How I built a platform that's processed more than $2m at 17
Wow! It was only a few months ago that SuperPay (https://superpayit.com/) crossed the $1.3m mark, and now that we've passed $2m, it's even crazier.
A bit of background behind myself and SuperPay: I'm Che, 17 years old, and living in London. I started SuperPay Dec 2018 (I was 15) as a mini internal tool for an accountancy firm to easily accept card payments without paying the PayPal premium. After seeing how useful it was for them, I decided to spin it out as my own project, and it's grown organically since then.
Today SuperPay is the fastest and easiest way to accept one-time and recurring payments backed by Stripe with zero code. It's an awesome feeling knowing that my product is really helping businesses grow by taking the complexity of payments out of their minds - that's what motivates me.
We crossed the $2m mark a week ago (I didn't even notice at first 🤦♂️), and the most exciting thing is that we processed more than $500k last month alone! Hopefully, that gives you some idea of how fast we're currently growing. It took us 15 months to reach the $1m mark, now it's taken us 3 months to reach the $2m mark (https://cln.sh/p6ktto).
Being such a small team means that we really have to think about what we want to be spending our time on. So we take massive advantage of managed services like Heroku. As much as I love managing infrastructure, it's time-consuming, and I much prefer spending my time on features my customers love! Not stressing over the size of my JS bundles.
My first customers, we're friends and family initially, but after I'd exhausted that list, we took the leap and became an official Stripe Partner (https://stripe.com/accept-payments/superpay). I then understood the value of a trusted and established marketplace that you can leverage to propel your own growth.
There is honestly so much more I want to share about my journey so far, but I'm not sure where to start... So please go ahead and ask me anything! You can DM on Twitter (https://twitter.com/che_sampat) or shoot me an email over at [email protected] I'd love to hear from you.
Congrats 🎉 Tell us more about getting users and your marketing efforts.
What have worked?
What didn't work?
Hey Che, that's awesome - congrats!
A few questions (if you don't mind)
Are you worried about building a business so dependent on Stripe? It seems to me superpayit and competitors such as https://tillypay.com/ have found a gap in that Stripe is sort of hard for a non technical person to do standard payment things. What if Stripe puts more focus on becoming more "non-tech" friendly?
How much revenue have you earned through $2/million processed?
Hats off to you - super impressive stuff at such a young age!
Thanks! Of course:
This is something that I constantly think about. Stripe is a developer centric product. At its very core it's a developers product. And I think it's incredibly hard to make both a killer developer product (that they have done) and make a killer no-code product.
We charge a 1% fee on top of anything processed through SuperPay
Basically you made about $20K revenue from transactions, which means you would need about $1MM in transactions per month to at least have a $10k MRR. Which means you would be a $12MM SaaS startup if you achieved your goals.
Hey Che, is there a public documentation page for superpayit? Could not find it. Would want to read on how to potentially use it in my project. Thanks!
Dealing with payments is not an easy task. Have you experienced any hack attempts or problems that led to funds being at risk? Also, how do you deal with legal issues being just 17 yo?
I studied the SuperPay site and don't see what it does that I would not get from Stripe directly. Can you explain?
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Hey, can you tell us about how you deal with regulations? It seems to me that you're trying to reduce the friction layer which is required by law - KYC. How do you perform it?
I'm just trying to warn that it's a heavily regulated industry for a reason (Payments). I can think of many things that could go wrong:
Comes to show
I was validating the exact product 6 weeks ago and decided to pivot after minimal to no traction
Similar to payfunnels from my research
Main issue i found was people did not find the difference between this and paypal/stripe
But shows that if you do the right marketing, the audience exists
Wow, great to see you here. Congrats on your success - keep it up.
Hi Che, you've made some great progress so far, but I found some pain points while trying to test out your product.
(1) It is unclear what this offers developers/ website builders. Is there an API that I can use, or how does this integrate into a website?
(2) Can you give a video demonstration of your product?
(3) The signup process is tedious and requires multiple steps. When I first logged in, I expected to see a dashboard showing me what the product offers. Instead, I was met with a series of forms. I want to be able to test your product before ever giving you my personal details, especially since the product description is abstract. I was hoping I could setup a
(4) Why does the account name on the first form have to be unique for the entire site? This seems like an information sharing bug. For example, I could search "x company name" and potentially reveal people using your product. That doesn't seem like something people would want.
You're doing great!
Cool service! I looked at your website but couldn’t find the answer to a question: if I use the service, how do I get the funds? Are you collecting the payments in stripe for me and then paying it out to my stripe account or do I create my own stripe account (stripe connect) and you collect the fund on behalf of me?
Amazing product man! If we hadn't went through the trouble of setting up stripe, would have been very interested.
Hi Che, congratulations! You have developed an amazing project at such a young age. My question is: are you already dreaming of your next venture or you are 100% focused on growing https://superpayit.com/?
This is super growth @KareemC. Congratulations! I look forward to hearing more about the story and journey when you share it!
Congrats!
Found this when you launched the "Super Portal". Really neat, if this had all existed when we launched our billing integration would have been 1000x simpler.
Great story. Remember reading about that milestone a couple of months ago. Congrats on the new one!
This is incredible! Great service and the website looks very professional as well.
May I ask what tools you used to build such a beautiful and responsive website?
Congrats!
So impressive! You have a bright future ahead of you!
Congrats @KareemC! Love your approach on taking advantage of managed service like Heroku as I’m not a server person myself.
Do you mind sharing which plan or config you’re using on Heroku to safely handle such amount of load?
That's amazing, congrats! Are you able to share some information about the margin on these payments? E.g. Are you comfortable sharing your average MRR from fees?
Congrats Che!
Thanks Charlie!