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We interviewed Che Sampat, Founder of SuperPay & SuperPortal ($15m GMV).
In-depth conversations with bootstrapped entrepreneurs building profitable internet businesses. Including both members and friends of the Ramen Club community. Ramen Club is building the community, content and tools supporting founders to ramen profitable, and beyond.
Hello everyone, welcome to the Ramen Club podcast. Today's special guest is none other than the awesome Shay Sampat, who at the ripe old age of 19 has already founded a couple of payments companies and is a senior software engineer at Veed amongst other things, and also works at Fast. Yeah. Looking forward to this Q and A. So yeah, how are you doing Shay?
Che:Yeah, good. Thanks. No, yeah. Thank you for having me on.
Charlie:Yeah. All good, man. All good. Long time coming. So there's quite a lot of stuff we could talk about, I feel.
Charlie:But maybe the the first place to start before we get into, say, Superpay is just a bit more about your background. Like, how did you get into indie hacking, building products and stuff in the first place and at such a young age?
Che:Yeah, it started off. I'd always had somewhat of an interest in computers in general. One of my very early experiences to computers were maybe when I was eight or nine and when we had just bought our first home PC and it would connect up to the TV and we could play games on it and we would watch movies via iTunes on it. And that always really did interest me. So then at my dad's company, this was Easter holidays when I was maybe 13, 14.
Che:I said, Hey, can I come in and just help out? I didn't know how to help out, but it was just, Hey, just let me just come and do something. So I said, Yeah, sure. Like we have some, like, laptops that you can help, like, fix that were broken. I was before my age was pretty nifty with laptops at the time, like usually better than my parents.
Che:So I would always help out with stuff like that. So I started doing basic, like, IT support, helping out the, like, IT manager there. Just doing, like, basic stuff. Like, even if I was asked to, like, fix fix the, like, screws on on like, on a chair. Yeah, sure.
Charlie:And this is your dad's accountancy firm, iHorizon, right?
Che:Yeah. And then that sort of carried on for a short while. And then I started to learn how to code at school and they had introduced us to Python. And then that really just quite amazed me. I was like, wow, this is insane.
Che:So I just went home and quite a few solid weeks, spent every single day, like, before school, during school, or after school, just learning to program. This is just all in Python and really basic stuff. And then my my first sort of proper I say proper project, but my first project was like at school, they had put in this new system that would filter websites on all of the school computers. We and then we couldn't play any games on it, which is pretty common, like during lunch or during computer science lessons. You would just have a games window open to the side and you'd be playing games while the teacher wasn't looking.
Che:Well, they had brought in this new system that would block these quite well, actually. So I said, oh, like, it it would be really cool if I could build something that that could get around this. So my first, like, little project was this. It was like a it was basically a glorified reverse that basically I would curate the, like, games and I, like, scrape them off the Internet and then stick them in, an iframe. And then I then I proxy that request through another server that was not connected to the, like, school's network.
Che:And then that is how we got around it. And I'd actually named the domain. I'd got this, like, free domain, and I'd named it the school. And it was, like, for grammar,.tk. And that would be our games website.
Che:And it was very hard for them to block it because then they'd to block keywords like the school's website name, which obviously can't happen. But, yeah, that that was like my first, like, like, little project and actually worked and, like, everyone in school was, like, using it. And then I was known as the guy that got everyone their games back.
Charlie:I love that. You must've been a legend at the school.
Che:But, no, yeah, it it definitely did. It definitely didn't put me in the good books with the IT. There.
Charlie:Alright. Yeah. I can imagine. I can imagine. I feel like this is, how a lot of entrepreneurs start by, like, hacking a system at a young age, and they take that, like, approach and just apply it to business world sort of thing.
Charlie:Was there any other sort of things that you like, little workarounds and hacks like that you did at a young age?
Che:Yes. And then this was actually the one that, like, sparked Superpay. It was at my dad's company, and they were using PayPal at at at the time. And PayPal was, like, giving them grief and was withholding thousands of pounds of funds for no good reason. And I said, oh, what if it would be just really cool if we could just send our clients a link?
Che:And then they just tell us how much they, like, wanna pay, and then it comes straight into our, like, bank account. And then I'd, like, just literally just searched online how to take payments online. And the first thing that came up was was, like, Stripe, and they made it sound really easy. So I said, okay. Surely this can't be that hard.
Che:So over the course of, I think it was, like, just two, three days, I just whipped up a really quick, like, Django website that did exactly that. Our team would enter in an amount, would hit generate, and then would send the client a link, and then the client could pay. And it was that simple. And then when then I realized, actually, okay. This is actually working.
Che:Like, these guys are, like, finding it useful. What if other companies are gonna find this useful? Then spent my Christmas holidays turning it into a slightly different version of the app where other companies could sign up. It still did the very basic just enter an amount or send it to them. They can pay.
Che:That was the only thing it did, but I just made it so other companies could then sign up. And then I had to teach them. So a bunch of other things because suddenly it was like, I'm building an app that not has just got to work for one company, but it's got to support many other companies and those companies can't see each other's payments, etcetera, etcetera. And yeah, that was like the first thing that I like hacked together that actually was live in production that other people were using.
