HustlePay

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  Landing page

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  Virtual account, card and transactions

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  Payment links

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  Payouts

Inspiration

According to this report, there are 58 million freelancers contributing $1.4 trillion to the US economy. Fun fact - Google has more freelancers than permanent employees today! Ask any of these freelancers and they will tell you - it's a pain dealing with traditional banks for receiving payments, and being on top of tax and compliance. I know this, because I have worked as a freelancer and I've always wished for a "CFO as a service" that'll just take care of the boring finance operations.

Check out some screenshots of frustrated freelancers asking for help in a Slack community about remote work:

It looked like a huge market with a real problem that I myself face, but building the payments APIs myself was the biggest obstacle that stopped me from building it. When I heard about Rapyd's hackathon and went through their documentations and videos, I realized Rapyd has a suite of APIs that would make my idea feasible and immediately signed up and started building HustlePay's prototype.

What it does

1. Gives virtual accounts and cards to freelancers.
2. Generates shareable payment links and accepts international payments.
3. Allows freelancers to instantly withdraw money into their home bank accounts.
4. Runs tax computations on transactions at the end of month.

How we built it

I used the following Rapyd products and their APIs to build this:

Virtual accounts

Powered by Rapyd Wallet. We use a combination of the Rapyd APIs and webhooks to keep track of the transactions that go in and out of the wallets.

Cards

Powered by Rapyd Issuing. While using Rapyd Sandbox, HustlePay instantly creates and approves a card for every freelancer when they sign up. We don't store the card numbers, but instead use Rapyd's hosted card details page to let the users access the details of the card.

Payment links

Powered by Rapyd Collect. Users can create payment links for charging their clients and track payments. We used Rapyd's hosted checkout page to build this.

Payouts

Powered by Rapyd Disburse. We use Rapyd's hosted beneficiary tokenization page to capture the user's bank account details without actually storing the details on our DB. Users can withdraw money into their home bank accounts at any time and can see their payout history and the foreign exchange rates which were applicable at the time.

Tax computations

Currently, this will be a manual process that happens at the end of the month by an actual accountant who will use a Retool app connected to HustlePay's postgres DB. I'm a YCombinator alum and if there's one thing I've learned from YC and my previous startups - it's okay to do things that don't scale early on, so I'm hoping that this should be enough to get users' feebdack and iterate.

The app is built on Phoenix Framework using the Elixir programming language and it uses postgres as the database. I've hosted it on Gigalixir - that's the "Heroku for Elixir". The UI is all hand coded using Tailwind CSS and server rendered right now, which may change to Phoenix LiveView or React/Vue when further development happens.

Challenges we ran into

There were a few hiccups along the way when using Rapyd's Sandbox (failing card payments involving FX and wallet balances not updating after payments are successful) but thanks to their dev rel staff, I got quick answers on Slack and wasn't stuck on anything for too long.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I heard about the hackathon very late and I only had about 10 days to build the entire app and it was too late to find a co-founder. So I decided to go solo and ruthlessly cut down scope and decided on the things I'd ship no matter what. I'm glad I was able to finish everything that was planned.

What we learned

I learned how the different Rapyd products work together and how to build a fintech product on top of it. This is my first fintech product and I had a lot of ground to cover. I'm still figuring out country specific regulations etc.

What's next for HustlePay

I plan to show this prototype to actual freelancers and accountants and get feedback from these user interviews. If that goes well, the next steps would be to move from the sandbox environment to production with more robust code, start onboarding actual users and hopefully grow from there!

Notes

The code is on the Rapyd temp github org for privacy: https://github.com/Formula-0001-Rapyd-Fintech-Grand-Prix/hustlepay

Built With

• elixir
• gigalixir
• phoenix
• postgresql
• rapyd