Announcing The Databases of Money

A Free Chapter is now available for readers of Money in Transit

Welcome to Money in Transit, a newsletter on the technology to move money around, from the insides of non-fintech startups that can’t stop thinking about payments.

This Friday, the 1st of December, I’m launching my new book, The Databases of Money: Designing Modern Payment Applications. There’s a free chapter available to wet your appetite, which you can download here.

Consider sharing this post with a founder who is taking a two-hour flight soon and could use a good read.

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Any successful startup’s raw material is information. Without situation awareness, founders can’t make good decisions, ask good questions, or plan for a better future. The computer is the latest in a trail of innovations making processing and acting upon information easier and more effectively.

Over the last 60 years, technological acceleration has made the use of computers widespread. Hardware has been commoditized into the cloud, and software has been commoditized into open source.

Handling money and transactions inside organizations has been an obvious use case for computers. There must have been thousands of payment applications built over the course of those 60 years. Some are probably being actively developed now. And yet, there is at least one payment application project, somewhere, that is failing.

Can you imagine? A well-funded startup, building software that other companies have built before, tasked with an important component of any business. A piece of technology that sits on top of money’s thousands of years of history. And it is going down the drain.

That is happening to some CTO today. In 2023.

Back in college, architects study thousands of buildings, and their masters’ works. By contrast, software engineers “learn by doing”, and get to understand only a handful of large programs in depth. Sadly, those are programs they wrote themselves. 

Engineers are repeating each other’s mistakes rather than stacking each other’s successes.

For the last few years, I have been laser focused on designing payment applications. I have built, experimented, and learned. The compilation of all that experience is the book I’m launching this Friday: The Databases of Money: Designing Modern Payment Applications.

Money software must be put in the context of money. TDoM is a map for startup founders to avoid detours, obstacles, or roadblocks.

Is there really a need for a book on designing payment applications? Well, no. You can instead hire generalist software architects that will either recommend generic best practices like “make it work, make it right, make it fast”, or integrate with a payment platform that will eat away at your revenue and from which there is no escape.

Reading TDoM, you can gain expert insight in the two hours it takes to read it cover to cover. The man who understands principles can select his own methods, and avoid becoming part of the 70% of startups that fail. Doesn’t it bother you that payment applications have become the most common barrier to growth, even for startups that aren’t fintech? 

Founders are not only giving up countless hours on a part of their business that should have been solved already. They are also missing out on the untapped value that comes from

• Risk models that are superior even to their fraud service providers’.

• A more cost-effective selection of payment providers based on currency or time of the day.

• An increased reliability in the face of the constant outages at the very worst moment.

If something as simple as keeping track of your customers’ money keeps you awake at night, if the possibility that your otherwise fantastic product may be derailed because customers can’t trust you with their money, The Databases of Money is for you.

You can now download a chapter totally for free by clicking on the button right below. I will be in touch at launch day.