u/GeologistRelative425

7 merchants live, almost all cash discount, tho i'm still tracking everything in a spreadsheet + texts + whatever i remember from the last call - works until it doesn't lol, missed a renewal Convo last month cuz it wasn't on my radar. Went thru Cashswipe's training and the sales r solid, tho nobody told me whatto actually use to manage accs once they're signed.

Tried a free CRM - felt like more setup than my actual merchant list needed, maybe i just need to keep it simple - share what made u move on from the spreadsheet and what u moved to pls

We collect USD from US customers and pay a small dev team in India. Started on Stripe alone, got flagged twice for "unusual payout pattern" within 4 months, each time a 5 day freeze.

Current setup: Stripe for card payments, Lemon Squeezy for the subscription/billing side, and Unlimit for the business account that actually receives and holds the USD before we convert and pay contractors. Idea was that no single provider sees the full flow, card in, subscription logic, payout out.

It's worked for 7 months, no freezes, but I can't tell if that's the design or just quieter volume than before. Onboarding on the EMU side took about 4 days, which surprised me after the usual bank runaround.

Anyone running something similar long term, or is splitting providers just delaying the same review from happening somewhere else?

1.5 years as an HR Generalist. Over the last 6 months, I quietly became the de facto owner of remote monitoring for our 40-person team.I evaluated tools (chose Monitask), spent a month writing the tracking policy, trained managers, and now handle all timesheet discrepancies.No title change. No pay adjustment. I make $58k in the Midwest.

Questions for the community:

-Is this salary low for this added scope?

-What do you make in a similar role?

-What % raise is realistic to ask for when adding this level of responsibility, and do companies actually approve it?

Banks lowered S&P's forecasts for the current year. The gap between the best-case and worst-case scenarios has widened.

The bulls bet everything on AI: Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are pouring more and more money into AI. That's why we can see the hype around it. The bears scratch their heads and think about that most of these AI investments covered by loans, not by the actual profits.

Resently, I took some profits and I didn't cash out everything yet, coz I don't wanna chase the market like a dog chasing a bone.

Who is agree?

Right now one frontier model does everything in our pipeline: query rewriting, reranking, and final answer generation.

The plan is to use cheap models for rewrite and rerank, and the strong model only for the final answer, where quality actually shows. The hard part is picking "which" cheap model. Benchmarks don't tell me much about how a model does on reranking in the real world.

Some gateways publish rankings based on real routed traffic by task (llmapi.ai has coding/agents/research/writing, for example). Has anyone found those more useful than the usual leaderboards? Or do you just run your own evals?

What does your split look like?

We both had our doubts at first. The market felt either too crowded or too simple. But I kept grinding on nights and weekends around my 9-to-5.

A year later, I have 16 approved merchant accounts, and the residual income is already helping me pay off my debt faster. Having a support system at CashSwipe that actually understands these hurdles made a huge difference. I still have a lot to learn, but I'm so glad I didn't talk myself out of taking this risk.

I keep seeing the same pitch in this space: sign a merchant once, get paid forever, no more work required. That hasn't been my experience.

I got into merchant services 2 years ago after a rough year on a traditional ISO program with almost nothing to show for it. My residual checks are real now, but the first year was cold calls, rejected pitches, and merchants jumping to a cheaper processor the month after I signed them.

Nobody mentions the part where you're basically running a full sales business before any of it feels passive.

I went through CashSwipe's onboarding last year mainly for the lead gen system, and even their own material admits the early months look like a job, not a bonus check. Same story I've heard from people running other payment-processing reseller programs.

So maybe the question isn't whether residual income is passive. It's how long you're willing to work like it's a job before it starts acting like one.

For anyone who's actually built a merchant portfolio: what surprised you more, the grind at the status or the point it actually went passive?

I’ve talked to about 15 people this month about joining my team. Most have great energy, but the wrong expectations. They think "residual income" means passive income from day one.

We sell card processing to local businesses (restaurants, retail). I need hunters who will make calls and knock on doors. I don't need people who watch a few videos and wait for a check.

The residual model works. But you have to handle rejection and grind through outbound sales for a few months to build your book. This is not a stock tip.

I use CashSwipe’s agent program because it provides the scripts and the backend process, so I don't have to build the system from scratch. But the actual selling is still 100% on you.

If you can handle outbound sales and want the real residual model explained, drop a comment or a DM me.

Building video for B2B SaaS (in-app tutorials + customer demos). One enterprise prospect has EU data residency reqs for user-facing infra, incl. video. Narrowed to:

- Bunny Stream - solid CDN, EU PoPs

- Kinescope - hosted in NL, bundles CDN/player/analytics (one vendor vs. stitching pieces)

Went w Kinescope mainly to cut vendor count in the data-flow diagram for the SecRev, not strong technical preference.

Anyone hit similar residency reqs for video specifically - overkill, or has this actually come up in your compliance reviews?

I left my 7- year bank branch manager job 9 months ago to build a merchant services book (started with CashSwipe).

The first 3 months were brutal. I was making maybe $200/mo in residuals. I asked my old boss if I could come back if it didn't pan out. He said, "The door is always open, don't worry".

I stuck with it. By month 6, the residuals picked up, and I never looked back.

But last week, I ran into a former colleague who left for a big ISO program around the same time. He tried to go back to the bank after 5 rough months. Despite the same manager giving him the exact same "door is always open" speech, he got total radio silence.

It feels like that offer only means something if you never actually need to walk through it.

Has anyone else experienced this corporate hypocrisy?

If your game cannot earn back a realistic Cost Per Install (CPI), no channel mix will fix it.

At MRAID, we follow a strict rule: once the economic model is viable, test several marketing promises around the same core product truth.

Expand the formats that attract users who actually retain. Do not just chase the format with the cheapest click.

Playables are especially useful when the core game decision can be understood quickly. However, they are not mandatory for every genre.

Do you focus more on lowering CPI or improving Day-1/Day-7 retention in your marketing tests?