DEV Community: Matangi_vs Sriram

The future of work isn’t about adding more software. It’s about making work simpler.

Matangi_vs Sriram — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 06:15:46 +0000

The future of work isn’t about adding more software. It’s about making work simpler.

That’s what makes Rippling interesting.

By bringing HR, IT, payroll, benefits, and workforce management into one platform, Rippling is tackling a problem many companies still struggle with: disconnected systems that create friction for employees and extra work for teams.

The real opportunity isn’t just automation.

It’s creating a workplace where:
→ Employees get what they need faster
→ HR teams spend less time on repetitive processes
→ IT can manage access and devices more efficiently
→ Leaders get a clearer view of their workforce

As companies become more global, distributed, and technology-driven, the ability to connect people, processes, and systems will become increasingly important.

Rippling is a strong example of how modern SaaS can move from being a collection of tools to becoming the infrastructure behind how a company operates.

The next generation of workplace technology won’t just help companies work faster.

It will help them work smarter.

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Flippa’s Sales Strategy and Growth

Matangi_vs Sriram — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 12:59:04 +0000

Flippa is an online marketplace where people can buy and sell digital businesses such as e-commerce stores, SaaS companies, websites, mobile apps, and content businesses.

Key Points
Two-sided marketplace:
Flippa connects business sellers with potential buyers. More sellers create more opportunities for buyers, while more buyers make the platform attractive to sellers.
Focus on business growth:
Flippa has expanded beyond small website sales and increasingly targets established businesses and larger acquisitions. This allows the company to participate in higher-value transactions.
Use of technology and AI:
Flippa uses technology and data to help buyers discover suitable businesses. Its valuation and matching tools can make it easier for buyers to compare opportunities and for sellers to understand potential business value.
Global market reach:
Flippa connects buyers and sellers from different countries. This gives sellers access to a larger customer base and gives buyers more investment opportunities.
Professional services:
The platform has expanded its offering beyond listings. It provides services related to valuation, buyer matching, due diligence, brokerage, legal support, payments, and business transfers.
Repeat customers:
Flippa benefits from buyers who return to make multiple acquisitions. Repeat buyers can increase transaction volume and reduce the need to continually acquire new customers.
Data-driven sales strategy:
Information from previous transactions can help Flippa understand market trends, business valuations, and buyer preferences. This data can improve the experience for both buyers and sellers.
Building trust:
Buying an online business involves financial risk. Flippa therefore needs to maintain accurate listings, verification processes, and reliable transaction support to build confidence among users.
Main growth opportunity:
Flippa’s major opportunity is to become more than a marketplace. By combining technology, data, global buyers, and professional services, it can position itself as a broader platform for digital business acquisitions.
Conclusion
Flippa’s sales strategy focuses on connecting buyers and sellers, expanding internationally, using technology, increasing higher-value transactions, and encouraging repeat purchases. Its growth shows how digital marketplaces can use technology and data to simplify business sales and create opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors around the world.
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Flatpay: Rethinking the Payments Business Model for European SMEs

Matangi_vs Sriram — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 12:53:35 +0000

In European payments, scale has traditionally been associated with sophisticated technology, broad merchant coverage, and increasingly complex pricing structures. Danish fintech Flatpay is pursuing a different proposition: simplify the merchant experience, standardize pricing, and build a high-volume payments business around small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Founded in Copenhagen in 2022, Flatpay provides card-payment terminals, point-of-sale (POS) systems, and online payment services. Its core proposition is deliberately straightforward: merchants pay a flat transaction rate rather than navigating a complicated schedule of card-type, subscription, setup, and transaction fees. The company has subsequently expanded beyond Denmark into Finland, Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

For finance professionals, however, Flatpay is more interesting as a business-model experiment than simply as another payment processor. Its growth illustrates how a fintech can use pricing transparency, vertical integration, and a highly targeted sales model to compete in a market dominated by much larger incumbents.

The business model: monetizing payment volume
At its simplest,** Flatpay**’s business model is transaction-based. Instead of relying primarily on recurring software subscriptions, the company earns revenue when merchants process payments through its infrastructure.

Its current pricing illustrates the model. Flatpay advertises a 0.99% transaction rate for its payment-terminal offering in several markets, with no subscription or fixed transaction fee. Its POS products can carry different rates and upfront hardware costs, while online payments have separate pricing for different card categories and payment methods.

