Poornima Vijayashanker

Producer for Payments9.6.2012

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Products shipped

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Founding engineer (September 2006 - January 2010)

Employee #2, came up with the name for Mint. Built the prototype focusing on back-end development in Java.

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Customer Support.

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YodleeVendor that provides data from financial institutions.

Customer Support Tool

Provide tool to debug financial institutions transaction data.

Read-only access for customer support reps to troubleshoot tickets.

Users

Want accurate & secure financial data.

Inaccurate transaction data.

Unavailable transaction data.

Need to keep track of issues to get vendor support and improve.

Need to make sure issues being reported are not minor ones.

Keeping sensitive financial data sanitized and secure.

PROBLEMS

SOLUTION I BUILT

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Engagement analytics.

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In 2007 engagement analytics solutions didn’t exist.

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My solution was to run cron jobs that queried the database for the following criteria:- Number of new users.- Active users.- Inactive users.- Feature adoption and usage.- User personas based on financial data.

Email & Sms Alertsweekly summary emails

recommendations for financial products

Fed into life cycle marketing and built additional features to increase engagement, retention & monetization of users.

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security.

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Mint needed to build trust.

Built the Encryption manager which was a separate service responsible for encrypting all access codes across mint and its data vendors.

Worked with security consultants to expose vulnerabilities, and came up with solutions to address them.

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Scalability.

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From 0 to 2M users.

Re-architected prototype into a service-oriented architecture.

Broke apart initial prototype into: core consumer application, messaging infrastructure, analysis engine, internal tools, apis for mobile applications, and data warehouse.

optimized performance at the application layer & database layer.

front-end architecture.memcaching.Moved to a master/slave database architecture.Optimized mysql queries.

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Mint acquired in 2009.

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Founder & CEO (January 2010 - Present)

Membership management for small businesses.

Inspiration came from 7 years of practicing yoga, volunteering, and providing tech consulting for yoga studios.

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Built 2 products in 2 years.

membership manager tracks lifecycle of members to improve retention & increase sales.BizeeBee Billing is a virtual terminal that streamlines the process of taking CC payments & getting paid on time!

Bootstrapped business with 7 full time employees & $300k in outside funding.

Organic distribution channels: SEO, Bloggers & social media channels.

Service 600+ studios in 5 major countries.Subscription and transaction revenues support BizeeBee.

Built to be a self-sustaining business.

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Payments Platform

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Understand current problems in the market before building a solution.

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market ResearchThis is a brainstorming phase. Sample questions that will drive thinking about product solution:

General Australia Travel Questions

How many people travel to Australia each year, based on different nationalities? (Reason for doing this is to know what the most popular currencies are.)

What is the reason for travel? (business, vacation, personal)

What is the total amount spent on hospitality in Australia? (Hotels, B&B, etc.) split into luxury vs. budget travel.

What is the process for getting accommodations?

How do people pay for accommodations?

How do people deal with cancellations/refunds?

When is the most popular travel times of the year (given that Australia's summer is during December people might travel more during the holidays), and least popular times?  (This will also affect the exchange rate.)

How many people in Australia own properties (homes, apartments, vacation rentals)?

How often does the owner stay in his own property (i.e. what is the vacancy period)?

How are does the owner manage his property? (Property management companies, services, or self?)

Are people in Australia open to strangers living in their properties?

If so, how do they accept compensation for stays? What is the length of stay?

What portion of the Australian housing economy consists of renters/sublets? (Are there any additional regulations?)

What is the demographic of the renters/subleters?

What is the culture of the various major cities? (Melbourne, Syndey, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, Darwin)

Online payments in Australia

How comfortable are Australians with taking/making online payments?

Why are the sources of discomfort or unease?

What are the current services they use online (bill pay, PayPal, BillMeLater)? Do they use any mobile apps?

How does a transaction flow through the banking/credit card system in Australia?

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Product priorities are driven by the balance of business goals & user experience.

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Current BusinessI need to get a pulse on AirBnB First.

What is current revenue?  (I need to know so that I know what a 20% increase would be.)

Do you want to just grow top line revenues or increase 20% of bottom line?

Do you want to decrease costs?

