

How I made Stripe as easy to use as Paypal in 5 days - drewwilson
http://theindustry.cc/2012/10/19/space-box-behind-the-scenes/
https://spacebox.io
======
dsl
You forgot a few critical steps for a full PayPal replacement. Might I
recommend:

* Set up a Twilio number for billing support. Play hold music even if your office is closed.

* Proxy transactions to Stripe using a intermediary server in India to match the latency and reliability.

* Randomly multiply totals by 10.

* Randomly forget to call the Stripe API.

* Setup auto renewals. Even for one time payments.

* If a customer has more than 20% in receipts than the previous day, freeze all funds for 190 days.

~~~
jrockway
Also require the user to enter his One Time Password to unsubscribe from
marketing emails.

~~~
AgentConundrum
Isn't that illegal?

~~~
bwilliams18
They want to confirm your identity.

~~~
AgentConundrum
I get that, but I thought that CAN-SPAM required one-click unsubscribes.

~~~
jrockway
I'm pretty sure you're right. Laws are like traffic lights: nothing is
actually physically preventing you from driving through red lights, it's just
that you might get in trouble if you do it. "Might" being the operative word.
(And there are a lot more traffic cops than spam cops.)

------
rexreed
I clicked the article title in dread fearing someone had turned Stripe the
company into a mirror image of everything we loathe about Paypal. I was
relieved to realize the OP meant the ease of use part of Paypal, and not all
the rest of the baggage that comes with Paypal.

I'd have clicked the article with less dread had it been titled "How I made
Stripe as easy to use as Paypal in 5 days".

~~~
mparlane
This happened.

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nickwoodhams
Hey Drew,

Site looks great-

Hate to tell you though, I beat you to it by a few months :)

<http://easybill.co>

Different pricing structure. Driving keyword traffic has been a bit of a
challenge. I think that this is a tough value prop for customers.

Overall, site looks great, wish you the best with it.

~~~
gavingmiller
Just a bit of feedback on your test forms: Your credit card number doesn't
chunk the credit card into segments, making the input really difficult. And
the sliding text when fields get focused is distracting.

Also as a question. Does my subdomain have to be nickw.easybill.co or will it
be specific to my account? (not clearly stated)

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sthatipamala
I love the concept and the design. My suggestion to Drew is to post
screenshots of forms or – better yet– actual dummy forms on spacebox.io's home
page.

If I hadn't read the post, the actual website wouldn't have indicated how
great this is.

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vog
From the article:

 _> The main thing that surprised me about this build was: it wasn’t a “hack-
a-thon”. I wasn’t killing myself and never sleeping. Instead, it was just
super normal days. Loved it!_

For me, this was the most insightful thing: that the "5 days" were really 5
days, not 10 days compressed into 5 days.

------
drewwilson
You can visit the app directly here: <https://spacebox.io>

------
crux
I had been thinking about setting up a simple donation page for a website that
I run. I saw this post and decided, heck, why not. I had never touched Stripe
or (clearly) Spacebox before.

I was done and receiving donations in just about twelve minutes. The longest
part of the whole process was logging into my bank account to find my account
number.

------
windu
This looks great, but I feel like everyone is forgetting about wepay. They are
exactly in this market and are usually overshadowed by stripe. I'm testing
them out soon, and hopefully I'll be a happy customer.

~~~
acangiano
"You must be a US resident to accept payments." My reason not to use them.

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rkalla
Best of luck with this Drew. Looks like a great simple approach for folks jus
wanting to "collect some damn money" - a lot of payment platforms require a
much higher bar be cleared to get started, that is what it looks like you ace
here (especially with the form builder - brilliant)

Your offering will naturally grow an expand as Stripe does so - smart move.

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sachinag
I believe the recently announced Wufoo integration does this as well, but it
appears this flow is more elegant.

~~~
drewwilson
Ya, wufoo does it too. But my app is free :) and in the near future will have
useful analytics and CSS customization, etc for pro users.

~~~
sachinag
Yeah, I like yours better for sure. But please don't compete on price! Charge
for the useful analytics and CSS customization. louisck's web developer should
use your product for his next $5 video and you deserve to get paid for that.

~~~
twelvechairs
> please don't compete on price

It strikes me as very sad that in bringing down a monopoly (Paypal), already
you are advocating price collusion amongst the new players in the industry...

~~~
tghw
As opposed to racing to the bottom?

~~~
twelvechairs
Yes. Its called a competitive market - I don't know how you can seriously
argue against such a thing in the modern world, where all of us rely on it
(price competition) for basically everything we buy.

Though (perhaps thankfully, given the response to my post) the relatively
simple nature of this means that its (if not now then soon) going to be a
price-competitive industry anyway.

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navs
What I find most appealing about this post is his enthusiasm. It's rubbed off
on me. I've been unproductive for the past 2 hours watching anime but suddenly
I'm excited again.

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ainsleyb
This looks great! It seems to make Stripe simpler (since Stripe is essentially
simple payments for developers, but non-developers have a hard time grasping
all of their docs). If you don't plan on expanding it too much, you might try
to talk to the Stripe team and have them integrate :)

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justjimmy
Wow...you're sick. You can design, code front AND back end? Not to gush, but
that's like a step above the 'unicorn' :O Now I have something to aim for :P

(I also took a peek at Lumo...wth man...is there anything you don't do!)

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steve8918
From what I've seen, wepay.com is pretty easy to use and has more
functionality.

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kennethologist
Are you limited to offering this service to users in the country that Stripe
is currently available (US & Canada I believe) or anyone in any country?

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olalonde
How will you deal with chargebacks?

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callmeed
This looks really good.

I have a similar service about to launch.

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anandkulkarni
Good stuff! You should consider supporting recurring billing, too.

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makmanalp
Isn't this a prime candidate to be out-competed by stripe?

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tdrd
Why does stripe need to out-compete this? They still get their cut.

~~~
makmanalp
Yeah but they can just implement this in a week or two, whenever convenient,
and get all of the money.

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arkonaut
Really well done! Love where the payments space is going.

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ta12121
Paypal? Or a toy example kind of like Paypal?

~~~
Sam_Odio
You're pointing out the obvious (that this is a 5-day one person project) in a
way that's not constructive.

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evv
I am not defending a valueless response like that, but it is a bit crazy to
imply that one person could build something the size of PayPal in five days.

