dc_rog

From Mercury’s own website “ Get up to $5M FDIC insurance through our partner banks and their sweep networks to ensure eligible deposits are protected.”

Why not try sell Pocket instead of shutting it down? Seems like such a waste

Super cool.

Typo here “Show your art, keep friends up-to-date or share family photos with lode ones.”

Funny because I often read “open to work” as “desperate”. Would love to know the success rate of quietly looking vs “open to work” and who gets hired more.

Maybe not, but they’ll tell you what they don’t like about an incumbent and that’s sometimes all you need to enter a market.

Start telling your story about why you built it in the first place. Tell it on any community that you think people who are in a similar need will be. Get narrow, try a few small niches. Stick with it for a month and then see who is following along. That is your audience. Start to tease out features based on outcomes that those people will achieve once they are helped by your product. Let your audience tell you what they want.

Paid ads, etc, will very likely not yield good results at this early stage because you don’t know your ideal customer profile well enough and no one knows you or your product well enough to trust you. This will build over time.

Crowdfunding and donations are very high risk for fraud and money laundering activities. These approved platforms likely do some type of risk mitigation that Stripe is comfortable with when processing the transactions and take on some of the fraud and chargeback risk.

*Not affiliated with any so this is an educated guess.

Probably depends mostly on the payout country (where you are located) that will drive KYC requirements from the processor (stripe, etc), where people are paying you from (currency acceptance), and a little bit on what you are selling (e.g. subscriptions need a little more infrastructure).

“Non-US” could be any of 190+ other countries. Where specifically?

I finally splurged on an Apple Watch. But before I had a very cheap $20 alarm vibrating watch marketed towards reminding people to take their pills. It worked great as a vibrating morning alarm so I didn’t wake my partner up.

This is not shade because I like this space, but how did you decide YC/venture path was right for Roame? I see many bootstrapped builders in travel (or have a lower margin business around content/affiliate revenue) and would love to know why you chose to raise venture capital or if you could share your thoughts around this topic.

For early versions I’ve had a much easier time building with subscription model (used a third party, set up in one day). Unless it was a key differentiator for a customer choosing me, usage based was more complicated to set up for shipping quickly early on. There are 3rd parties that help with this but it’s more complex.