Comment by getmetheswan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by getmetheswan | Hacker News Reader

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'They just made it hard for no reason'. LOL. Osper has raised over 11MM. It takes a lot more than a kickstarter campaign to fire up a card program like Osper or GoHenry. Give Marqeta a call and check out their fee structure.

If there is constructive feedback here, it is that there were smaller, cheaper hops PiggyBank could have taken to get a smaller product out there earlier to validate assumptions. And if they had taken a few of these hops, they would have learned along the way, and maybe one day would have had a chance to pitch for a 10MM raise. But they didn't.

It feels like a typical 'first startup' experience - as founders, not employee. At least there is some really great collective feedback in this thread about how they could approach things differently if they were to try again. Unfortunately, little of it is on tap when there are just two people in a room trying to navigate a path.

Thanks for sharing Oscar.

> "It takes a lot more than a kickstarter campaign to fire up a card program like Osper or GoHenry."

No, it doesn't. At our startup we managed to get on a prepaid program without funding (we are a London based startup). Infact, through negotiation we even got the sign up fees waived.

And, we did all that before we had ANY funding.

> "Give Marqeta a call and check out their fee structure."

We did call Marqeta but they're not yet in the UK. Can't discuss pricing because of the NDA they make you sign but I can tell you that we didn't have to pay anything to Marqeta during development.

But, either way my issue is that they kept blaming their banking partners for the failure of their startup instead of taking an actual critical look at the mistakes they made.

I can't comment on the UK eco-system, but things are definitely more difficult in the US.

You first have to convince a prepaid provider to work with you. You'll need runway for this. You then have to convince a bank to back your card program. For this you also need runway. And if you get through that and start developing, you are immediately on a clock since card program fees are substantial when they kick in.

Let's say it takes you 6 months to get from scratch to launch and fees are waived up to that point. I'd guesstimate you now need a minimum of 25K retained users on your card program to cover costs. If you have a conversion rate of 5%, that means 500K downloads. And that's before factoring in churn.

The PiggyBank team raised 100K. They were two people and iOS only. It is a stretch to think they could achieve all of this before running out of cash.

I am with Johnie and a few others - the lesson is to try something less ambitious first and use success there to raise money to build something more ambitious.

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