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Comment by hasenj | Hacker News Reader

I don't quite get his message, it contains things which I see as contradictions.

He uses "Square" as an example of doing it right. I have no idea what square is, but quoting the article:

> Square processes payments. They don't handle group payments, they won't auto pay your bills, and they have no presence online to compete with PayPal.

A payment service that doesn't handle all the use cases of payment? Isn't this exactly what he's saying you shouldn't do? Yet he quotes it as an example of doing things right?

I don't get it.

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Square puts out a credit card reader you attach to a cell phone to make charges "in the field". It is perfect for what it does. The use case is some band is selling t shirts and CDs at a gig and now they can take cash or credit instead of cash only.

The message, while I don't agree with it, is clear solve a small problem completely, don't try to do more because you can't do it well and will drive away all your customers. What he is speaking out against is what you suggest doing solving the wider problem, because he automatically assumes you will do it in a halfassed manner.

Square is not trying to handle every use case for payments. They said "Hey, it is a pain in the ass to pay people with credit cards in person." So they solved that. And they solved every part of it – the merchant relations, the design and functionality of their app, the pricing, the backend architecture, the card reader, security – extremely well.

They are not trying to handle "all the use cases of payment", and I'm saying that they should not move into any other type of payments until their product is as good as they can make it. And they don't, on purpose, because they don't want to solve 90% of 10 different aspects of payment. They solve 1, 100%.

Thanks for the clarification.

Square nails their use case of "allowing people to pay in person with a credit card." That's Square's problem. They aren't focused on being the generic omnipresent payment processor, just making physical transactions possible without cash or checks.

Edit: I do agree that the author really sould have made the problem statement more clear.

Well, that's still pretty vague.

It seems like what you did there is just reformulate the problem statement to make it look like a stand-alone problem instead of as a use case (or subset) of a large problem.

Handling credit card payments in person is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT problem to being an online payment processor.

Other than paypal, no one offers BOTH services... Paypal seems to have done it, purely as a response to square.

Banks I guess do it, but they don't do any of it well.

So which problem are you refering to that groups In person payment with online payment? Because it feels much harder to frame them together than apart...

Agree. This is a poor article

Poor is a bit strong, but yes the message was mixed.

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