Just saw this post about our startup, I'll clarify some things since some people seem interested.<p>RubyPay was a points based payment system for digital content that anyone could use. Points were bought for cash, and redeemable for cash. It was released because we wanted to generate some feedback on the model.<p>RubyPay was closed so quickly because we realized some problems, and didn't want any live transactions going through our system that we'd later have to refund. Among some of the problems were:<p>1) allowing anyone to sell content without a screening process for them or the content<p>2) allowing consumers to redeem the points for cash, which brought a whole new set of laws into play<p>3) not anticipating all of the ways that fraud could propagate through the system<p>We're currently working on the service to address these and other issues. We've also discussed the business further with lawyers, became PCI-DSS compliant, and are in the process of forming industry partnerships. As always thanks for the feedback (there was another discussion thread on HN too), it helped us quickly pivot and iterate on our model, and probably saved us tons of time and headaches.
Can you imagine how much worse this could have been if they’d never posted this and simply plowed ahead?<p><i>Knowing when you’re in over your head</i> is crucial and it looks like they caught it early enough since they opened up the feedback thread. Hopefully they’ll take this, regroup, and have a bit more ground to stand on in the next phase or project.
Everybody here seems in agreement with the guy just shutting down the service.<p>My first reaction was WTF. In fact, I think the OPs last comment is a little rude. None of the commenters were advising him to shut down the service. They were trying to help improve the service ...<p>Altogether it's just weird.
There is still room for quality payment services like this. In particular, high-risk and micro-payments, would be great niches to get into.<p>The primary problem is that to do this right, you will need to spend a lot on legal fees or find a lawyer to work for equity in your idea(you wouldn't even have a single customer yet).<p>I've run the scenario a million times and I would love to create a start-up that can disrupt, maybe even revolutionize the payment processing industry. My friend runs one of the big PayPal sucks sites, and makes several million collecting residuals by forwarding angry PayPal customers to open a real merchant account. I've seen first hand every possible complaint and gripe you can imagine.<p>Someone find me a VC that wants in on this. I'll take a $1 salary.
I love to see reactions like that from entrepreneurs because <i>sometimes</i> that's what should happen. Some ideas -- at least in their present form and in the present context -- are just dumb and need to be abandoned so folks can move on to something else.