Every club gets its own card terminal and it's slower on purpose

A good chunk of my May went on writing to banks.

Not to investors. Not to customers. Banks.

That's what happens when you decide every club gets its own card terminal. There's a faster way to do it. We chose not to take it.

PagoCRM is our platform for sports clubs to collect players' fees. This spring it stopped being a promise and started being deployed for real. And deploying it turned out to be the same little dance, club after club.

Ask the club's bank for a virtual card terminal in the club's name. Set it up in test mode first, never straight to live. Create a subdomain on the club's own domain, so families pay on the club's address. Ask our hosting provider to activate a security certificate for it. Test a payment. Only then, go live.

Different clubs, different banks. Each bank with its own forms, its own contacts, its own ritual for moving a terminal from test to live.

By the end of the month my inbox was full of threads that all looked the same and were all slightly different. Like a spot-the-difference puzzle nobody asked for.

The shortcut we didn't take

There's an obvious easier way. One payment account: ours. Every club's money comes in through us, and we pay them out.

One setup instead of many. A club onboarded in an afternoon instead of weeks.

I get why it's tempting. Especially while a bank is taking its time to reply.

But I don't want to be in the middle of a club's money. If fees go straight from families to the club's own account, the club is always in control. If they ever leave us, their payments still belong to them.

And we never have to explain why a club's money is sitting in our account.

If you sell trust, don't put yourself between the customer and their money.

The price is time

A lot of it.

Every new club is a small project with steps I don't control. A bank can take days to answer. A certificate needs someone else to switch it on. Moving from test to live is one more round of emails.

I'll be honest: it's frustrating. Convincing a club can happen in a meeting or two. Getting them live can take weeks.

And it doesn't scale nicely. Ten clubs is ten banks' worth of paperwork.

What makes it bearable is boring. The same checklist, in the same order, every time. Asking for the terminal the day the club says yes, because the bank is the bottleneck. Never skipping the test, because a wrong charge to a family costs more trust than a week of delay. Telling the club honestly how long it takes, because if you promise days and it takes weeks, the delay becomes yours even when it's the bank's.

And the club's name on everything. Their domain, their account, their terminal. We're the tool, not the owner.

In the middle of all that, on the last day of May, we also heard that our adhesion to the network of digitalising agents for Kit Digital, the public digitalisation programme, had been granted. Now we wait to be put in the catalogue. And, hopefully, not taken out again.

Why we can afford slow

A funded startup needs growth curves. Slow onboarding would scare an investor.

We don't have one. The studio pays the bills, so the product can grow at the speed that's right for clubs, not for a pitch deck.

One shared terminal would have been faster for us.

A terminal of their own is better for them.

And they're the ones paying.

P.S. If any bank is reading this: I'm the one with all the nearly identical emails. Hi again.