Charlie:Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. So it was originally something to help you out at iHorizon. And did you decide that you wanted to charge from that from day one or did it just was that more natural organic progress?
Che:No. From day one, it was charged like, 1% per transaction just because of how easy Stripe made it. Like, Stripe's own docs was like, oh, if you wanna take a transaction fee with this, just pass in the number one into this request, and then you get paid. So it's like, let's just do that.
Charlie:Yeah. And then what would you say the elevator pitch is for for Superpay? I I have described it before as it's like creating a checkout page built on top of Stripe without having to write a line of code, basically. Would you say that's right, or would you say it's more than that as well?
Che:I would say it's more of a it's a payments platform for small businesses. Yeah. It's aimed at the, like, nontechnical user who maybe don't even have a website. Like, a lot of our customers don't even have a website. They maybe just have a Facebook page.
Che:Like, that is that that is how they verify with Stripe. They just have a Facebook page. So if you start throwing terms at them, oh, embed this in your website or create your product catalog and all, like, all of these types of stuff that for them, they just want to take a payment. Like, they literally just want to log on, type, like, type in a customer, type in an amount, and then send then send then send them a link, and that's it. And then everything else has just got to work.
Che:That is that was really from day one sort of what I wanted Supa to be, and that is definitely what it is today.
Charlie:Yeah. Awesome. So how long since you started it and what stage is it now in terms of, like, users or revenue or whatever sort of metrics you're comfortable sharing?
Che:Yeah. So, like, from a metrics perspective, we have I I think we processed around, like, 15,000,000 in GMV last year. G GMV gross merchandise volume is how much, like, how many payments that we have processed on behalf of our merchants. And then we take a one per and then we take, like, a 1% fee of that. Our MRR is harder to measure just because we don't charge any monthly recurring fees.
Che:It's just purely transactional. But, like, to give you an idea, like, few months ago, we were doing around 8 k and 8 k in revenue per month. Then in terms of, like like, profits wise, like, our costs are minimal. It's literally just me, my sister, and then we've got like a few, like, infrastructure tech costs.
Charlie:Family business. I love it. Yeah. And how did you grow to that level? What were the kind of things that you found that that works and maybe that you tried and didn't work?
Che:Definitely. I think one of the main reasons why Superpay worked was because we built on top of a trusted partner. Payments in itself is extremely sensitive. Most businesses are very risk averse when it comes to their payments. So if we wanted to enter the market as almost like a white label, like completely white labeling Stripe and just being this magical payments platform that just made it work and we hid all of the Stripe details behind closed closed doors, I don't think we would have been anywhere near as successful as where we are now.
Che:And by building on top of that trusted partner, we got access to an entire ecosystem of customers and a marketplace that gave us validation, gave us a sticker to put on our website that said, We are a verified partner. That was, I think, one of the single biggest reasons why we got to this stage was because we were building on top of a trusted partner. That really encouraged that marketplace as opposed to if we tried to build on Adyen or Braintree or checkout.com or any of the or any of the other payment process where they don't have that level of gravitas around everyday businesses because they they all aim at enterprise. That is yeah. That is really why I put down, like, where we get the most of our customers and why it works and and why people trust us.
Charlie:Yeah. No. A 100%. Totally get that. I'm curious how you think about platform risk.
Charlie:So I guess with being on any marketplace, there's huge benefits to it. Do you ever think about the kind of trade offs or potential risk? This is not me saying like you should have done anything different. Of course not. But I'm just wondering, do you ever think about that in terms of say, Stripe building something that could be some kind of threat?
Charlie:Has, for example, has payment pages had any impact? How do you think about this sort of thing?
Che:No. Yeah. It's like definitely, like payment links has had an impact in that customers that just come to us solely for that payment link functionality who are maybe slightly above, not completely tech illiterate, they'll be happy to use Stripe payment links just because it is pretty straightforward. And of course, Stripe is encroaching more and more into their no code offering. So what now we are starting to do, and this is what I'm actively working on now, is moving away from just being a payments platform and moving more into the customer enablement side of things because payment is just one part of the puzzle.
Che:It's obviously a very important part. But there are things that you can put before and after it that add additional value. So the before is like our customers don't have websites. Like, they don't have somewhere yeah. Sure.
Che:They can hack something together on, like, Facebook pages. But for most of they just want somewhere to be able to display all of their products in one page and it worked. They just press add products and they type in their detail and they get everything automatically generated for them or the after thing connecting to various different systems, releasing digital goods. So there are things on both sides of the equation that we're now starting to focus more on as as opposed to just that payments platform in the middle.
Charlie:Yep. Got you. Yeah. So taking the idea of, like, end to end payment solutions, like, a different level kind of thing, starting from the website or the way to Am I right in saying all the way to the customer portal, which is, like, your latest product? Yeah.
Charlie:Yeah. So that's yeah.
Che:For those who don't know what Swartz portal is, it's essentially so Stripe also has customer portal, but one thing to note about it is you need to be able to write code to be able to actually integrate it and actually be able to authenticate your customers. So what Super Portal does is it basically sits on top of your customer portal, ingests all of your Stripe customers into our database, and then we then give you a page that you can send any customer to. They can enter in their email, and we will authenticate them for you and sign them in into their portal. It takes the burden off you completely as managing access to this portal, and we do that all for you. And this is actually a separate product to Super Portal to just because it sits in a slightly different category of users.
