees a transaction they don't know and complain to their bank, you get a chargeback. You just lost a tv. In the UK this is rare, due to chip & pin. It is very easy to defend a chargeback when the customer entered a pin into your terminal.

If someone wants a tv delivered to their house you do a 'customer not present' transaction, which can use their house number and area code to authenticate that the card is registered at the address you are delivering to. Now if they raise a chargeback you can defend it by showing a delivery note etc. If you use a 'not present' to do a face to face sale surely you have just defeated the security model entirely?

Chip & pin is not a requirement in the US, but I agree with you that using it does alleviate risk. This is why Stripe offers a fee discount to 2.7%+5c when using their card reader vs. 2.9%+30c. These are common fee structures for other gateways like Square.

The app runs all transactions through the Connect accounts Radar fraud filters, and the user can opt to force several levels of validation on the card (CVV, zip/postal, name, address).

These types of transactions happen all the time, regardless of if they're more secure or not.

> Chip & pin is not a requirement in the US,

It really is in the UK. I think you will struggle here

Not required in the US. Email receipts are built into Stripe if you provide emails.

Thought about this so many times with domain registrars. I’m content not being a huge company. Way simpler.

Didn’t. First integrated with Magtek (insanely painful). Then I wished that another company would make it simpler. Along cane Stripe’s Terminal and here we are.

Bingo, although the YAUs is a bit lower than that for obvious reasons. However, simple solution for these places to depend on for in person charges.

Though the private jet company and exotic car rental place are a touch higher than that.

Great question. It’s not about the money, but more about how I was passive for too long just letting it be. I’ve waited to invest in several things for growth until I knew had the market cornered. I’m not too concerned about adding more features now, so the only next logical step is growth.

Growing from $6M to $10M didn’t seem huge at the time, but now it does...

Still, what's your motivation for wanting to grow more? Money can be a legitimate motivation, but you said that's not it. I guess I'm curious what drives you now.

Larger user base will hopefully protect me from being cut off.

One could argue also the contrary, a larger user base might make you more of a target for Stripe to cut-off. Who knows.

That argument doesn’t make any sense to me. Stripe gets 2.9% regardless of how many users I have. It’s just volume to them.

I believe they mean that by, increasing your user base and revenue even more, you'll convince Stripe that having their own feature/app developed is absolutely necessary. And they might be concerned that you represent a one-person company, single point of failure. They can't just rely on you to be there for them forever.

But I really hope they don't :) Great story. Thank you for sharing and for the inspiration.