Entrepreneurial language: Dwolla not take the usual road subversion payment industry

Intermediary transaction SEO diagnosis Taobao guest Cloud host technology Hall

Dwolla founder Ben Mirna (left) and investor Kutcher Beecher (right)

Apple has a famous ad, "different different" (think), advertising admirable Steve Jobs's tears: "Salute to those crazy guys, they are maverick, they are whimsical, they push change, push human forward ..." This classic copy is not only a portrait of Steve Jobs's life, it also inspires all the entrepreneurs to keep on developing new dreams.

Entrepreneurs have a dream of challenging the world's original rules and changing people's lifestyles, as Jobs did. Dwolla, a start-up in Iowa, is a disruptive business model in the area of payment, hoping to change the traditional way of transfer and bring more convenience to people's daily lives.

The special thing about Dwolla is that they bypass the credit card company to transfer money directly through the user's bank account and charge a fee of 25 cents for each payment. Yes, no matter how much the transaction amount, only a coin charge. Compared with PayPal, square and other existing payment service providers 2.7% of the fees and credit card companies charged 2% of the card fee, Dwolla is a very heterogeneous.

Ben Milne, the founder of Dwolla, Ben Mirna the idea of making payments as simple as making friends on Facebook by not doing the next PayPal. In Mr Milner's view, PayPal and square are both phenomenon-class creative products, but they are built on credit card networks such as Visa and MasterCard, while Dwolla is another high-rise.

This is a paranoid success of the world, Mr Milner is a little bit stunned, talking about the fucking and so on from time to language, straightforward and rugged. Speaking of Dwolla's creative origins, he blurted out without hesitation: I just want to finish the fucking transfer! (I ethically want the fucking money move)

Mr Milner is less than 30 years old, though he looks like an uncle. Mr Milner has been gone for 10 years on the road to entrepreneurship. His trajectory also coincides with jobs, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg): Dropping out of school. After graduating from high school into the University of Northern Ireland (University of Northern Iowa), Mr Milner found himself far more interested in starting a business than studying. He soon made his first big choice in life: dropping out of school and starting a business.

In 2002, Mr Milner started his first company, Elemental Designs, with 1200 of billions of dollars in investment, and he was 18 years old. He launched a website to sell speaker products, and the company's turnover exceeded 1 million dollars in four years. The company is still functioning, but Mr Milner's energies have shifted to Dwolla, the second start-up.

The creation of Dwolla is a product of Mr Milner's discomfort with credit card companies. American credit card companies charge a 2% fee for each card transaction, which alone can bring in 40 billion dollars a year. At the first company, Mr Milner found himself contributing tens of thousands of of dollars a year to the credit card companies.

"Why should I send them money?" Mr Milner, who had no financial knowledge, suddenly became interested in credit cards and banks. He found that the current U.S. payment services through the bank's automatic Switching Center (ACH) system, due to the existence of a lot of fraud to identify, the ACH system is currently running very slow.

Mr Milner thought that if the ACH system was bypassed and the credit card company was safely certified, the payment would become ever more convenient and would be exempt from various fees. The idea of completely leaving the existing financial system to create a new payment service, and the financial sector being the most tightly regulated area, seems crazy, but Mr Milner insists.

In 2008, Milner founded the payment services company Dwolla. The biggest difficulty for startups in financial Services is trust, and Mr Milner was hard at first to convince banks to deal with themselves. Fortunately, he found several financial institutions to make strategic investors. The financial institutions themselves are engaged in banking and credit card processing services, thus allowing Mr Milner to start his own business pilot in a small area.

In December, Dwolla began to operate formally, and Mr Milner remembers clearly that the first week was a 50,000 dollar deal. After four years of operation, Dwolla is now out of Iowa and expanding to the U.S. market. Today, with an average of $500 for each payment, the daily deal Dwolla $1 million trillion at the end of last year and is moving toward a $3 million mark.

Dwolla's model is not complicated: users need to use social security number and mobile phone registration, after the completion of the verification can be paid, the recipient does not need to Dwolla account. The payment amount is transferred directly through bank account, not through ACH system and credit card company, so it cannot be overdrawn. Dwolla also focuses on social networking, where users can associate Facebook accounts and transfer money directly to Facebook friends.

Although it has been operating in Iowa for a long time, Dwolla soon became popular with consumers and businesses. The reason is simple: 10 U.S. dollars to pay the transaction fee free of charge, more than 10 U.S. dollars no matter how much is a fee of 25 cents.

Due to the extremely low fees, Dwolla has been welcomed by more businesses. According to Mr Milner, only 11% of Dwolla's payment transactions are personal to individuals, 89% are business-to-business, or C2B. For businesses, they had to pay the credit card companies or the square, PayPal and other payment services to pay up to 3% of the fees, each year is also a huge amount of spending.

While the size of the Dwolla is still not comparable to square or PayPal, if it attracts strategic investors like square, or, like PayPal, with Discove, a financial giant, It is not impossible to increase the size of the cooperative business to a geometric number.

In terms of mobile payments, Dwolla has also launched its own smartphone app, which functions like Square or PayPal. Consumers can use the complete payment transactions such as collecting, payment and recharging, and can also search for the nearby cooperative merchants who support Dwolla. The payment service Provider Spreedly CEO Justin Benson Benson said: Dwolla is the way to pay in the future.

Earlier this year, Dwolla completed a 5 million-dollar B-round financing, and the New York VCs union Square Ventures. Most notably, Hollywood star and venture star Kutcher Beecher Ashton Kutcher, who also came from Iowa, Dwolla. When the two were at the event, Mirnair was amazing: "Beecher was a shrewd investor, but it took me a while to find out because I didn't know about him!"

Mr Milner is right that the firm is a smart investor. Before investing in this Iowa fellow's start-up company, Dwolla used the service as a consumer. His feeling is: "From Square to PayPal to other companies, too many people want to enter the payment field, but Dwolla is a different product." Dwolla in a way that ordinary people never thought could bring a subversion to the payment industry from the outside!