(This post was originally titled “Payment Problem” and entered into my Journal on the 20th of June, 2015. I decided to share it to show how solving your own problem my lead to creating a product other people may want.)
Today was one of the most frustrated I’ve been since we launched 1.0. The frustration was as a result of a level powerlessness a founder should never have over his users. This was almost the same feeling I felt during the Subscription Conundrum, where we were having issues with subscriptions but only worse. This time around, users were getting billed but we were not receiving the money.
A few seconds after I switched on Netsob customer care line early this morning, a call came in. The call was from a distraught user who apparently has been billed for subscribing to an alert but has not received the confirmation SMS that he’s been subscribed.
At this point, let me briefly explain how our subscription service works. First, a user enters his phone number on our site and clicks subscribe. After that, our site provides him with a text message to send and a number to send it to in order to pay for the service. The user sends the text message to the number and his mobile network verifies that he has the required credit to pay for the service and if he does, the network deducts it. They then send a portion of the money together with the user’s phone number and text message to our payment platform provider who then logs the purchase and send the request to us and we subscribe the user. After that the user gets a confirmation SMS that his subscription was successful.
From the complexity of the payment process, you can see that any issue with the user’s mobile network or my payment platform provider will affect our own service. But the most common cause of this type of problem is when the user’s mobile network is having issues so they’ve billed the user but have not yet sent the user’s details to our payment platform provider. So I explained this to the user, in fewer words of course, and ask him to call us back if he doesn’t get the confirmation message after a few hours.
However, immediately, that user’s went off the call, another call came in. The same problem. User have been billed, but they haven’t received the confirmation SMS. I was still on call with that user when a third call came in, ended and a fourth call came in. The same problem. After the forth call, I tried to subscribe myself and I was billed immediately. But I didn’t receive the confirmation SMS. So I check our records to see if I have been subscribed. Nope. I checked our payment provider’s record to see if we at least got our own share of the money. Nope. The problem was obviously from the mobile network. They were billing our users and we weren’t getting a dime so the users weren’t getting subscribed.
After ten more similar calls, I was super pissed. I’ve been doing this for a while now so I know that not everyone who didn’t get the confirmation SMS calls in to complain. And if you factor in those who don’t even know their subscription was not completed even though they were billed, we were looking at a lot of dissatisfied or soon to be dissatisfied customers in just one day. The worse thing was that I didn’t have a record of everyone who had been billed since the mobile network didn’t send it to our payment platform provider. And that was what I needed right now. If I had that, I would have gone ahead and subscribed them manually. I would be much less pissed if we were the ones that were getting ripped off and not our users.
All through the day, I attempted several times to subscribe again, but had the same experience: I was billed, but I was not subscribed. I can imagine the frustration our users will be feeling right now: they would probably think we were the ones ripping them off. And, of course, they would be justified. Because we were the one who told them to pay for our service through a platform that we have no control over whatsoever. Then I realised the major problem. I have no control over my billing platform. The control was with the user’s mobile network and my payment platform provider. If anything is wrong with any of their system, my user suffers and I have no way of mitigating their losses or ours. Screw that. That’s no way to run a technology company. I brought out my design notebook. There is only one solution here: I’m creating my own payment platform.