One-click checkout. That's it. One button. No passwords, no forms, no friction. Amazon had Buy Now for 20 years and nobody else did. We were going to change that.
Stripe invested $20 million in us and then built the exact same product. That's Silicon Valley for you. Your investor is also your competitor.
We raised $120 million, hired 400 people, and were doing $600,000 a year in revenue. I know how that math looks now. At the time, it felt like we were about to break through.
We shut down on a Tuesday. 400 people lost their jobs. I'd moved my family from Australia to San Francisco for this. It was the worst day of my life.
I was building a product that the market didn't need as badly as I thought. The checkout problem was real. The willingness to pay for a solution wasn't. That's the lesson.