The economic logic is straightforward:

Merchant payment volume × Flatpay’s effective take rate = transaction revenue

This creates an important alignment between Flatpay and its customers. If merchants process more card payments, Flatpay’s revenue increases. The challenge is that the headline transaction rate is not the same as economic margin: Flatpay must absorb or pass through the costs associated with payment networks, acquiring, fraud, hardware, customer support, sales, and other operating expenses.

Consequently, the key financial question is not simply how much transaction volume Flatpay processes, but how much contribution margin it generates per merchant and how quickly that margin scales relative to customer-acquisition costs.

Why the flat-rate proposition matters
Payment processing is inherently difficult for merchants to understand. The economics can involve interchange, scheme fees, acquiring fees, terminal costs, software subscriptions, minimum charges and different rates for different card types.

Flatpay attempts to remove much of that complexity.

Its proposition is effectively a shift from price optimization for the payment provider toward predictability for the merchant. Flat pricing can make payment costs easier to forecast and can reduce the perceived friction associated with switching providers.

That simplicity is particularly valuable for smaller businesses, where owners may not have dedicated payments or treasury teams.Flatpay therefore competes not only on price but also on financial transparency and reduced operational complexity.

The company also emphasizes daily payouts and a merchant portal that provides transaction and sales information, extending the proposition beyond simple payment acceptance into cash-flow visibility and business management.

A deliberately focused customer segment
Flatpay’s early strategy was not to compete for every merchant.

In 2024, the company told TechCrunch that it targeted merchants processing more than €100,000 annually and generally avoided multi-location chains and franchises. At that point, Flatpay had approximately 7,000 customers across Denmark, Finland and Germany.

This focus is important from a unit-economics perspective.

A payment processor incurs costs to acquire and onboard every merchant. Sales representatives, hardware deployment, installation, customer support and compliance processes can make very small accounts unattractive. By focusing on merchants with meaningful transaction volume,Flatpaycan potentially generate enough recurring payment revenue to justify those acquisition and servicing costs.

In other words, the company is not simply selling a cheaper card terminal. It is attempting to construct a merchant-level economic model in which higher payment volume supports the cost of acquiring and servicing the customer.

The unusual role of sales in a fintech model
One of the more distinctive elements of Flatpay’s strategy is that its go-to-market model has historically relied heavily on in-person sales.

That may appear counterintuitive for a technology company. Yet it reflects an important characteristic of SME payments: changing a payment provider is operationally consequential. Merchants need to understand pricing, hardware, installation, settlement and integration before they are comfortable switching.

Flatpay therefore combines technology with what its investors describe as “old-school people-led sales.” Dawn Capital says the company’s growth has been driven by a combination of customer-focused products, people-led sales and technology.

For investors, this creates an interesting trade-off.

A direct sales model can increase customer-acquisition costs and limit scalability compared with a purely digital acquisition funnel. But if it materially improves conversion rates, merchant retention and payment volume, the higher upfront cost can produce attractive lifetime economics.

The critical metric is therefore not sales efficiency in isolation, but customer lifetime value relative to customer-acquisition cost (LTV/CAC).

Growth before profitability
Flatpay’s financial history also demonstrates the cost of aggressive expansion.

According to the company’s 2024 Danish accounts, Flatpay ended 2024 with approximately 17,000 customers, representing 300% year-on-year growth. The company generated DKK 12 million in gross profit, compared with a DKK 3 million gross loss in the previous year. However, its net loss increased to DKK 151 million from DKK 52 million in 2023 as the company invested heavily in expansion.

This is a classic growth-fintech profile: gross economics improving while bottom-line profitability remains negative because operating expenses are being deployed ahead of revenue maturity.

For an investor, the distinction matters.

A growing net loss is not necessarily problematic if each new cohort of merchants produces attractive contribution economics and the company’s fixed-cost base can eventually be leveraged. Conversely, rapid revenue growth accompanied by persistently weak unit economics would suggest that scale is being purchased rather than created.

Flatpay’s investment case therefore depends heavily on whether operating leverage emerges as the merchant base expands.

From startup to European fintech unicorn
The company’s funding trajectory reflects investor confidence in that model.

Flatpay raised €45 million in a Series B led by Dawn Capital in April 2024, bringing its valuation to more than $100 million at the time.

