Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Braintree
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @benmills details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 110 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 25 comments
I'm excited to give Braintree a go someday, but what I really wish is that someone would come up with a system that was orthogonal to and independent of the existing banking system.
The banks and the regulations make all real credit card processing a major PITA, and while Braintree eases the process, they are not an exception as far as I can tell. They still have to underwrite and they still have to vet accounts for underwriting. If you have bad credit or anything else that would prevent you from getting a loan, you're not going to be able to process cards without PayPal, which means it's difficult to bootstrap yourself out of a bad situation.
One of the main reasons I think Bitcoin is cool is because it's a great experimental platform for this kind of stuff.
For anyone who hasn't used them yet, it's the one-stop-shop and their API that really sets them apart from the competition. You submit one set of paperwork and they take care of all the accounts: merchant, gateway and api. No need to chase down different accounts and get them all working together.
The fantastic API literally saved hundreds of hours of integration and build time, as the recurring billing, discounts and everything is completely programmatic and just works.
I just signed up within the last few weeks and throughout the whole process I could tell they built it up with developers in mind, not as an afterthought.
"Who are the customers Braintree decided to write off? “It was a fool’s errand to try selling medicine to those who hadn’t yet experienced pain. Payment processing is complex. It’s difficult for inexperienced merchants to recognize value. We’d spend countless hours trying to explain ‘pain’ and our cure but some just didn’t care because they hadn’t felt it yet...'"
That's money right there. And noted for the future of my business. People will pay for you to take away the pain of their bad experiences with an inferior service/product.
These guys are awesome—they power all our payments. The one thing I wish they could somehow add support for is outgoing EFT/ACH transfers.
We do have one funny story about them from Getaround... one night, early in the morning, we got a call directly from their CEO. Apparently we had written some bad code that was just hammering their servers—basically, we were accidentally DoSing Braintree.
Got it fixed up quickly, and have loved them and used them ever since!
Oh how I wish Braintree was accessible in Canada. We've haven't been very pleased with our payment processor as of late.
About a year ago I actually managed to get someone from Braintree talking with someone from Chase Paymentech Canada (since Braintree supports Chase Paymentech). Unfortunately, BT is integrated with CP Salem whereas CP Canada only processes through CP Tampa.
If anyone has tried to do this in the last year and succeeded, please comment.