Che:These are users that have that that use Stripe already in some shape or form, such as payment links, but then have now found that hold on, I don't actually have a way for these customers to update or manage their billing. So slightly different type of user, but still the same fundamentals.
Charlie:Yep. Gotcha. Gotcha. And I wanna get onto something I will actually I I definitely also wanna ask. So a lot of people in IndieHacker community are quite interested in the new sort of Stripe app offering where you can build apps within the Stripe dashboard.
Charlie:I was just wondering if that's something that's built on Stripe a lot, like if you got any kind of initial impressions of it in terms of like its potential for bootstrappers to build on top of or what do you think?
Che:Yeah. No. Yeah. I was. Yeah.
Che:I was actually really excited when that came out as well because it very much obviously it is a new product, so it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles, and it's still missing some key functionality that like, I think a lot of apps would expect. But it's definitely going in the right direction. And Stripe is realizing that it's got a very strong, like, partner marketplace. One, like, why not bring them further into the Stripe experience? And I really do think that this is really good for and it's gonna enable, like, a whole, like, different class of apps, how they're gonna monetize them or if you even can, like, monetize Stripe apps.
Che:That is something that Stripe hasn't made clear as of yet. So how you can monetize these Stripe apps. It'll be interesting to see. I see these more as integrations Yeah. As opposed to stand alone products.
Che:So for example, with Superpay, so we let's say we decide to, like, get into, like, digital goods. So, like, as soon as someone pays, we then release, like, an ebook or or a PDF where we give them access to, course. I can definitely see the value in us building a Stripe app so that when you go into your customer in Stripe, we can show you all of the, like, all of the digital goods that this customer has got access to. And you can one click resend or you can one click upgrade them to a new version or all these types of things that are actually an extension of your product. I think are really useful.
Che:Building an entire app or an entire product in Stripe apps, I think it'd be very hard. But I think they're definitely going in the right direction.
Charlie:Yep. Yep. Got you. And so I want to get on to supercharged, which is your latest invention. But before we get there, I'd like to touch a bit on your day job.
Charlie:Like, because you also work. Like, you're not full time on superpense. So, you know, you worked originally at iHorizon at your your dad's accountancy company. I'm sure you also could do some bits and pieces here and there. So you were there then at Fast at a payments company and also and now you're at Veed.
Charlie:So what was Fast? Tell us about that story.
Che:What was fast? Fast was a very unique experience. It was amazing. It was genuinely on the inside, one of the most exciting, enthusiastic, all of the keywords that you associate with these high growth startups and how everyone talks about, oh, this is the best place to work at. On the inside, it genuinely felt like it.
Che:Everyone there was truly super excited, super duper ambitious, and were truly, like, the world class of their industry. And the people that I got to work with there were, like, some of the best engineers and some of the best product managers and some of the best designers I'd ever, like, worked with or, like, actually met in person or even met over, like, video calls. They were truly world class. Obviously, the ending wasn't, but there is apparently such thing as too much of a good thing when it comes to people and companies. Yeah.
Che:We just had we we we just had too many good people. And and then, obviously, the markets weren't too kind to us at that time. So we got caught in a bit of a jam. And the short story is we just ran out of money. That's literally it.
Che:Like, we had customers. We had a really strong pipeline. We were like actually, our numbers were, like, looking up in comparison. Like, we were only two years old, but things were looking, like, really strong, but we just ran out of money. But no.
Che:Yeah. My I I learned a lot there. Definitely. For it's really weird. We went from, like a scrappy head.
Che:We went from a really scrappy company to actually what was becoming a very mature, almost enterprise, very quick. Like, I saw this transition. I was only there for five, six months, but I could really see the dynamic between what, like, a scrappy start up looks like and then what does a mature enterprise or or organisation look like, which is pretty unique. And, like, what different, like, controls and peoples and departments and what do processes look like at a 500 person company? Like, how do you still ship fast?
Che:How do you still improve your products and things don't grind to a halt? That was pretty interesting. And like, how do you coordinate, like, a huge engineering or to actually deliver large scale products? Because things were actually moving internally. Like, even to the very last day, people were shipping stuff.
Che:And I think that definitely showed to the people there as well, like, level of professionalism and, like, really the, like, world classness.
Charlie:What lessons do you find that you're applying the most from that experience? I mentioned there's too many to mention, but is there any that you find, like, perhaps the most surprising or just that keep recurring sort of thing?
Che:Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Not everything at Fast was perfect, and it's harder it's harder to take the things that worked and then try to replicate them somewhere else only because the reason why those things worked was usually a combination of a dozen different things. It wasn't just one thing that were that went right, that they made this one right decision.
Che:So it's hard to take things that worked, but it's easier to take a look at things that didn't work, that failed completely. So one one example of this is that because we grew so quickly and we are hiring so many engineers and we were, like, growing our team really quickly, our processes didn't have time to catch up. Like, I I and, like, I I was at the end of their last doubling cycle, and even then, our our our our processes didn't catch up to where we, like, needed it to be. And we and it it it was coming increasingly hard to move the needle on things, especially because we were like a microservices architecture and then something that you would find is like each team had their own microservice and they owned it, but each microservice looked different. It looked differently, worked differently, had different patterns and different idioms that actually if you wanted to move teams or if you wanted to fix something in someone else's service because it impacted your service, you couldn't because they would feel like you were onboarding them into a brand new company.
