Why Was The RadPad Deal Shut Down Early? An Explanation From Their CEO

As you know, RadPad was offering free credit card rent payments when you used AndroidPay until the end of the year. Yesterday that deal was ended unexpectedly. RadPad originally reached out to me when the promotion was launched and reached out again when the promotion was ended.

Jonathan Eppers (CEO & Founder) wanted a chance to explain what happened with this promotion and give their side of the story. I think it’s an interesting look at what could and should have been done better.

Contents

1 The Explaination
2 Our Verdict

The Explaination

Here is the e-mail I received from Jonathan in full, explaining the issues with this promotion:

I’m attaching a screenshot of the notice we received from Stripe in July announcing no Android Pay processing fees for the remainder of the year. Given how many sign ups we experienced in the first week (300% + from what we typically see) and given that just these new Android Pay payers accounted for more than $70k in fees alone, I called our contact at Stripe to keep them up to speed on how successful this promotion was doing. That was when they informed us for the first time ever that they were capping the fees for the entire year at $50k, not $150k. And we aren’t getting reimbursed from Stripe until March 2017. As much as we hated to do it, we had to end the promotion right away because as we calculated what this would cost us over the course of four more months, we reached a number of over $700k in processing fees (if current sign up rates continued).

We made some big mistakes here.

We projected way to low when we modeled out how many new rent payers we thought would convert
In the promotion announcement, we failed to include language that gave us a means to end the promotion at any time
The promotion should have been lighter in that instead of offering it for the remainder of the year, we could have shortened the timeframe to give ourselves room so we didn’t end up in a position like we did yesterday having to end the promotion after only 10 days

Attached screenshot:

Our Verdict

I don’t think any of the parties involved are blameless, RadPad certainly should have included better fine print and Stripe should have been more forthright with any limitations (although it’s entirely possible they ran into the same issue with Google). I know some people went out of their way to purchase devices for this promotion and they’ll no longer be able to recoup the costs of those purchases and that definitely sucks.

I don’t think RadPad intentionally ran a bait & switch promotion though and I think some of the reactions in the community were overboard. I hope RadPad and other companies continue to target promotions to communities such as ours and they cross all their t’s and dot all their i’s when it comes to the fine print.

The Explaination

Our Verdict

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