For thine is the tech, the business and the profit

So I work in payments and in tech circles, it’s the in thing now. Everyone is either doing a payment app, a disintermediation system (a la Uber) or an aggregator type platform.

But what I find is people who know the tech of the thing but have almost zero idea of the business of the thing.

For payments for example, the tech once you figure it out is fairly simple. You just need to build it robust enough to be successful say 99% of the time. But building the tech/platform is one thing, but viable business development based on your tech is a totally different thing.

You see fundamental mistakes like providing a transaction service to your customer free where you pay a service provider a transaction fee for each transaction on the platform. And you extract little other value from the customer to cover this cost. You have a robust platform yes, and your tech is superb. But you have a really really faulty and unsustainable business. So the business becomes stuck in a perpetual loop of Series (insert alphabet) funding.

If it is doesn’t make sense in regular business, it will be in the rare case that it will make sense in tech business. Because, in the end, when the books are prepared, it will be in financial terms. This bubble will burst soon. And it will not be pretty.