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In today’s newsletter: better recurring payments, prettier charts and graphs, and 100+ ways to build an audience before you build a business.

Makers Carolina Nucamendi and Brenna Curran originally launched Waivr as a consumer app to prevent unnecessary bank and credit card fees.

The app worked by alerting users when their account went into overdraft. Waivr would then bring the account balance back up to $0.00 — before the bank could process any fees. Ditto for credit card late fees: Waivr would spare users by picking up the minimum due.

A data-driven pivot: Two years on — almost to the date — they’re relaunching as Waivr API: a Pay By Bank protocol designed to eliminate the problem of failed payments for both users and merchants. Why? Data analysis with existing customers led the Waivr team to a key insight.

Subscriptions often cause fees: Co-founder Brenna Curran discovered that recurring payments often bounce owing to subscriptions being charged at inconvenient times. “Typically, there was just a cash flow misalignment between when an individual gets paid and when they were charged for a product,” she shares.

How Waivr API works to solve failed payments: For individual users, Waivr promises no bounces and no failed payments. This is owing to their use of a hybrid Same Day ACH and Real Time Payments (RTP) network to move money from customer to merchant at cheaper rates.

Solving problems for both businesses and people: For merchants charging recurring payments or for subscription products, using Waivr API can reduce failed payments and improve customer retention by eliminating bounces and payment failures. Can you imagine? No more churn from expired cards.

“Credit card perks [like Starbucks or airfares] for educated, usually urban professionals are being subsidized by people who have less,” according to a recent story from the New York Times titled, ‘The Dirty Little Secret of Credit Card Rewards Programs.’ These are exactly the problems Curran and Nucamendi are working to get ahead of.

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