By November 2025, Flatpay had raised a further €145 million at a valuation of approximately €1.5 billion, according to Dawn Capital. The investor also reported that the company had exceeded €100 million in annual recurring revenue and had expanded across several European markets.

TechCrunch reported in November 2025 that** Flatpay** had reached approximately 60,000 customers, up from 7,000 in April 2024.

That trajectory illustrates the central investment thesis: the company is attempting to turn a relatively simple merchant proposition into a highly scalable European payments platform.

Flatpay’s position within fintech
Flatpay sits at the intersection of several fintech categories.

First, it is a payments company, because its primary economic activity is processing merchant transactions.

Second, it is increasingly a merchant software company, because its POS products combine payment acceptance with sales, order, reporting and operational functionality.

Third, it has characteristics of a financial infrastructure platform, because recurring payment flows create a foundation on which additional merchant financial services could potentially be built.

This last point is strategically important. Payment processing can provide frequent interaction with a merchant’s financial activity. A provider that understands transaction volume, cash flows and business performance may eventually have opportunities to offer adjacent products.

However, Flatpay’s current proposition should not be confused with a bank or lending fintech. Its core business remains merchant payments and POS infrastructure.

The competitive challenge
Flatpay operates in a highly competitive market alongside established payment companies and fintech platforms such as Adyen, Stripe, PayPal and SumUp.

The company’s competitive advantage therefore cannot simply be “payment processing.” Large incumbents already possess enormous scale and sophisticated infrastructure.

Flatpay’s differentiation is instead based on simplicity, targeted distribution and merchant service.

Its strategy effectively asks whether an SME would prefer a highly optimized but complicated payment proposition or a straightforward one with predictable pricing and hands-on support.

That positioning can be powerful, but it also creates several risks.

1. Margin pressure
A flat rate simplifies pricing for the merchant but does not eliminate the underlying cost structure of card payments. If the cost of processing particular transactions rises, Flatpay may have less pricing flexibility than a provider using more granular pricing.

2. Customer-acquisition costs
A people-led sales strategy can be expensive. Maintaining attractive LTV/CAC economics will be crucial as the company expands into increasingly competitive markets.

3. Geographic complexity
European payments are fragmented by national payment methods, regulations, consumer behavior and incumbent relationships. Expanding from Denmark into multiple European markets therefore introduces operational complexity even when the underlying product is standardized.

4. Incumbent response
Large payment providers can potentially replicate simple pricing structures or compete aggressively for high-value SME customers. Flatpay must therefore continue improving its product and distribution advantages.

What finance professionals should watch
For analysts and investors evaluating Flatpay, headline customer growth is only one part of the story. Several operating metrics are arguably more revealing.

Payment volume per merchant indicates whether Flatpay is attracting increasingly valuable customers.

Effective take rate shows how much revenue the company generates relative to processed volume.

Gross margin and contribution margin reveal whether scale is translating into better economics.

CAC payback period indicates how quickly sales and onboarding costs are recovered.

Merchant retention determines the durability of recurring transaction revenue.

Operating leverage determines whether the company can convert rapid top-line growth into sustainable profitability.

Finally, cash burn relative to growth is critical. A payments company can grow extremely quickly while consuming significant capital because hardware, sales infrastructure and international expansion require upfront investment.

Conclusion
Flatpay represents a broader shift occurring in European fintech: innovation does not always require a radically new financial product. Sometimes it comes from redesigning the economics and customer experience around an existing financial service.

The company’s proposition is deceptively simple. Give SMEs a payment terminal and POS system, charge a transparent transaction rate, provide fast settlement and human support, and build revenue as merchants process more payments.

The financial challenge is considerably more complex.

Flatpay must demonstrate that its simplified pricing can coexist with attractive payment-processing margins, that its sales-heavy acquisition model can generate strong customer lifetime value, and that international expansion can eventually produce operating leverage.

Its rapid growth — from 17,000 customers at the end of 2024 to roughly 60,000 reported in late 2025 — suggests substantial market demand for the proposition.

For finance professionals, Flatpay is therefore worth watching not merely as a fast-growing fintech, but as a case study in how pricing transparency, distribution strategy and payment-volume economics can be combined to challenge established financial infrastructure providers.

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folk: A Modern CRM for People-Powered Businesses

Matangi_vs Sriram — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:02:55 +0000

Most CRMs are built around a familiar idea: collect contacts, move deals through stages, log activities, and keep the sales machine running.

