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Ask HN: Funny Startup Anecdotes?

by nsx147 on 10/25/19, 2:04 PM with 1 comments

One time I accidentally charged a customer $5,000 instead of $50 because the Stripe API takes cents (which would be 5000), and the UI takes $. I entered 5000 into the UI because I was so used to using the API. Still scrapping around manually charging customers because we weren't all the way automated yet.

Called up the person and told them what happened and refund was on the way...they didn't seem too worried. haha...

Was exchanging stories with someone today and wondering if anyone else had some funny stories to share?

  • by byoung2 on 10/25/19, 2:21 PM

    I worked at a company that helped small businesses improve their Yelp, Google, Foursquare, etc listings, reply to reviews, etc. In order to do that we had to constantly crawl their listings looking for changes to their info and new reviews. Shortly after launch our CEO called a meeting and made a big announcement that our service was a big success because customers reported that views on their listing pages were through the roof! The engineering team exchanged puzzled looks before one spoke up: isn't that just the traffic from our crawlers?