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Comment by andrethegiant | Hacker News Reader

Never understood why/how Venmo gained so much popularity in the first place. Using it is not any easier than using PayPal, Square Cash, etc. The only differentiating feature I can think of is its newsfeed of friends' transactions (and it baffles me how anyone finds that interesting). Am I missing something?

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It's a lot easier than Paypal to make an account and send money. Your friends and contacts are already loaded via whatever social network you OAuth[orized] the app through.

It is quite literally as easy as typing a friends name and having it auto completed. Typing in a number and hitting send.

Paypal might have an app that does something similar and it likely came after Venmo gained popularity. For most of us, who have been using Paypal since the 2000s, it might not seem logical, but Paypal UI experience does seem like an archaic UI experience by comparison even to me.

PayPal has had "send money to any email address" since the very beginning, or close to it. Yes the recipient has to then create a PayPal account, but that's usually not very painful.

Have you ever made a PayPal account? Sending in scans of two different photo IDs isn't exactly "not very painful".

yep, works fine ...

When it launched, it was miles ahead of PayPal. You could sign up and be transferring money within 10 minutes, and to cash out, once you verified your account information, they actually delivered the money to your account quickly, often as soon as the next business day. PayPal, until recently, never delivered the money in a timely manner, not to mention all the freezes and holds that have them paying out a class action settlement.

As of now, I don't disagree. PayPal has successfully adopted most of the best parts of Venmo (though time to receive money remains the slowest of all the competitors) and Square Cash is miles ahead of both of them - the ability to send money to people who don't have an account, and allowing them to access that money without creating an account is simply fantastic. No more conversations with friends like "Look, I'm sorry I don't have cash right now. You can wait, or you can download Venmo and let me pay you now."

I think the most reasonable comparison would be with Square, and it's a question of marketing. While Square has p2p payment features it's marketing is mostly towards businesses with its tagline being "start selling today" right on its website. Venmo's tagline is "share payments," indicating they're marketing themselves mostly for p2p. Paypal is a bit of a pain to sign up in comparison with Venmo, which allows seamless Facebook Auth via your phone so is easier for people to sign up for. Kind of all irrelevant since Paypal owns Venmo anyway, but there you go.

I didn't at first either, but after using Venmo, the simplicity of the UI is amazing.

I can easily search for a friend, and send them money right away. In addition, you can request money from people.

It's really easy to split groceries, utilities, and other bills with roommates and friends.

The fact that everyone has it and people don't believe that Square Cash actually works as well as it does.

If I remember correctly, PayPal owns Venmo.

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