But relationship-driven businesses often work differently.

A founder meets someone at an event. A sales rep discovers a prospect on LinkedIn. An agency talks to a client over WhatsApp. A partnership starts with an email introduction. Weeks later, someone needs to remember what was discussed, when to follow up, and why the relationship matters.

This is where folk comes in.

folk is a modern CRM designed around relationships, with tools for managing contacts, conversations, pipelines, outreach, and increasingly AI-powered workflows.

What is folk?

At its core, folk is a CRM for teams that depend on relationships to generate business.

Instead of treating the CRM purely as a database, folk brings together people, companies, interactions, notes, deals, and outreach in one workspace.

You can capture contacts, enrich their information, organize them into groups, track opportunities, and keep a history of interactions across channels.

The idea is simple:

Your CRM should help you build relationships, not become another administrative task.

folk is particularly interesting for startups, agencies, sales teams, consultants, recruiters, and founders who rely heavily on networking and personalized outreach.

The problem with traditional CRM workflows

A common CRM workflow looks something like this:

Find a prospect.
Add them to the CRM.
Research them somewhere else.
Write notes somewhere else.
Send an email.
Set a reminder.
Forget about the reminder.
Search through old conversations when the prospect replies.

The problem isn't necessarily the CRM itself.

It's the fragmentation.

Important context ends up spread across LinkedIn, Gmail, calendars, spreadsheets, messaging apps, and personal notes.

folk attempts to bring more of that context together.

Its integrations include email, calendar, WhatsApp, LinkedIn workflows, and thousands of additional integrations through tools such as Zapier and Make.

Capturing contacts without the busywork

One of folk's useful features is its browser extension.

Imagine you're researching potential customers on LinkedIn and find someone relevant.

Instead of manually copying their name, company, role, and other information into a spreadsheet, folk can capture the contact directly into your CRM.

From there, enrichment tools can help fill in missing information such as professional details and contact data.

This matters because CRM quality often depends on how easy it is to put information into the system.

If adding a contact takes five minutes, people eventually stop doing it.

If it takes a few seconds, the CRM has a much better chance of staying useful.

AI that works with your CRM data

This is where folk gets particularly interesting.

folk has been adding AI capabilities directly into the CRM rather than treating AI as a separate chatbot.

For example, its AI features can help generate personalized icebreakers, summarize conversations, extract structured information from notes, assist with research, score leads, and suggest follow-ups.

Magic Fields

One example is Magic Fields.

You can create an AI-powered field based on the information already stored in your CRM.

For example, imagine you have:

First name
Company
Job title
Notes
Website

You could create an "Icebreaker" field and ask AI to generate a short personalized opening based on those fields.

Instead of manually researching every prospect, you can generate the first draft directly inside your contact list.

The important part is that the output remains connected to your CRM data.

AI-powered follow-ups

Following up is one of those tasks that sounds simple until you're managing hundreds of relationships.

Someone emailed you last week.

Someone else had a meeting yesterday.

Another prospect hasn't replied in two weeks.

Who needs attention first?

folk's Follow-up Assistant can analyze recent email and calendar activity and suggest contacts that may need a follow-up, along with draft messages that you can review before sending.

That's an important distinction.

The goal isn't necessarily to let AI send everything automatically.

Instead, AI handles some of the repetitive thinking while the human stays in control of the final message.

Turning conversations into structured CRM data

Another compelling use case is meeting and call notes.

Sales conversations can contain dozens of useful details:

Budget
Decision makers
Timeline
Pain points
Competitors
Objections
Next steps

But manually transferring all of that information into CRM fields is tedious.

folk's AI features can use transcripts or notes to extract structured information, including frameworks such as BANT and MEDDIC.

That means a conversation doesn't have to disappear into a transcript after the meeting.

It can become structured CRM information that the rest of the team can actually use.

Research without endless browser tabs

Sales research is another area where CRM workflows often break down.

You might open:

LinkedIn
The company's website
News articles
Previous emails
Your notes
A spreadsheet

After 30 minutes, you've gathered plenty of information—but none of it is organized.

folk's AI research capabilities are designed to turn saved context, links, notes, and contact information into concise research briefs.

That can make preparing for an outreach message or sales call much faster.

Pipelines for relationship-driven sales

folk isn't only a contact database.

