
Origins of Venmo (2014) - saadalem
https://kortina.nyc/essays/origins-of-venmo/
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dheera
> We decided, you should be able to share this stuff, because it’s interesting

Interesting, because this is main reason I don't like Venmo, and prefer
PayPal, but everyone seems to want to use Venmo. In my social circle, many
people have expressed similar sentiments.

I think the main thing they hit is being able to pay your Facebook friends by
entering their name, before Facebook had Facebook Pay. Come to think of it, it
would have been much wiser if Facebook acquired them instead of rolling out a
competing payments system.

~~~
probe
The second point is really interesting - how instrumental was having a semi-
public feed in them taking off? I use venmo b/c everyone I know has it, it has
my bank info anyways, and it's easy to find people. Even now with a gazillion
options I still default to venmo.

On the latter point of finding people though, a public feed has been useful.
Often when I venmo someone new (ex. dinner), it's helpful to see my friends
also having venmo'ed the person so I know I have the right account.

~~~
ndespres
The "network" functionality, whether you use the social/feed aspect of it,
does warn you if you attempt to pay someone that you've never paid before and
that you have no friends in common with. That's also a good way to make sure
you're paying the right person.

~~~
dheera
The funny thing is I get the warning almost every time because I only ever use
Venmo with new acquaintances I'm eating with for the first time in a group
setting.

Once I'm actually friends with someone we stop splitting bills and end up
roughly alternating (sometimes after fighting) about who pays. Might be an
Asian thing though.

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boring_twenties
I still can't figure out for the life of me why anyone uses Venmo. I tried it
once and had an awful experience. For those that use it, what is the appeal
over simply using PayPal? That also lets you send money to friends for free.
As far as I can tell, all the differences are very much in PayPal's favor:

1\. Must use mobile app to send payments. You cannot send through the website.
WTF?

2\. When I tried to send $250, from my Venmo balance no less, I got an opaque
error about please try again later. Only through trial and error did I figure
out that it would let me send up to $100, but no more.

3\. Everything about the social feed aspect. Among the Venmo users I know, no
one actually uses it. Everyone talks about how easy it is to turn it off. But
isn't this its only differentiator? If you're going to turn it off, why not
just stick with PayPal which doesn't have this annoying anti-feature in the
first place?

4\. I could be wrong, but I think that even if you turn the feed off, you
can't hide your list of "friends" from the public.

~~~
barbarr
The main value of Venmo to me is that it feels a lot less awkward than other
alternatives. I think the main reason it's less awkward is because you can
safely assume a friend will have it set up already (unlike with PayPal or even
similar services like Facebook Pay), and because it's easy to find people.

~~~
boring_twenties
I guess the question is something of a chicken and egg, then. Why did all your
friends already set up Venmo, when it seems to be strictly worse (worse in
some ways, not better in any ways) than the existing solution (Paypal)?

~~~
jeffy90
in 2014 I'm not sure that paypal had a nice clean simple mobile app like Venmo
did. In 2014 Venmo was the best, and today I think it still fulfills its
purpose quite well.

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iamwpj
>We thought, “Why are we still doing this? We do everything else with our
phones. We should definitely be using PayPal to pay each other back. But we
don’t, and none of our friends do.”

None of my friends use any pay services. Apple pay, Venmo, Paypal, it's a
crapshoot if I can find a way to pay them back. I was able to convince them to
use Facebook Messenger pay because we were having a conversation in it once.
We are in our 20s. I would be surprised if they had set up Apple/Google pay on
their phone to pay contactless (maybe now with covid). My point is -- Venmo
doesn't solve any problems it just creates another -- namely another payment
system none of my peers use.

~~~
webkike
That sucks. Literally everyone I know uses Venmo.

~~~
saurik
Yeah: I (still) live in a college town, and the idea that someone doesn't use
Venmo feels very alien.

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mcntsh
Off topic, but one major thing I found interesting moving from the U.S. to
Europe was how the SEPA system here makes products like Venmo obsolete and how
Venmo seems like just a bandaid on top of the archaic banking system there.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Exactly, Australia and NZ too.

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saurik
College Humor did an amazing take on the public feed "social networking"
feature of Venmo.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BWFLztKBrLY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BWFLztKBrLY)

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lwhalen
I quit venmo when they went mobile only. There's no obvious way they make
money, so it must be in the metadata they collect... somewhere. I can control
what they see from a desktop web browser, but on mobile their app asks for far
too much.

------
dang
Discussed (a bit) at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844404)