Che:And I think it's something that I think Veed is getting very bright is that we're keeping things simple, like from an architecture perspective and from a technology perspective, simple is better always. And only add complexity when you really need to because the real cost of complexity is not the cost of implementation, it's the cost of maintenance. It's the cost of every time you're onboarding a new engineer, you now have to teach them another system, another process. So if you start your code base from a high base of complexity, the more people you add, that complexity only compounds every time you add a new person. Whereas if you started from a really low base of complexity, as you add people, it makes it much easier to onboard them and then slowly evolve your process.
Che:So definitely, that is one of the things that I definitely learned from Fast, and it's good to see that we're doing it somewhat correctly at Veed.
Charlie:Wow. I'm learning a lot right now. And that kind of naturally takes us on to Veed. So why don't you tell everyone what you're doing at Veed?
Che:Yeah. So I work on the I work on the monetization team. Our job is basically everything payments at Veed. So it's like everything from first customer interactions on the pricing page and to getting them on into getting them into the app to taking payment that if payment fails, how do we recover them? Churning, dunning, upgrades, downgrades, different feature management stuff.
Che:Certain users have got access to certain things based on what they paid. So anything that revolves around money, is what our team really focus on. Me specifically, I work on the so I'm currently building out our new payment service. We're currently in the transition from a monolithic application. So where everything indeed sound like one app to more of a microservices architecture.
Che:I I call it microservices, but it's more No, it is. It is. But it's not. It's very low in terms of complexity. It's very low in complexity.
Che:It's very simple to understand. Every service looks the same. It's deployable really easy. So that's definitely they they got service. They got microservices really, I think.
Che:So I'm currently working on the transition of the payment service from our monolith into its new own dedicated service, and that will allow us to move quicker, ship faster, and unlock cool things like pricing experimentation. So, like, one thing we just wanna be able to do is, let's say, for 10% of the traffic in The US, if we half the price, do we get 60% more users? If so, that's that is something to consider. So no. Yeah.
Che:That is what I'm focusing on, Aved.
Charlie:Yeah. I'm a big proponent of a pricing experimentation and treating it like a feature, like everything else. That's amazing. And I find from talking to Oh, by the way, for those that are familiar with Veed, it's a video editing, a browser based tool. One of the co founders is a long time member Saba, who's also a friend of the community.
Charlie:Yeah, I'll be talking about payments generally with you and with Michael as well, who works at GoCardless, He's in in Ramen Club. It just sounds like such a fascinating space. I don't think a lot of people are aware of the amount of complexity under the surface with payment systems. From what I understand, if it's, like, credit card based, like Mastercard or Visa, it's actually fairly standardized across the world and fairly simple. But when you supposedly, when you're talking about, like, direct debits, for example, it's just different in every single country.
Charlie:So, like, what's like, would you say that's accurate? Like, what's your sort of general take when explaining pay the payment systems to a layman?
Che:Well, if payments if you can avoid it, don't get into it. No. Really, like, payments on its own is an insane world. And no. Yeah.
Che:What Michael said is completely right. Card payments come with the benefit of sitting on a card network like Visa and Mastercard. They're pretty standardised. If you can accept a Mastercard in one part of the world, pretty easy to accept it in another part of the world. When it comes to direct debit, every country, every bank almost in that country may even have their own flavor of it.
Che:So, yeah, it's a completely different ballpark. Most of almost all of my experience is solely focused around, like, card payments. So I can speak, like, a little bit about it, but it would mind boggle some people as to how complex it is to actually put in your to, like, put in your card onto a website and then to actually be charged and for that merchant to be paid. There are so many moving parts. Like, between every single every time you, like, tap your card, there is at least four, five, six, seven, eight, like, different companies and different pieces of platforms and softwares and and tools that is, like, in the middle of every single transaction.
Che:And I could talk for hours of the, like, complexity of of payments, but it's it's amazing that it works. Let's just put it that way. It is amazing that it works. And the only reason why it works is because we have no other option. We have to make it work.
Che:Absolutely. Because if if we don't, like, people don't get paid, money doesn't move around, everything kind of grinds our out. So we have no other option. We have to make it work.
Charlie:Yeah. You're doing God's work, Shay. We we all we all appreciate it. Yeah. And with you've got you've got an important busy day job and fees.
Charlie:You've got multiple other projects going on. How do you balance all this stuff? Like, you because I know you also have a social life. It's not like you're a hermit. Like, how do you go about doing getting all this stuff done?
Che:That is a good question. I'd like to be able to say that I have some insane methodology where I keep track of everything and then like everything always gets done on time. No, it's not. My methodology is pretty simple. It's work on whatever is most important and will deliver the most value in the moment at any moment.
Che:That's it, really. That is that is it. Yeah. I tried the whole to do list and time boxing and the Pomodoro technique, and I've lost count of how many different things that I've tried to increase my productivity. But it always comes back to the same principle of just work on whatever's most important at that time and just do it and just get it done.
