• The Square Developer Podcast

  • By: Square
  • Podcast

The Square Developer Podcast

By: Square
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  • Summary

  • The Square Developer Podcast dives deep into the backend of a business. Hear discussions about tech that fuels commerce innovation with folks who have built apps, integrations, businesses, and more on the Square developer platform. In each episode, we’ll chat with a dev about their real-life experience using Square tools — the good, the bad, and the buggy are all fair game as we go behind the build. Together, we’ll talk about the tech world at large, and how it influences their decisions or drives their ideas forward.
    2024 The Square Developer Podcast
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Episodes
  • Building a Closed-Loop Wallet

    Building a Closed-Loop Wallet
    Mar 31 2025
    Richard Moot: Welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moot, head of developer relations at Square, and today I'm joined by Sophia Goldberg, who is the co-founder and CEO of Ansa. Sophia, would you be so kind as to give us a little intro about yourself and Ansa to let all of our listeners learn a little bit more about what it is that Ansa is and about you?Sophia Goldberg: Happy to, and thanks for having me, Richard. So I'm the, like Richard said, the co-founder CEO of Ansa. I've spent the better part of the last decade building in payments. So I was at a company called Adyen across commercial and product roles. I also wrote the book, the Field Guide to Global Payments to help anyone learn payments a bit better. And here at Ansa we're a stored value wallet as a service or closed loop payments infrastructure platform to let any brand or platform launch customer balances. So that can look like the Starbucks in app payment experience that can also look like the backend of transportation systems, microtransactions for gaming and everything and the like, but especially we've been building the last few years in the food and bev and retail space.Richard Moot: Very cool. And so you've built a lot of your integrations on Square and built a lot of this stuff for square sellers, but one thing I want to dig into with that is maybe tell us more about what is a closed loop wallet?Sophia Goldberg: Yeah, it's a niche part of payments infrastructure and the payments ecosystem, but a really important one. And so closed loop really just means where funds can be spent and so a wallet like the Starbucks wallet say, or for some of our brands that are on Square that we've built for closed loop means the customer adds prepaid funds. The brand can fund that wallet with incentives and those funds in that balance can only be spent with that brand. And so in turn, that helps drive retention frequency, really stickiness, but also on the brand side reduces cost of payments, drives cash flow, and can kind of become this really virtuous cycle of retention, loyalty and customer lifetime value.Richard Moot: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean one of the things that I know for particularly say coffee shops is you have these low ticket receipts and so it's actually in terms of percentage of fees that you're incurring on each sale is a little bit higher when looking at it marginally. So I'm guessing this helps mitigate that in many ways because you can then preload with these things and you're not incurring this on every single sale that coffee shops making.Sophia Goldberg: Exactly. And so for brands that have high frequency and lower average tickets, we call them Holt Merchants, HULT habitual use low transaction Value, which coffee shops or bakeries are a great example of if you have a $4 latte, which unfortunately in San Francisco I can't find a $4 latte anymore, that brand might effectively be paying up to 10% in fees because the fixed fees of every payment really add up. You're paying probably 20 to 50 cents no matter how large of a brand you are. And so by having a customer prepay into a balance and say, add $25 to spend over five coffees over the course of a month, that means you're only hitting those fees on that first time. You have the benefit of that float in the meantime. And you're also guaranteeing that I'm going to come back four more times, enjoy my coffee, and you're going to be saving about a dollar just on that one customer that month.Richard Moot: And so I'm curious, you've been in the payments space for a while now. What kind of really sparked that motivation towards building onset and building the solution?Sophia Goldberg: It started to come up earlier in the pandemic when I was seeing more and more different types of commerce trying to catch up and meet us where we were all stuck inside our homes and apartments and it kind of tapped into an observation I'd been having that commerce and payments have continued to diverge, especially in the US there's so many more different types of brands, merchants, customer experiences, we're using our phones even more, even in-store payments have an e-commerce experience or element whether you're maybe at say a kiosk or on your mobile phone. So all of the lines are blurring and I saw time and time again merchants not being able to actually support the customer experience they wanted because payments was often kind of the stick in the mud for them of what they could innovate and build and launch. And I'm a bit of a purist.I really love payments and I really love that our role is commerce enablement and that just didn't seem to make a lot of sense. And so actually in the early days we thought this was going to be a creator economy payment platform use case to enable online micro transactions, so think busking in the subway, but how you do that digitally, which is growing and happening all over the place and we couldn't find an infrastructure platform to ...
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    37 mins
  • Scaling a Pop-Up Business to 120 Franchises

