The second reason that we started this business is that we are solving a problem that we felt firsthand. Three years ago we started my first business, which grew in fits and starts – sometimes making myus giddy with excitement from the growth and other times depressing us by convincing us that it wouldn’t survive the month. It is now stable, growing and profitable, providing good full-time employment to 7 people and exceptional customer service to around 100,000 customers.

One constant thorn in our side while running that business was buying financial services. Getting a checking account was relatively easy – I called 6 banks and found the checking account with the lowest fees (Washington Mutual free business checking). It took about 2 hours and in the end we got the best deal possible. After that, however, things began to spiral downhill when we tried to buy credit card processing, insurance, a line of credit and payroll processing.

We needed to allow our customers to shop with credit cards so we went about shopping for credit card processing services. When we filed our company with the state we had gotten a bunch (~20) of mailings from credit card processing / acquiring companies, each claiming to have the best deal. So we began calling and 4 hours later had heard a lot of slick talking but still didn’t have a clear picture of which company had the best deal. The salespeople seemed to make it as complicated as possible – talking about downgrades, transaction types, reserves, interchange categories, etc.  We turned to the internet and got the same result – lots of salesmanship but no clarity. We spent about 8 hours on buying this one service, but that 8 hours was spread throughout the week, between all the other things required to launch the business. Eventually we ran out of time and randomly picked one of the processors. It turned out to be a disastrous move – the rates were terrible (we didn’t find that out until the next time we shopped around, about a year later) and at one point, during our first christmas season, they became unreliable in paying us, withholding about $30,000, which nearly sunk our business

After speaking with some other small business owners we realized that they all faced similar problems.  That’s when we decided to solve the problem using a little bit of technology and came up with FeeFighters.