How I ALMOST built a failing product in Web3

Collecting payments online is expensive. Stripe will cost you ~3-7% to take payments depending on your country. Others are worse.

I had an idea to do $0 payments with UST. After 2 pre-orders and 10s of people wanting the product on Twitter, UST crashed. And so did my dream of making millions.

Here's how I was pitching my idea:

Problem: Payment processing costs 3-7% of the revenue
Solution: Collect payments using UST payment rails and pay $0

How is this possible?
If you know UST, you know Anchor. It's a platform that gave you 20% interest on your UST/year. My plan was to eat the payment fees myself and use the money in the treasury (payments that the client hadn't cashed out to their bank yet) to earn the interest. In the ideal scenario, the costs should balance out over a month or so and the rest of the interest generated is profit. Cha-ching!

I had a cool landing page too.

...but then UST crashed and took $60B with it.

Thank gawd I hadn't taken anyone's money yet or I would be toast. I lost my own $3K. Sad but still OK.

Without UST, I saw no way of getting this done, so I ended up shutting shop and refunding pre-orders.

Sucks to put an idea to rest but being an entrepreneur is knowing when to give back. Now I'm validating my next idea - Launchman. Fingers crossed 🤞