Che:I think one thing I'm pretty good at is if something's hard, that is not a reason for me that I put it off. I don't put off things because I think it's hard or it's boring or it's gonna take me six hours, and I just I just have to sit there and do this really monotonous task. I don't really care about that because it's got to get done. But just for me, it's whatever's most important and whatever can deliver the most value is what I work on.
Charlie:Is that more of an instinctive thing at this point? Or have you ever used any sort of frameworks to help you with that? Or how do you think about that?
Che:Yeah. I have tried, like, quite a few different, like, techniques, but I found that they always I don't know. I I I was always left unsatisfied because I still knew in my head the, like, list of things that is most important that I actually need to get done as opposed to trying to listen to a planner that I'd said at the beginning of the day or that I'm going do business. And it's because I've got so many, like, different things going around me. I rarely am in control of what's most important.
Che:So when I'm not really in control of what's most important, it's hard for me to say, I'm going do this and this while also still doing what's most important. So I would happily change things up if something else let's say I'm doing something for the super pay. And I'm, like, in the, like and I'm right in the, like, middle of it, and then something happens to be that I was like, oh, no. This thing's on fire. Or, actually, we really need to get this done this week.
Che:I mean, okay. Fine. Drop this. Work on that. And then I'll come back to this later.
Che:So, yeah, that's very much how I approach things.
Charlie:Yeah. One thing I like about Veed is they're accepting of people of of of hiring people who have side projects, which I actually think is an underrated advantage in the hiring market. Some places are like, yeah, you can't do that. Or if you do that, we'll have ownership of it. And I think some of them don't realize, you know, talent they're missing out on by doing this.
Che:Yeah. No. Yeah. That was definitely, like that was, like, the first thing Sour said to me, when he, like, called me and says, Shay, you can, like, please, like, can continue working on Superpay while you're here. There is, like, no conflict.
Che:It's all good. Whereas when I was at Fast, it was unfortunately, we can't let you can continue working on it because, technically, like, their legal team classified Superpay as, like, a as, like, a competitor. I'd like to go and say that we outlasted a billion dollar, like a hundreds of million dollar company.
Charlie:Oh my God.
Che:We were the ones still left standing.
Charlie:Yeah. Love it. I love it. And so I'd love to talk a bit about your latest idea, which is supercharged. So you came up it quite recently.
Charlie:Yeah. Why don't you tell everyone what that is and what stage you're at, what the future holds?
Che:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just bear in mind, like, not everything's still fleshed out.
Charlie:Of course.
Che:Tomorrow, I might completely change my mind on the on the, like, overall direction of it. But the underlying premise is something that I've, like, noticed both when I was at iHorizon, when I was at VOSS, now I'm at Veed. A lot of us are still reinventing a lot of the core organisational problems when it comes to engineering orgs and engineering efficiency and productivity velocity. And then I think where it really sits is like how can we make engineers as efficient as possible? Because for most companies, engineers are the biggest cost center for most companies.
Che:It comes people and then within that people group is engineers. So companies have a real incentive to make sure that their engineers are efficient and are not blocked and are not wasting time on things that they probably shouldn't be or it could be automated for them. So one of my core beliefs is the code review process. So when you submit a PR and for those who don't know, a PR is a pull request, so it's when you want to merge your version of the code into the code base. So you've made some new changes.
Che:You've added a new feature, and then it's going get merged in. Before it gets merged in, most companies, basically every company, has got a code review process. And it's someone else has to review this code and they've got to add some comments and you don't actually know those comments and then they get signed off. And I think the value of a code review of a really good code reprocess is heavily underrated in small to medium sized engineering orgs. The big boys get like the Facebooks of the world, Googles, the Amazons, the Apples.
Che:They really get this. They invest so much into building top tier code review processes. I think Google is like as far as, like, publicly documented processes go, Google is probably one of the most one on ones where they have an insane system when it comes to code review. Like, it's magical. Like, a code like, a engineer will just write their code, will press submit as as as soon as as soon as it's ready for review.
Che:They just hit that button, and that is it. The system literally takes care of of the rest in, like, selecting, okay, who is the most appropriate reviewer for this? They then have SLAs so that you aren't sitting there for days on this thing. When is this gonna get reviewed? And it takes into account, like, holiday schedules and, like, capacity.
Che:Hey. Like, maybe this one person is really good at reviewing code and he is best suited for this, but he's got 12 PRs. The second guy that is just as good as got one, let's then give it to him. Let's balance the load. So there are all these things that actually big tech companies have worked out that the code review process is so important for so many different reasons.
Che:Like it increases the quality, it coaches engineers, it gives real time feedback to people as to how to develop their skills. Engineers are quite fortunate that we have this process that actually we can be continue every time we're adding new code to a system we can be learning new stuff and we can be developing our skills and we can be raising the bar in the engineering org. So what I'm now looking at now at Veed and what I eventually now want to build is how can we productize class code review processes? Like, how can we make every engineering org? How can we give the tools to every engineering org to have a world class review process without having to build their own?
Che:Because let's face it, GitHub is pretty rubbish. Like, when it comes to actually the code review process, the actual process of doing the code review, it's pretty good. But when it comes to actually selecting the reviewer or who is the right person to actually review this code or how fast are we reviewing code? Are PR sitting there for days on end? People are wondering, like, when is this going to get reviewed?
