Billing (recurring or one time) is a transactional activity and should be monetized as such. There should be a per invoice or per customer type of rate. This whole % of revenue seems crazy to me. There is no inherent risk involved like payment processing. You can get paid no matter what in a tx model...
Based on what I see in the market with other billing/subscription providers, they all do the same thing (rev share). Since these businesses are not the payment gateway they try to do a revenue grab with the % share.
I hoped Stripe would be able to disrupt this by already being positioned as a payment gateway and offer this on top in a transactional model....
Hope they rethink this strategy. And no first $1MM isnt going to cut it. Any serious business will see this as a growth challenge. Backend billing flows are challenging to build and once you are committed to this you are locked in for quite sometime from the roadmap perspective.
Thanks for the feedback. To your risk point -- there is often risk involved, as businesses that have worked with large ACH payments know.
More broadly, we believe in revenue-based business models because it's the clearest way to align our incentives with those of our customers. We want to be forced to find ways to generate more revenue, via smart recovery, better invoice payment methods, more payment method support, etc.
Maybe you can provide clarity on ACH risk. Seems like businesses have most of the risk there.. and not the billing system (keeping the gateway out of this).
Secondly, transaction/user based models are also aligned with customer incentives. With growth, customers will execute more transactions on the system.
Frankly, Smart recovery is an area where I can see you can ask for % share. Other features like payment methods etc sound transactional again.
Finally, Stripe has a payment gateway business already. This will ensure growth on that side of the business. Optically this seems like a revenue grab. You have the opportunity to disrupt the ecosystem.
Thanks for responding to my comment. Appreciate the interaction.
Lowering revenues doesn't really align with IPO'ing, though. The issue is the VC model that will keep us trapped in this, until there are less greedy given the resources to disrupt these systems. Capitalism works well, it shouldn't necessarily have a stake in foundational systems - which is why we need governance to manage.
There should be some sort of penalty for canceling/rejecting even if you had availability. Just like canceling an Uber. These cancellations ought to add up over time and reflect in the rating...
Additionally potential renters should be able to rate this initial experience as well, which should factor in the rating.
Dont think that will fix this problem but might curtail some of this behavior. I believe that technology and applied correctly has potential of changing behaviors (we have seen that in spades with AirBnB already).
This would probably be the most practical way of dealing with issues like this. A tag such as "[Unreliable] Host canceled prior availability dates 5 or more times." would make these assholes think several times before canceling on someone because of their skin color.
I also like the idea of showing someone's profile photo only after they book. Really, there is no reason for anyone to see my photos for short-term rentals.
Maybe the two could be tied together! That is, if I start canceling prior availability dates more than a couple times, AirBNB will stop showing me profile pictures of prospective tenants in advance.
There is a small penalty of sorts. I booked an instant book Airbnb once where the host didn't like the length of my stay, and told me to cancel it. I told her to deal with it and Airbnb support ended up cancelling it for me. The dates of my stay were unavailable for others to book and an automated review was left on the listing saying that the host cancelled. I think it's a bummer I couldn't say what happened in that review though :(
Also to +1 the general topic from my (female) Asian perspective which is typically considered rather non-threatening, I have a pretty vanilla photo and I always bring up "nice" things when inquiring about airbnbs, if there are no instant book options. The profiling adds up to a serious load of crap especially when you get to a/b test a bit by asking someone else to also inquire about the place.
Ya it happened to me too. This is why stars on AirBnB doesn't mean everything. We have to check the host profile to see if there are too many "host cancelled" comments, and if it's the case it's a very bad host.
Seems simple enough for AirBnb to do. I'd bet a curious Airbnb data scientist has already done it. Do analysis of users' ethnicities/names/profile skin color/gender/ attire etc where booking cancelled for one person but allowed for another in same time period immediately after cancellation. Hosts with many such cancel/book patterns should be penalized. This would have flagged OP's friend doing second booking.