Teams can also use it to manage sales pipelines and deals.

You can organize opportunities by stages, create custom fields, track activity, and build views around the way your team actually works.

This is especially useful for businesses with sales processes that don't fit neatly into a rigid enterprise CRM workflow.

An agency might track:

Lead → Discovery → Proposal → Negotiation → Won

A startup might use:

Prospect → Contacted → Meeting → Evaluation → Closed

The workflow can adapt to the business rather than forcing every team into exactly the same process.

Outreach and sequences

folk also includes tools for email campaigns and, on higher-tier plans, email sequences.

That creates an interesting workflow:

Capture → Enrich → Segment → Personalize → Contact → Follow up → Track

Instead of exporting contacts from your CRM into another tool every time you want to run outreach, more of the workflow can happen in one place.

The current pricing page lists email campaigns, contact enrichment, AI assistants, AI-powered Magic Fields, LinkedIn extension, and email/calendar/WhatsApp sync in the Standard plan, with sequences, dashboards, API access, and additional capabilities available on Premium.

folk is going beyond the desktop

One of the more recent additions is Contacts by folk, a mobile app for iOS and Android.

The mobile experience is designed around capturing contacts, recording notes, searching your CRM, and accessing interaction history while you're away from your desk.

That's particularly relevant for people who do a lot of networking.

Imagine meeting someone at a conference.

Instead of taking a business card and promising yourself you'll enter the information later, you can capture the person immediately and add context while the conversation is still fresh.

Small workflow improvements like that can make a surprisingly large difference to CRM adoption.

Who is folk for?

folk makes the most sense for teams where relationships are central to the business.

Founders

If you're constantly meeting investors, customers, partners, candidates, and potential hires, folk can become a central relationship database.

Agencies

Agencies often manage a mixture of prospects, clients, partners, and collaborators.

folk positions itself specifically for agency workflows, combining contact management, outreach, pipelines, and collaboration.

Sales teams

Sales teams can use folk for prospecting, enrichment, personalized outreach, follow-ups, pipeline management, and AI-assisted research.

Consultants and freelancers

If your business depends more on relationships than a huge automated sales operation, a lightweight CRM can be more useful than an enterprise platform packed with features you'll never use.

How much does folk cost?

As of August 2026, folk's pricing page lists:

Standard: $30/member/month, or $24/member/month when billed annually
Premium: $60/member/month, or $48/member/month annually
Enterprise: from $100/member/month, or $80/member/month annually

There is also a two-week free trial with premium features. Pricing and included features can change, so it's worth checking the current pricing page before making a decision.

What makes folk different?

The CRM market is crowded.

There are huge enterprise CRMs, highly customizable platforms, sales-specific tools, marketing automation platforms, and lightweight contact managers.

folk's differentiation is its focus on relationship-driven work combined with AI assistance.

It isn't trying to make every CRM workflow infinitely complicated.

Instead, the product emphasizes:

Fast contact capture
Relationship context
LinkedIn workflows
Contact enrichment
Personalized outreach
AI-assisted research
Automated follow-up suggestions
Flexible pipelines
Cross-channel interaction history
Mobile access

Recent releases also show folk pushing further into AI. Its 2026 changelog includes AI Fields, Assistants, Auto-fill AI, MCP support, and the new mobile app.

The bigger idea: CRM as a relationship assistant

The most interesting thing about folk isn't simply that it has AI features.

It's the direction those features point toward.

Traditional CRM software often asks humans to maintain the database.

AI-powered CRM software can start using that database to help humans make decisions.

Instead of:

"Here is a list of 500 contacts."

You want:

"Here are the five people you should probably talk to today, here's why, and here's a draft that uses the context you've already collected."

That's a much more useful CRM.

And that's the direction folk appears to be pursuing.

Final thoughts

CRM software has historically been about storing information.

The next generation of CRM is increasingly about turning information into action.

folk sits right in that transition.

It combines the fundamentals of a CRM—contacts, companies, pipelines, interactions, notes, and outreach—with AI capabilities that can help research prospects, personalize messages, summarize conversations, enrich records, and surface follow-ups.

For teams that win business through relationships rather than massive automated funnels, that combination is worth exploring.

If your current CRM feels more like a database you have to maintain than a tool that helps you build relationships, folk is an interesting alternative to put on your shortlist.

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