AirBnB Guest

What are current monthly bookings? (i.e. frequency and popularity of travel to Australia)

What is current monthly revenue growth rate? (Do we have projections specifically for Australia?)

What are the points at which there is a potential sale? (analyze drop off points - start with analytics then have conversations with users to understand their behavior)

Why is the sale not happening? (i.e. where are the drop off points - product fit & expectations, product quality, marketing message confusion)

AirBnB Host

What is the potential number of listings? (Should be based off of market research.)

How many people have listed?

How many listings are complete? (i.e. pricing, availability, cancellations, quality/ratings, etc.)

What percent are incomplete, and which incomplete portion is affecting sales?

How many in-active listings are there?

What are some channels for attracting new listings?

Current Payment Processing

Do we have vendors or is it a solution built purely in house?

What are all the fees we are incurring? (exchange rate, payouts, credit card processing, chargebacks/refunds, cancellations, blended rate - based on card type). I need an exact figure is because some banks underwrite based on yearly revenue.

Do we do ACH or other types of non-credit card transactions?

Other costs such as customer support for transaction processing?

What are the views of customers (host & guest) regarding current payment processing solution?

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Who is our user and what is the pain they currently experience during the payment transaction phase? (AirBnB Host in Australia. AirBnB Guest traveling to Australia.)

What pain are we trying to solve?What value to the payment transaction process are we trying to add?  (e.g. Guaranteed payment & convenience, reduction of fees.)

What is the experience we want to deliver and how do we want to deliver it? (i.e. web, mobile, white-labeled & seamless integration with product)

What are the milestones and deadlines for the milestones? (e.g. could we offer credits before building payments infrastructure)What is the budget for this project? (debating built vs. buy) Are there other goals aside from revenue? (e.g. build brand awareness through branded AirBnB gift cards)

Are there existing payment providers in Australia?  How do they deal with international currencies?Existing payment providers in the US that will work with Australian banking system?What are all the fees associated with a transaction?Adoption rate of online vs offline payment options?Is there a change of behavior?

User Experience

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Company Location Notes

Braintree USA Looks like AirBnB already uses them. Might want to renegotiate based on volume.

PlaySpan USAHandles in-app purchases. Worth looking into if we want to integrate payments in to the AirBnB iPhone app. Acquired by VISA in ’11.

GlobalCollect USA Focused on local e-payment methods.

Envoy UK/Australia Focused on online payments. Acquired by WorldPay in ’11.

SecurePay Australia Online payment gateway currently used by large e-commerce carts like Magento, Shopify.

Paymate Australia Handles online and mobile payments. Recommended by eBay in Australia.

PaySimple USA Great technology and currently rolling out a white label API.

BalancedPayments USAFocused on providing a solution for marketplaces like AirBnB.Great technology that streamlines a number of processes (fraud detection, escrow, payout).

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Product Roadmap.

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Payment PhasesI. Explore and understand tradeoffs of building vs. buyingII. Buying - interview vendors and align their solution with our business and user experience goals

a. negotiate rates and fees based on volume of transactionsb. figure out who will provide best rates for card not present transactionsc. evaluate costs associated with third party processor vs. payment gateway or direct merchant accountd. most elegant solution given AirBnB’s goal of providing its customers with the best experiencee. best technology solution in terms of quality of integration, maintenance, and put a service level agreement in place that can be reviewed periodically

III. Building - engineering expertise a. understand feasibility given current team and resourcesb. recruit if there is a budget and need

IV. Feature roadmap with milestonesa. factor in infrastructure that needs to be builtb. AirBnB host facing featuresc. AirBnB guest facing featuresd. do some usability studies to prioritize features based on user feedbacke. create user stories in Pivotal Tracker to help with deadline estimates and planning sprintsf. begin building and testing features internally

V. Measure adoption rate & collect feedbacka. put analytics in place to track: engagement, revenue, costs incurredb. keep track of support tickets

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AppendixProcess for Picking Payment Processor http://bizeebee.com/2012/04/bizeebees-process-picking-payments-processor/

Personal Blog http://femgineer.com

LinkedIn Profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/poornima

Quora http://www.quora.com/Poornima-Vijayashanker

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