2nd
My letter to Venmo
(I just forwarded one of Venmo’s weekly “update” emails back to them with a couple thoughts.)
Dear Venmo,
Just wanted to say—I appreciate what you’re trying to do with “social payments” but the automated weekly email telling me which friends and acquaintances had some kind of transaction is starting to seem pretty silly. I like the radical transparency idea, assuming that’s what you’re going for, but if that’s the case you need to either a) start pushing people to disclose actual transaction sums to their social graph or b) figure out some other way to make it interesting and/or useful. (Product tie-ins? Additional story-style information? Photos of the events being repaid?)
You could also decide that providing a really easy, much less annoying way to Pay your Pals online is differentiation enough and that maybe people don’t need to have a digest email telling them that “Janey Johnson paid Bully Bopkins for toothpaste”. Speaking as somebody trying to turn an existing business model “social”, well, not everything needs to be.
Sincerely,
Lou Kosak
Pinchit.com
The email in question:
