We’ve been told that Shift4 will be printing t-shirts with their new strategy, SkyTab or Die.
First we were a little puzzled.
The clarity came later:
Shift4 must migrate all their customers onto a single POS platform.
This makes sense.
Technical debt is expensive to manage and Shift4 already spends nothing on R&D relative to true software companies like Toast, Shopify, Square, SpotOn, and others.
In fact, R&D spend as a percentage of revenue is perhaps the best litmus test for payments bro vs software company.
No idea what the SkyTab or Die means for Shift4’s recent acquisitions of Revel, Appetize, and Vectron, but Shift4 now owns as many POS softwares as their CEO takes flights into orbit.
And that’s saying something.
But we think Shift4 uses the wrong conjunction here.
Instead, Shift4 should be saying SkyTab AND Die.
That’s because payment bros are always threading a very small needle: steal as much from their customers hosts as possible BUT keep the host alive.
A payments bro views themselves as a failure if their host ever makes money OR if their host declares bankruptcy.
It’s a very thin line that payments bros are edging.
If their host makes money it means that their payments-bro tactics weren’t aggressive enough, but if their host dies it means that they might have to undertake some actual work to find a new host.
And parasites, by definition, are lazy.
Any merchant using SkyTab needs to be prepared to see their dreams die.
Because they will be pushed to the extremes of financial solvency.
That’s what all the evidence continues to show us about Shift4’s business “strategy”.
Here.
Here.
Here.
Need to pay an emergency medical bill?
SkyTab has hoovered all your savings.
Late on the mortgage?
There’s your mortgage payment circling the earth in a spacesuit.
Kids planning to attend college?
Now they’re not. Too bad, so sad.
That is, without question, the “Shift4Way”.
We post this next slide for the comedic relief so we don’t end on a depressing note.
Because Shift4 will clearly become the “category leader in all major markets across the world” with their software-first culture and aggressive R&D spend, just as they really prioritize “customer satisfaction scores” with every rate increase they jam through.
This summer’s top comedy is a real knee-slapper:
SkyTab AND Die.
Add comment