You really need about a million dollars to make a marketable product. (not a lifestyle business) You can either put a million dollars of your own blood, sweat and tears in, in which case it'll be the wildest ride of your life, or you can deploy capital.
It looks like it's just code but it's not. There's a dizzying array of skills and knowledge you must be able to deploy effectively. If your product is not in an established industry and niche, if a bank can't understand you, that makes everything much, much harder. There's a reason franchises do so well.
When you get started, you don't know what's going to hose you. It's easy in retrospect to say that they shouldn't have messed around with a business model requiring a bank partnership to get started without already having that partnership before building anything, but they didn't understand that going in.
It looks like it's just code but it's not. There's a dizzying array of skills and knowledge you must be able to deploy effectively. If your product is not in an established industry and niche, if a bank can't understand you, that makes everything much, much harder. There's a reason franchises do so well.
When you get started, you don't know what's going to hose you. It's easy in retrospect to say that they shouldn't have messed around with a business model requiring a bank partnership to get started without already having that partnership before building anything, but they didn't understand that going in.