Spred

Back in February, I was disappointed to learn that the industry-leading partner I most wanted to work with wasn't going to support my efforts to build a scrappy, indie payments product (surprise, surprise).

So I went on the hunt for an alternative. Sadly, while there are a great many players in the space, most of them are not currently capable of offering the kind of platform that this product needs. And for the ones that are capable, they're working extra hard to make it super difficult for a small biz to get off the ground.

Thankfully, I managed to find one - just one! - that was prepared to give me a chance. A small, London-based startup called Trilo (https://www.trilo.io/). They've taken a huge chance on me and put some time in to build a small API on top of their existing platform to enable the kind of integration I need.

And you know what: it's working!!!

I can now facilitate payments (in the GBP & UK-only banks for now) between a customer and a merchant with reasonably high limits (think 'thousands' of £).

So I'm reinvesting some time into Spred to see where it goes. Right now, my very hacky PHP-script soup is being converted into a 'proper' Laravel app. I'm streaming the build over on YouTube, making a little progress every Friday.

If you're running a business in the UK, come sign up for the beta:
https://just-spred.com/

I found out this week that the Open Banking partner I really want to use (Plaid) has determined that the product I want to build in Spred is at some next level of requirements in order for them to feel like there's "financial incentive".

Despite being very clear with them from the get-go what I'm trying to build, it's taken them almost 2 months to figure it out and clearly explain the solution that I would require from them.

On top of that, they now want to make it almost prohibitively risky for me to get going.

This means that for there to even be a chance to get this off the ground, I really need to go hard on getting folks to commit OR go and get a reasonably huge chunk of cash.

These are both really annoying things because they're a distraction. They're going to keep me from building the product itself.

At least with trying to get some pre-release customers on board, I'll technically have some customers... but without a product, I'll be on a short leash to make sure something comes of it swiftly.

My gut says Plaid and the surrounding processes to get this going might take a little too long for some of those businesses to swallow and the worst part is that Plaid have now become a liability - I just don't know what they will turn up with next.

Quite a frustrating week overall. Honestly, it's really knocked me back.

But on the plus side, a buddy who I worked with a long time ago has been in touch and is quite excited by the potential of the product and the idea. He has a lot of connections, good ideas and insight and it will be awesome to have him on this project.

I'm meeting up with him in a couple of weeks, so let's see what happens.

Ultimately, I'm still confident that there's a solid product here and there's still a good opportunity to go after, it's just turning out to be a steeper hill to climb now that we've reached the foot of the mountain.

I just created a mailing list for Spred in about 5 minutes.

Nothing fancy, no custom domain stuff set up. Just create the list and use Mailcoach's built-in website to drive subscribers to.

Added a link to the final step in my marketing site's funnel.

This feels like it will be a valuable channel, so it's worth having, but I didn't want to spend loads of time putting a solution together.

Now I can move on to something else that has more value right now: building the functionality.

I'm going to try something really radical (for me) here on IH that I'm slightly afraid of: being fully transparent about what's happening with Spred, almost day by day.

So the biggest challenge for me right now is the catch-22 of whether to build the product or prove if it's viable, and there's an important reason that that's a problem for me at this specific moment:

I have no day-job (I'm doing a bit of freelancing and consulting, but that's really hand to mouth right now) and the cost of getting Spred to even be a viable product is going to set me back almost $15k.

Why? Because, in order for me to get access to a Plaid production account, they require me to sign up to a minimum 12-month contract and a minimum spend of £1,000 per month 😨

With zero customers, zero funding and only a little confidence that consumers can and will be comfortable using the payment flow, it's basically impossible for me to commit to - it would just be a silly bet to make.

If I had the capital and could afford to lose $15k, I'd do it. But I'm just not in that position.

(To be fair to Plaid, they have offered to delay the first 3 months' payments to give me an opportunity to ramp up, but as far as I know right now, there's no 'get-out' clause, so that still feels super risky to commit to)

The thing I can do is build the product. But then if I can't ever get this coin together to commit and go for it, I could arguably have better spent my time on something else.

What about going for investment?

I don't have the time or energy to go after investment. Also, I'm really keen to keep this bootstrapped and independent - I've got a lot of things I want to try when one of my ideas does succeed and I don't necessarily want heavy-hitting investors vetoing my decisions.

I think keeping it indie is also going to translate to better outcomes for my customers and, in turn, their customers.

So, what are you gonna do?

Well, I am going to continue building the product for a start. I've got loads of ideas that I can flesh out and build functional demos for that will I can use later on to pitch to and trial with potential customers.

But I also thought what might be great is to get some keen early adopters and offer them a huge life-time discount for supporting the product financially so early: I'm calling it the Superhero Early Adopter Program.

If there are just 50 absolute heroes out there willing to part with just $300 (temporarily! - make sure you read that linked post for the details), that will allow me to commit to the Plaid contract and build this thing for real - in a way that they and others can benefit from sooner.

And if it doesn't work out - i.e. the product turns out not to be viable for some other unforeseeable reason - those Superheroes will get all their money back.

And though the main offer on the table here is about use of the product once it's ready, I would really like to expand on this with other ways to reward such heroic early adopters, whether they continue with the product or not!

If anyone reads this, I'd love to get your thoughts on this plan:

• Is it enough of an offer?
• Does it still feel risky? Why?
• What would convince you to part with $300 temporarily to support a fellow hacker?

• Created a logo or worried about branding
• Set up any social media accounts
• Got all of my website copy perfect, written loads of support content or focused on SEO at all
• Designed any web pages
• Built for scale
• Worried about languages, frameworks, design patterns, layers of abstraction, tests/code coverage
• Set up a registration process

I'm not even using a database yet! 😱

What I have done:

• Planned what the product will do and picked the first thing to build, focused on that
• Bought a domain name or two
• Set up an SSL certificate
• Set out my data structure (capturing the absolute minimum data in files)
• Set up a support mailbox (using HelpScout)
• Set up some tracking (using Fathom Analytics)
• Hosted on a small VM
• Launch

Please check out Spred