False. If you're going to let your house out for short-term rentals on the market, you are obliged to follow the same rules regarding who you rent to as the hotels are.
If you don't want strangers in your house --- and I sure don't either --- don't try to capitalize on it on Airbnb.
In my town the permitting process for vacation rentals is quite different than hotels.
I have a very expensive permit ($2300 for the first year) and jumped through all the hoops. We pay occupancy tax, etc.
What makes it most different from a hotel is that we have to vet our guests. We won't take anyone off the street. This is perfectly reasonable and also different from a hotel.
I do hope that cities avoid passing laws around vacation rentals. The law is our town is an expensive illogical nightmare.
According to the information I got when I was hosting, Airbnb does punish hosts who reject a lot of guests by pushing the listing down in search results. The idea is that they want to show listings that are likely to convert to a match. Granted this might not help much if people of color only inquire occasionally, and everyone else is accepted
Felt more like they're just not ready yet (not a good sign IMO). When the final version of the Model X got a stage reveal, Musk presented a great deal more info (interior, new features like BioHazard mode, etc...)
The BioHazard Mode was a work of genius. Not in terms of the actual feature, but in marketing terms, everyone was talking about it and it was a unique thing that only Tesla had.
Essentially they re-branded "full" on the AC dial.
When the final version of the Model X got a stage reveal, they capped off the night by delivering cars to their first six customers. It's not a reasonable comparison with the Model 3 target release being a year and a half out.
The presentation definitely felt short. I wanted to understand more of the specifications, get to know the car a little bit. Especially if 115K people just pre-ordered something they know so little about.
I was surprised too. They left SO many questions completely unanswered. At minimum I thought they'd give us an internal tour, show someone sitting in it, even if it was via cheezy video.
Hopefully some vehicle reviewers will test drive it and we'll learn more going forward. Or when Tesla's site comes online.
Awesome!
I would love to see one of the providers take that up and offer that in the migration process.
One of the best things Parse offered was ability to purely focus on application code and not worry about anything else. Tech pundits may balk at this approach but for a startup looking for product/market fit, this works. Until we have that nothing else matters.
This is a great article. So true at all the levels.
Look at any mid to large scale company and their internal ticketing systems, HR systems, travel booking systems, time tracking systems.
The last company I worked for, did not upgrade the employee laptop OS from Windows XP for over 10 years as their legacy ticketing system wasnt supported on the newer versions. Obviously this was a cost issue of the new ticketing platform but also the unknown cost of retraining the whole company. Additionally people and organizations get comfortable with the "evil you know".
Frankly as a new entrepreneur this is also incredibly hard to test in the market. Most early customer development will give you signals that they want it, but won't act when it comes time to switch.
This is why you see SaaS services succeeding by cracking few employees or small teams at a time. Think of Yammer, Slack etc.
They don't need the whole company or department to change. Just few employees or the team can use it and slowly infect the rest of the company. That would be the only way to overcome this problem (although not all products can do this).
Yes this has nothing to do with the customer. This has to do with the waiters, hostesses etc who know how to use the system and to get them to us another system would take time to learn.
But the article says it is "shitty" and that "most hate it". I think it might be due to:
[1] There are issues in all software (bugs, lacking your pet feature, etc), and people like to complain.
[2] The article's author has developed a product in the same space (although it seems to be more of a restaurant website template, rather than a reservation system), so there might be some jealousy there.
Based on what I see in the market with other billing/subscription providers, they all do the same thing (rev share). Since these businesses are not the payment gateway they try to do a revenue grab with the % share.
I hoped Stripe would be able to disrupt this by already being positioned as a payment gateway and offer this on top in a transactional model....
Hope they rethink this strategy. And no first $1MM isnt going to cut it. Any serious business will see this as a growth challenge. Backend billing flows are challenging to build and once you are committed to this you are locked in for quite sometime from the roadmap perspective.