Cloak Payments
An AI-powered payments platform
The goal was to provide the internet optimal and convenient payments every time you make a transaction. That way, customers can purchase without worrying about choosing the best payment method (credit card, bank account, BNPL, etc.)
I encountered many challenges while building this platform. One of the biggest was aptly summarized by Naval Ravikant:
"Doing a startup is extremely difficult. So when you come up with a plan that says, I'm going to do A, and then once I'm done with A, I can do B, you will never get to B. A is hard enough to do. Just going from zero to one in A is a Herculean effort. If you imagine a B, then you should just start B. Or what's more likely is even if you manage to pull off A, and somehow you have the miracle of free time and capability and still a motivated enough early team that you can go do something else, you'll probably do A1 or A2 or C or something you couldn't have even seen when you started out to do A and then В."
Functions and Features within the platform:
- Auto saves inputs of cards
- Next time you encounter an input, the recommended payment would show
- Merchant Dashboard
- Merchant API
Didn't work out, but I learned a ton... Like building the whole financial ledger for the platform...
Lessons Learned:
- You should talk to more diverse group of people, including legal, financial, and technical people to gain more perspectives.
- A problem and solution should be clear and simple. If a person can't understand it within a minute, it's not clear enough.
- Appreciate when you face reality and shit doesn't work out.
- “Action produces information. Just keep on doing stuff.” - Brian Armstrong