[JayBallentine]

In merchant services (merchant cash advance) the people who offer the product don’t buy the product and will likely never need it. Think about it. Car salesmen drive cars. Insurance reps buy insurance. Real estate agents own homes. Salesforce sales reps use Salesforce. I could go on.

The fact that this dynamic exists makes it a bit tougher for buyers and sellers to understand each other in this space. If you go buy a car for your growing family, your salesman may have a growing family too. The fact that he may have a growing family as well may reflect itself in your experience and you just might - send him some referral business.

Because such an awkward dynamic exists in this vertical funders and merchants have become contemptuous of one another. Funders and merchants tolerate each other but do not necessarily love each other. I am willing to be that this dynamic has propagated itself into default rates.

Think about it. What would it be like to be a business owner and receive 5 calls from brokers, and another 3-5 from auto dialers all from folks who are calling you to serve their own best interests? How would that make you feel as a business owner? Let’s say you get to a point where you actually need the product, are you happy to consume it? Because the cumulative sum of these experiences were poor, are you more or less likely to default? Might you be tempted to “stick to those guys?”

So we have a pretty unique challenge with Buynance. We have to market a product that we will never consume and never have consumed.

So, we have decided to bet the farm that if we can create an amazing end to end user experience for the customer - walls of contempt will fall and we might even get to a respectable viral co-efficient.

Our ability to effectively serve customers is only partly rooted in our technology but mostly will come from a focused design on the end to end user experience. As a company we’ll do things like these on a macro level, but I am personally committed to taking the time to do things like; call customers on the anniversary date of their opening to wish them a happy anniversary and to congratulate them. I’ll send them personalized Holiday and birthday greeting cards amongst other things.

We think the sum of these activities (coupled with beating any rate a broker can offer) will help us become a catalyst to market expansion. How? Simple. When people love you - they talk about you. When they talk about you, they bring you other customers.

Here’s a secret. We started as a manual operation. So if you’re a broker you don’t need a bunch of technology to provide a more elegant experience, (we're using tech to scale quickly) you just need the desire to do so along with living by the lesson to be learned from this parable:

There were twin brothers. Each of the twin brothers were given an identical Island. The island wasn’t quite yet bountiful with sustenance so they would have to manage. One of the brothers made sure to eat every piece of fruit from every tree or plant as soon as it became available. He eventually starved. The other brother only ate the minimum required to survive and after some years was able to rest on his laurels - an Island filled with fruit.

One final word. Much has been said on this business of stacking. I’d bet my last dollar that if the industry was made up of former business owners who may or may not have had a need for the product - stacking wouldn’t exist. I say that because none of you would stack yourselves out of business.

[Ryan Shiroky]

"There were twin brothers. Each of the twin brothers were given an identical Island. The island wasn’t quite yet bountiful with sustenance so they would have to manage. One of the brothers made sure to eat every piece of fruit from every tree or plant as soon as it became available. He eventually starved. The other brother only ate the minimum required to survive and after some years was able to rest on his laurels - an Island filled with fruit."

learn to fish...