Wondering, are there any vertical niches in payment processing? For me, the average customer of a payment processing company is a business owner who is capable of selecting a good provider (paypal for being around for ages or stripe for being loved), so how do other payment processors survive?
Digital River, who basically consolidated nearly every payment processor for shareware devs, has revenues revenues in the nine figures. (Oh, by the way, shareware the word is pretty much dead but selling software on the Internet makes more money every year.)
Patrick, i sincerely want to thank you for participating in this thread. I feel like you have the accumulated amount of knowledge everyone trying to do business both online and offline has to know (or, at least, trying to). Do you ever feel like you are not using your knowledge in full or allocating it properly?
Suffice it to say I know a few things about a few things and get enormous satisfaction from sharing them with people. I'm privileged in that a couple of things I know how to do are worth stupid amounts of money, and perversely the more I try to give them away the more money gets thrown at me for them, so my businesses essentially allow me a lifestyle similar to that of a tenured professor except with less academic politics and an even more flexible schedule. Downside: a regrettable lack of cool faux-medieval robes to wear once a year.
I'm pretty happy with the pace at which I'm getting to take on new challenges, and pretty happy with my net impact on the world, including through building stuff and teaching folks. Besides, I'm not even 30 yet, so I've still got plenty of time to achieve total world domination through smoothing out market inefficiencies on the Internet. (I think I'll hire a tailor to get me robes as that point. Something in silk maybe.)