    Scaling a Pop-Up Business to 120 Franchises
    Mar 24 2025
    Richard Moot: Hello and welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moot, and today I'm joined by Rhea Lana. I want to thank you all for being here today. I really, really appreciate you taking the time. If you wouldn't mind going ahead and giving quick little intros to tell us who you all are.Rhea Lana: Hi, Richard. I'm Rhea Lana and I'm the founder and also the current CEO.Erin Franklin: I am Erin Franklin. I am the CFO for Rhea Lana's, and I am also a franchise owner.Dave: And I'm Dave. I help Rhea Lana with technology.Richard Moot: Well, thank you so much. Rhea Lana, would you be so kind, tell us the story about what is Rhea Lana, give us the story of how this all started and bring us if possible to where we are today.Rhea Lana: Sure. Well, we host children's consignment events, and so families bring their gently used children's things and we sell them for them. And so it started when I was a stay-at-home mom actually in the early nineties. We had made a move from the corporate world and Dave was doing nonprofit work. And so I was a stay-at-home mom on a really tight budget. I loved cute kid’s clothes, but it was just hard to find good deals in a really high quality atmosphere. So the goal then, Richard, was not to build a business. I really was just doing this little thing for my friends. And so I invited moms to, and we did our first sale in my little living room. We moved the furniture out of the living room into our bedroom, and we had three racks of clothes and 11 consignors. A consignor is a mom who's selling her kids things. And so that was our very first sale in 1997. So that's how it started.Richard Moot: After the starting of that, what made you want to turn this into a full blown business?Rhea Lana: Well, after that very first sale, Dave actually is the one that said, Rhea Lana, we should computerize this. Well, back in the early nineties, stay-at-home moms didn't have computers in there. I didn't even know a mom who had a computer in their house, but we did. We computerized it and we said we had barcodes. And the interesting thing is that families just kept asking me to do it again and again and again. And so the model is just two times a year. And so for those first several years, we would have these little sales in my house and they would take over another room of the house and my daughter's room and the kitchen and the garage. And then finally we moved out of our house and we began to hold these events in locations around our little town in central Arkansas. And then we had families that were driving in from Little Rock, Arkansas, which is about an hour away. And I began to realize families love this, they appreciate it. It's helping them not only be able to buy high quality clothes, but sell things their families didn't need anymore. And it gradually was making a profit more and more. And so we began to realize, oh, this is something that could be a business.Richard Moot: That's awesome. And so where are we today with the size of Rhea Lana?Rhea Lana: Well, in, let's see, it was about 2008, I think. That's right. We decided we would franchise and we still were on a very limited budget. And so we knew that if we tried, it didn't have much to lose. We couldn't risk a lot is what I was going to say. We didn't have the money to hire some big fancy firm to help us, some consulting agency. We just thought, well, we'll just franchise it. I actually read the book Franchising for Dummies. That's not a joke. I did. And while my kids were swimming at the pool, I would check the things off and do the things. And thankfully I had a friend who was a really smart tax attorney, and so he helped me put our contracts together and then we just decided to see if anybody would buy a franchise. And so that's how we started our franchising company. And so today we have about 120 locations in about 26 states across the country, and we've served, now millions of families. And our heart is we love serving families and we love just adding value to lives to families across the country.Richard Moot: Wow, that's awesome. And so to hopefully give also how this all works, so you have 120 franchisees or franchises all throughout the United States, and this is an event based thing, right? There's two annual events. Tell me a little bit about how these events get set up and how big are they?Rhea Lana: Well, I'll start and then I'll let Erin share because she owns one of our early franchises, and I still own and operate our franchise in central Arkansas. But you're right, the model is that we hold semi-annual events. So we just do 'em twice a year. And when the franchisees start, they're like a baby, but they grow into these huge sales. And so we will fill up large like a Walmart or larger, and we will have several thousand families bring their things, but we just set it up, we take items in for about a week, and then we sell items for about a week. And so it's kind of a pop-up event, but it is ...
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    41 mins
  • Creating Payment Solutions for Everyday Needs

