Birk Jernström

Founder of @polar_sh - how modern software is monetized.

[Birk Jernström @birk]

Thrilled to announce our $10M Seed led by @Accel today, with continued support from @AbstractVC & @MischiefVC, and incredible angels.

Join us and let's build the future of billing for developers to empower the next generation of software 🚀

[Polar @polar_sh]

Announcing our $10M Seed Round led by @Accel alongside incredible angels 💫

It's never been easier to build & ship software.

But it's also never been harder to monetize it.

We’re building the open-source monetization platform to empower future one-developer unicorns. How? 🧵

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@RaminNasibov Lemmings

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@eve_silb very sorry about that. It’s not an outage. We shipped some enhancements to team management two days ago (RBAC), but some sessions of merchant logins in the dashboard was impacted. If you clear cookies for https://t.co/C4XO7v11D4 you’ll be able to login and access the dashboard again.

Sorry about this experience and inconvenience. We thought we had addressed all those sessions, but seems we missed yours 😔

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@pontusab Jealous. Best city.

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@nota_codeur @polar_sh Yes, sorry to clarify, authenticated merchants experienced issues. However, for unauthenticated users (customers at checkout) there was no impact.

[Birk Jernström @birk]

Yes, don’t get me wrong, I love Scandinavia (I’m 50/50 🇸🇪/🇳🇴).

I’ve also lived in the US and taxation in NY is no joke either, but lots of benefits, e.g mutual taxation for partners, minimal employer tax and less sales tax.

As everything in life it’s all trade-offs at the end of the day. Happy overall with the ones here in Sweden, but the taxes are too high and the classical narrative to defend them is increasingly breaking apart.

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@andyhennie @BradyHaran But they make like 2-3x what we do to compensate 🤓

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@tnkuehne @polar_sh hehe fun fact: that’s how Polar started, but I’m afraid it’s a dead end or at least we were unable to crack it despite countless attempts

[Birk Jernström @birk]

We're working on "Sponsorship 2.0" at @polar_sh - better subscriptions + built-in services to upsell for open source maintainers.

Looking for some early adopters who want to try it out early in a few weeks & help shape the product.

DM me if you're interested.

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@Sikandar_Bhide @polar_sh ancient times

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@paulg Did your trip to Stockholm make you understand Gustaf better?

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@ivanburazin Rakija 🤝🏼🇲🇰

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@andruyeung It’s magical - enjoy!

I heard that Lofoten was considered for shooting Lord of the Rings. Sets the right expectations less orcs.

[Birk Jernström @birk]

We block a combination of things, e.g email, credit card, device fingerprint. Overall, we have a super low dispute/chargeback rate at Polar so it's not a widespread issue.

Unfortunately, friendly fraud (stupid name) is inevitable online and across any provider. So I'm afraid it's unavoidable for anyone selling online given enough time.

Worse still, banks tend to side with customers in case of chargebacks. I can't tell you how many times I've prepared a great case to counter with only to see the chargeback still be approved in favour of the customer. But then with an additional $30 in fees imposed by networks/PSPs.

That would have been the most likely outcome here, i.e still a refund and with an additional +$30 in fees.

No platform can protect against this. It's part of the credit card networks that each PSP, platform or marketplace needs to adhere to.

Refund policies does not prevent it. However, it can be used as evidence in a counter. But there are local laws in many jurisdictions that require a refund window that a policy cannot override.

It sucks. I totally get it and your frustration; I would have felt the same, and do frequently since we're ultimately liable for the chargebacks and end up covering a lot of them as the merchant of record in certain cases.

However, it's simply the game of commerce – for better and for worse.

In light of that, if we – or anyone else – would offer some form of guarantee against chargebacks, it would therefore require significant fees. Since we would need to cover that risk + margins by default and across the entire platform.

We don't want to do that. However, we do need to protect against chargebacks and too many of them. Therefore, we have to have this automatic refund mechanism in-place for certain criteria and thresholds.

Otherwise, similar to PSPs, we allow them all to pass on as chargebacks, but that has another set of trade-offs. E.g Internet is full of stories of people starting to sell and on the 10th sale they get a chargeback. Now with 10% chargeback rate they're kicked off immediately.

This is why the automatic refunds is even considered a premium (paid) feature with PSPs and with other standalone startups around the same, e.g https://t.co/GkMrM6TLn6

So I totally get and share the frustration, but am afraid there is no way around this challenge. It's all just a different set of trade-offs to choose from.

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@inlovewithgo @PeterGarety @polar_sh @routingdotrun The guy is just in here to shill his own offering. I wouldn't take him too seriously.

[Birk Jernström @birk]

Besides email, we block credit card and device fingerprint. Our disputes/chargebacks are super low as a platform too so it's not a widespread issue, but of course it happens.

Unfortunately, friendly fraud as it's (stupidly) called is unavoidable online, so I'm afraid no PSP or platform can protect against this fully.

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@BreejeAnadkat @sirdelani @polar_sh @isacpolar https://t.co/PN0WqLmDLl

[Birk Jernström @birk]

I understand the frustration. Unfortunately, this was caused due to the customer initiating a chargeback with their bank.

We integrate with the credit card networks to get early signals before a chargeback is officially submitted. We can then either a) refund to avoid a chargeback or b) let it pass and get a chargeback.

Given certain thresholds and criteria on our end we then need to automatically refund some of them to avoid excessive chargebacks on our end. This is standard practice for merchant of records, marketplaces and the like and a premium opt-in for PSPs. It's called Dispute Prevention on our end and shows up on the order for the refund. However, I agree we can do a better job of sending notifications too.

I hope this clarifies. We have a very low chargeback and dispute rate overall across the platform, but need to have mechanisms like this in-place to protect the platform and remain well below certain chargeback thresholds.

I investigated this further and found that the customer in question had done the same thing before. I've therefore blocked them from any future purchases across our platform since it's clear they're doing "friendly fraud".

I'm sorry this impacted you, truly. Unfortunately, disputes/chargebacks and friendly fraud is an inevitable and annoying part of commerce online.

But as the merchant of record, I'm afraid we have to have these protections in-place as all others, but will make sure we improve how we notify about it beyond the status in the dashboard for the refund itself.

[Birk Jernström @birk]

@PeterGarety @polar_sh Excuse me, what?

[Birk Jernström @birk]

There will always be a volume based discount offering since it's inevitable with enterprises and high volume businesses. We'll launch such a dedicated tier too.

In the meantime, we still offer volume based discounts beyond these for very high growth startups, and you're free to reach out.

However, for small to medium sized businesses, we wanted to offer a more transparent and opt-in model that was accessible from Day 1. Whereas other providers don't even engage with discounts until a certain & very high threshold.