Che:Like, when is this going to get merged in? So it's about building the tooling for every engineering to have a world class review process. That is their vision.
Charlie:Yeah. That's the the potential impacts of that is just, like, immeasurable, and I find it fascinating. And where would the would you see this as some a tool that kind of you'd sign up and then you would plug in your GitLab or GitHub data? Would it have to sit on top of a source like that or would there be other sources as well? How would you say it?
Che:Yeah, no. A 100%. It would sit on top of your existing infrastructure. There is no value in us rebuilding GitHub. There is no value in us sort of rebuilding GitHub's even code review system.
Che:Where I think the real implementation lies is actually because the data is already there. Most GitHub's are prettiest, especially if you've got twenty, thirty, 40 engineers, the data is likely already there. It's already in your commit history. We can pretty much already know who is the best reviewer for this code because it looks like John has been continuously working around this module for the last three months. Like, John should likely take a look at this code.
Che:The data is already there. It's just a case of ingesting it, understanding it, and then showing it in a way that is actually digestible. If we try to send out, Here is your daily email summary of code reviews, that is rubbish. So it's like the data's already there. We just have to ingest it, understand it, and then give it back in a way that's somewhat useful.
Che:Yeah. I I was just gonna say that, the reason why I think it's I'm actually quite excited about this is just like how you said, actually, the impact can be huge. Maybe have the potential here to if we can increase the velocity of every company's and engineering or even by one, two, 5%, that adds up.
Charlie:Yeah. It's massive.
Che:Every comp every single tech company has got an engineering or most of them are using GitHub. This is not this is not a problem that is unique to any one industry.
Charlie:No. So Yeah. Well, in some ways, every industry is the tech industry now.
Che:Yeah. Exactly.
Charlie:Yeah. You have developed every major industry now.
Che:No. No. Yeah. 100%.
Charlie:Wow. So I'm sure the question everyone's thinking is when prototype?
Che:When prototype? Yeah, no, very good question. And that's actually something that I'm actually currently also working on at Lead is like our code review process isn't perfect either. It's actually something that I'm working on now is actually, first of all, I think I need to understand what does a world class code review process actually look like in practice for a company of Veed size? Veed is not too unique from an engineering org perspective or a workflow development perspective.
Che:So if I can get something working through like Veed, just Veed, then we'll take it from there. Hey. If it turns out that it's useless and it doesn't work, but I I wanna make it work for Veed first because that is what I did with iHorizon. Like, I got the payments thing working just for iHorizon first. And then when I realized it worked there, it's actually, you know what?
Che:This might be useful somewhere else as well.
Charlie:Yeah. That's a great way to test prototypes and building in a real company where it's needed.
Che:Yeah.
Charlie:That's awesome. A couple more questions and I think we can open up for some more audience questions. So a bit of a higher level, but just as an indie hacker or bootstrap or however you describe yourself, do you see people make, what are common mistakes people making that you try to avoid yourself?
Che:Oh, thinking it's got to be perfect or even, like, thinking it's got to be, like, percent there for it to for, like, you to be able to, like, launch. I did this almost inadvertently with Superpay by accident. I'll give you an example. With Superpay, the very first version, I didn't even know what GitHub was. I didn't even know what Git was.
Che:So when it came time to launching my app, it was just a case of dragging and dropping a folder into pythonanywhere.com, which is some online Python hosting service. I initially just drag and drop the folder and then boom, it's live. The whole concept of testing and Git management and all this stuff, was completely foreign to me. So I didn't do it. And I think that's one of the reasons.
Che:I launched ZooPay in two weeks. Wow. It was because it was nowhere near perfect. I didn't have a way for people to change their emails, change their names, change their password, none of that. I literally I was just looking at one screen of what I built for iHorizon, which again was very janky.
Che:Built in two days, and I was actually just copying it line for line into this new version that allowed from all for other users. And then it wasn't until a few months into Superpay when now actually I'm developing changes quicker and my desktop. Because every time I did a new version, I just copy and paste the folder in my desktop. And then I called it like Superpay old, and then the next one would be super old and etcetera, etcetera. And then it got to the point where I was like four or five versions in.
Che:Was like, okay, surely there is a better way than this. So then I looked at how do you deploy your code automatically or where do you host your code? And then I found GitHub and then I learned how to use that. But then when it came time to deployment, it was the same. Saw that drag and drop.
Che:Back to your question. Like, the first a con a common mistake that I see is, oh, it's gotta be perfect from day one. Or it's gotta have even the basics, like, whole thing about change your email, change or change your passwords, update your name, update your profile picture. Just ignore all of it. Believe me, if someone wants to change their email, they'll just message you.
Che:Like, no one is gonna leave. No one's not gonna sign up to your product because they couldn't change your email, change their email in their settings page. Yeah.
Charlie:Gotcha. And is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight with Superpay?
Che:Yes. Yes. That's something I did last year. Last year, we were approached by Square to build an integration with them. And they came to us and say, hey, like, we don't have a recurring payments product.
Che:We really like what what you're doing. We like Superpay. We are trying to launch our own, like, marketplace with a recurring payments partner. We would love to partner with you. And then at the time, that that sounded really exciting.