    Creating Payment Solutions for Everyday Needs
    Mar 17 2025
    Richard Moot: Hello and welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moot, head of developer relations here at Square, and today I'm joined by Ryan from Payable. Thank you so much for being here. Ryan, could you go ahead and just give us an intro of yourself and tell us a little bit about Payable?Ryan May: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having us. So Payable Apps has been a Square partner for probably about three or four years now. We got started by making connections with Google applications, so everybody knows Google Forms and Google Sheets and how easy they are to use. And what we did is we made a payment connection for Google Forms and Google Sheets so you could connect them to a payment provider like Square, and then as while you're creating a Google form for somebody to fill out, whether it's a t-shirt signup or a membership or an order form, it can also take payment right inside that Google form for you and keep small businesses organized inside the software.Richard Moot: I've always really loved the idea of what you guys have built because it's taking something that is really simple and ubiquitous with a lot of small businesses and then allowing them to make sales using that make, it's really meeting them where they are and with something that they're familiar with.Ryan May: Yeah, I agree. Micro sellers are huge. There are so many of them out there. Almost everybody has a side hustle or they're doing something to try to turn their passion into a business, and they're all using free tools. They want to use free tools as much as they can. And so our goal was to take some of those free tools like the Google Suite, which has some handicap, some lack of advanced features, and try to just build it out just enough so that it is good enough for somebody who's doing five orders a day, 25 orders a day, until they grow that business into something more serious. It actually is a really good solution for them.Richard Moot: Yeah. So I'm curious, where did the inspiration from this originally come from?Ryan May: Yeah, I mean it as actually my co-founder real world situation, it was during COD, her boss tasked her with this task of saying, Hey, I need you to go around the office and get everybody's t-shirt size for this event, and you have to collect $20 from every one of them for this team outing event. So she was like, okay, well no worries. I'll use a Google form and I'll get your name and whether you're going to attend and if you have any allergies, what your food preference is, and ask for your t-shirt size. And she was like, why can't a Google form also just ask for $20? Because it became a nightmare. She had to get, some people were paying her with e-transfer, some people were bringing cash to her desk. It was all over the place and it was up to her to manage this collection of funds.And she goes to me, my background is in payments. She's like, well, Ryan, why can't we do this? Why can't a Google form also just have a pay with credit card button attached to the end of it? And I was like, there's all these PCI compliance and all these rules and it's not extendable in that way. And I was like, yeah, it's just not possible. But I sat there thinking about it a little bit one night and I was like, you know what? I think I looked at Google's developer docs and how you could extend it. And I thought if you were a little bit creative, you might be able to tack on an extra page and collect payment and do this in line to make it look very native and secure with the payment providers like Square or Stripe or PayPal. So we started with PayPal and we launched it and I said, well, if I'm going to build it for you, I might as well build it for everyone. Why build code once? So if I'm going to build this little solution for you, we might as well build it together.So that was the idea. And yeah, that was our first app called Payable Google Forms. And since then it's been downloaded over, we now have a hundred thousand different active small businesses who use it on a given month, and it's one of the more popular Google form payment and accounting add-ons that exist in the marketplace today, so it really has grown. It hits that one simple problem where people really know how to set up a Google form. Almost everybody has done it, and they just add Payable options inside of it. And it's live and easy for them, especially for things that are one-offs. Like we think about life and there are people who are creating a business and they want to have, I'm opening a t-shirt shop and I'm going to sell t-shirts all day every day. But for people who are tasked with these rare or seasonal or occasional projects, something like a Payable Google form is a really good way to set something up and go live quickly.Richard Moot: Yeah, no, I mean, it makes perfect sense. I mean, there's an interesting kind of parallel between, in that same Micro seller space that we used to see initially with Square was you go to a farmer's ...
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    45 mins

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