Che:Square has got, I don't know, how many millions of merchants, but they're big. And it was really exciting. And then I spent all this time doing this integration and it was super hands on. I was working directly with their subscriptions engineering team because they hadn't even built out the docs yet. I was just using the docs from a PDF that some guy had wrote.
Che:And then I built it, deployed it, fixed it, and then we then went live with it. And it was just a complete failure. I completely misunderstood the type of customers that Square customers fundamentally, they're physical businesses. Most of their customers use their point of sale devices. So when they're asking for recurring payments and subscriptions, they aren't asking it for online.
Che:They're asking it for in person. Fundamentally, not how we operate. It's a completely different type of product, a different type of business model. And yet, short story is that the whole Sperry integration failed. I spent six months building it in in, like, planning, reviewing, testing, because then they then have to do, like, a final QA.
Che:I spent invested all this time and effort, and then it failed. So, yeah, the lesson learned from there was when you're going to do something as big as build for another partner, really understand their customers make sure that because that's not what I did. I just thought, oh, Square is huge. We're going get to many more customers. It's going to be beautiful.
Che:But I failed to understand the type of customers Square are.
Charlie:Yeah, totally feel you there. I think it's very applicable for all sorts of founders. So, yeah, thank you, Shay. We're going to pick a few questions out of the chat now. Anyone that has questions, just feel free to get them in.
Charlie:First one from William. So what are your main traction channels for the different products and what is your traction like now? I know you touched on that Stripe earlier as a marketplace pushes a lot of users towards you, but what percentage of traction comes from that and what are the other kind of sources?
Che:For Superpay, the vast majority comes from still the Square marketplace. But actually, we are now finding more and more actually come from users that have checked out through Superpay before and then have then gone on to then sign up and then use it. One one really specific place where this happened was, for for some reason, we seem to have a monopoly on in this, like, North Of Ireland. There is, a cluster of eight, nine, 10 rugby clubs in this one city, and we seem to have a monopoly on all of them. All of them used to pay for their memberships.
Che:So we processed the recurring payments for, I think, eight, nine thousand members. Every single week, we're processing payments to eight, nine thousand members in this, like, one town in Ireland. And that actually all started just because one of them used us. And then the other one realized that, oh, that club's using that. That is really cool.
Che:Let's sign up to that. And that just went round and round around. So word-of-mouth was another big one for us as well.
Charlie:Awesome. Thanks, Shay. So question from Matt. What are your thoughts on how much crypto will disrupt traditional rail payments methods? Or do you think it's not a viable technology for payments?
Che:Yeah, I've thought about this one a lot. Coming straight from Fast. So really, there are a few different types of When it comes to payments, you do have some big segments. I'll focus on ecommerce just because that's the one that I'm most familiar with. Just coming from fast, I don't think crypto will rapidly derail or disrupt the ecommerce payments for one main reason.
Che:Because right now centralization is at the core of ecommerce when it comes to payments. The only reason why ecommerce works and someone on one side of the world is willing to pay for something on the other side of the world and trust that they're going to get it is because they are protected. They know that. Consumers know that if they buy something online and they don't get it, they can do a chargeback. They just go to their bank and they say, Hey, I ordered green slippers and I got pink fluffy slippers.
Che:And the bank will say, Okay, show us some proof and then we'll give you your money back. That doesn't happen. With crypto, it's trustless by nature and fundamentally, that doesn't align with e commerce and it's like principles where trust is almost at the core of ecommerce. You have to trust this merchant that if you give them your money, they they are they are gonna give you what you ask in return. And but there's no guarantees when it comes to crypto.
Che:So, hey, maybe someone will design the chargeback version for crypto payments. Then maybe. Then maybe.
Charlie:Yeah, fascinating. Very relevant topic at the moment. Question from James. So for the low tech customers, like the ones that only have a Facebook page who just want something that works, how did you get them to talk to you and give feedback so you knew how to iterate for them? Was this a challenge?
Che:Yeah. So something we did from the, I'd say three months to three months into launching, something I did straight away was I put up a banner on the dashboard. So as part of the onboarding flow, it would pop up and say, Hey, do you want to book in a three thirty minute concierge onboarding call? I made it sound really fancy. And then I said, hey, you'll get to speak to someone from our customer success team, and they're going to help you set up to see if they're just right for you.
Che:A lot of customers chose this just because of how non technical they were. And what I would do is I I literally jump on a half night call with, like, call with them. I'd ask them about their business, about what they wanna do. And I would go into their dashboard, and I would set up what they needed for it. And and I teach them how to use it to now do what they wanted to to do.
Che:And then in return, I got to ask some questions along the way. I never made it like, oh, thank you for now completing the onboarding. Here are five questions that I want to ask you. It was like I had five, six questions that I knew I wanted to ask, and I would weave them in through the conversation to make it seem like a lot more natural. And, yeah, they always left really happy.
Che:And actually, we found that those users were always our highest retention users. We still have users from years and two years ago that still actively use us day to day to day. And they were the ones that if you look back, those were the ones that I personally onboarded. So no, yeah, personally onboarding customers.
Charlie:Love it. Any other questions just before we wrap up? Going once, going twice. From William, so how many hours do you work a week and do you have a team?
Che:Justin, so you think you're across everything?
Charlie:William, do you wanna reply?
Che:Oh, across everything. Oh, actually, now I don't even know. It feels pretty constant. Basically, almost twenty fourseven. I get up at nine and I'll work until sixseven.
Che:If I've got something in the evening, I'll go. And then if I'm not doing anything in the evening, I'll continue working then. And I pretty much do that all day, every day. Do I have a team? No, it's just actually I've got my sister who does customer support for Zupei.
Che:She is legendary. If you're looking for another customer support agent, can give you a contact details. But she does like a few hours a day for us and helps me stay accountable to answering customer support questions.
Charlie:What about, are you ever afraid of burnout?
Che:It's it's crossed my mind a few times, but I've been doing this for this sort of same pace for three, four years now. And I don't know. I'm not afraid of it because I don't know what it feels like. I've heard of it. I've heard of people really burning out and it's catastrophic for them and they need to move jobs or they need to take a six week sabbatical just to recharge.
Che:I think for me, something that I do outside of work because I think having something outside of work is super, super important. Something completely different to what you do day day today is I go to martial arts twice a week, and it's an hour and a half on a Tuesday and a Wednesday evening. And those three, four, sometimes four hours a week are, for me, super duper important. It helps set everything else into it can sometimes be quite easy to get lost in work and think, oh, no, what I'm doing is really stressful or I've got deadlines or I've got four different people asking for four different things that they all wanted yesterday. That can sometimes seem quite stressful.
Che:But then whenever I go to those classes and don't know, someone sitting on my head and twisting my arm and digging their thumb into the side of my head, I think that is stressful. That hurts. This isn't. So for me, the way I'm working now is I'm quite happy. So, yeah.
Che:And think a lot of that is just down to because I have quite a few things that I do outside. I'm trying to sound pretty sociable. If you tell me, hey, do you want go grab a drink? I'd probably say yes. I'll probably say yes.
Charlie:Love it, man. And I think final question. So from Ostad, was it hard to become a stripe partner?
Che:Surprisingly, no. It it it wasn't too hard. No. It was hard. Actually, I was going to say it was hard to build it, but even then, that wasn't hard.
Che:No. It wasn't too hard to become a Stripe partner. It cost you paid, like, a $250 fee, one time fee. They would review your application, and then you would be approved or denied. We actually got denied first time.
Che:This might be a story for another day, but when Superpay was getting started, they actually banned our account two weeks in because we thought we were trying to build on top of Stripe, and they didn't like that. And even though we tried to tell them, oh, actually, no. We are building it through Stripe Connect, then they chilled out. But, yeah, like, this is, like, into two weeks since launching. We had a few customers.
Che:We were doing, like, a few $100 a day, and and then we got kicked off. And then everything ground to a halt and I'm freaking out. Was like, oh, no. My business has died. But then we, like, luckily got to reach out to Stripe and they're really apologetic about it.
Che:And actually, that was probably the start of actually quite a strong relationship with, like, me and Stripe.
Charlie:Yep. Awesome. And so final question from William. What do you think is the future of payments? So many global markets are not credit card friendly and have, alternate payment methods like EPI in India, Alipay in China, but less in Brazil.
Charlie:Just wondering how you think that it will evolve in future.
Che:Yeah. No. APMs are like a whole different ballpark. APMs, bought all alternative payment methods. So this is actually something that we're now starting to explore a bid.
Che:It's a completely different ballpark. I don't think we'll see any kind of consolidation anytime soon. Each market is completely different. For example, in Indonesia, they have 12 different APMs, but everyone's got tiny market share. They have no market dominated there.
Che:All those 12 companies, fifteen, twenty, they've all got a slither of the market share. So just in Indonesia alone, you've got 15 companies all competing and they've all got a tiny share, so there's no consolidation there. You just got to accept them all or accept none or choose to accept one or two. But I think Stripe will play a huge role in becoming the middleware on top of all this complexity. It's what they've been doing from day one and it's what they're still chipping our way up.
Che:So there is no value in Veed building integrations direct integrations into into into, like, 12 different APMs, like, in, like, different markets. There's very little value for us. But for Stripe, huge value for them. And if they can make it as easy for us to just to click a toggle, like, in or, like, offshopped checkout to suddenly accept a whole new market of APMs, then, obviously, we're we are gonna do that. If they've made it so easy, why not take it why why not take advantage of that?
Che:So, yeah, it's gonna be hard to say. The finance world has always been super fragmented. There's never been one clear market leader. Even Visa and Mastercard, they are duopolies, and they are like one in a chain of seven different companies that happen every single time you press pay. Nothing's going to change, though, for a very long time.
Che:It's extremely very, very slow moving, and different parts of the chain move at different speeds. Like how you just said, in India, they implemented a brand new piece of regulation that all the banks have to follow, that you have to authenticate every single recurring payment. So recurring payments in Stripe just just plummeted just because you have to request an authorization every single time, And it's just bonkers. We're going to continue to see fragmentation, and be up to central middleware like Stripe to put the glue glue it all together.
Charlie:I think that's a great question and answer to finish on. So I just want to say thank you very much, Shay, for joining us. Had a really good time talking to you today, as always. Thank you everyone for listening.
Che:No, no, thank you.
Charlie:We'll be back for more interviews like this with Ramen Club Pods very soon. So thank you very much.