What I've been working on

I’ve built something new with an amazing team and I’d love your feedback on it.

The product is called Sling, and it’s like a global Venmo.

With Sling you can send money to anyone in seconds, without knowing their account numbers or sort codes, and without them needing to have Sling. Sending money only takes a few taps and it’s very inexpensive – and free while we’re in beta. Sling currently works in 39 countries but we plan to add additional countries quickly.

We’re launching Sling in beta today – with a waitlist – and we’d love your feedback to help us make sure we’re building something great. You can download it for iOS or Android today.

Sling has a few features we think are unique and might be valuable to people:

• Sling can send money to anyone. They don’t need to have Sling in order to get the money and, in most cases, they can get the money you send them in their bank account in seconds without downloading Sling.

• No account numbers. You don’t need to know the recipient’s IBAN or account number or anything like that. You don’t even need to know their phone number. You can just send them a link with money on it. Or if they’re on Sling you can just search for their name.

• Transfers are basically instant. We’ve timed transfers from the UK to the US with Sling that take about ten seconds. Most competing products take 1-3 days to make the same transfer.

• Sling is global by nature. We’re starting out with 39 countries but we have plans to launch in a couple hundred countries overall.

• Sling supports any currency. You can denominate Sling transactions in any currency you want. Need to settle a bill in Thai Baht? No problem. Just switch your transaction’s display currency. All peer-to-peer transfers are completed using USDC, a stablecoin which is pegged to the US Dollar. We will be adding Euro and Pound stablecoins in the near future.

• We verify Sling user’s identities. We only display people in the Sling Directory if we’ve verified their identity and are confident they aren’t impersonating anyone else. Fraud and simple confusion are a huge problem in payments and we’ve put a lot of work into this.

• Sling is environmentally efficient. We use Solana’s distributed ledger to power Sling. Each transaction on Solana uses 0.878k Joules, which is less than a Google search and 0.0000243889% of the energy used in an hour by an LED light bulb. Solana publishes its real-time carbon footprint, and offsets its emissions.

• Sling is economically efficient. The nature of our technology removes middlemen and reduces our costs. We’ve built Sling with ten people. Most competing companies have thousands of people – 5,000 people, 13,000 people, 31,000 people to name a few. We can pass these savings on to our customers.

In the App Stores

Sling is now in the app stores in 39 countries including the UK and most of the European Union. You can download it from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.

We’ve got a waitlist set up but we’re currently letting people through pretty quickly. Please download Sling and give it a try. 

Give us feedback

We’ve been building Sling for about nine months now and we’re just at the very beginning. We need your help to make it great. We probably have lots of bugs, rough edges, difficult to understand bits, flows that can be improved, and missed opportunities. The only way we can make this better is with your feedback. You can do this in email, in reply to this post, or by joining our Slack community.

Join our Slack community

We’ve created a Slack community called Sling Friends. We’d love it if you joined us there to help give us feedback and just generally hang out and chat. 

More about the team

I started Sling with Simon Amor about nine months ago. Simon’s a brilliant product designer and we had worked together at Monzo, a UK-based neobank, a few years ago.

We’re now eleven people. I feel incredibly lucky to be working with this team. For some of us this is our third company working together. For many it’s at least the second. Everyone is smart, ambitious, experienced and determined. Everyone is intellectually open, curious, and customer obsessed. And they’re all good eggs. 

We also have awesome investors. Our seed round was led by Ribbit Capital and Slow Ventures and we have some really awesome and deeply experienced angel investors in our corner as well. 

I feel blessed and deeply lucky to be working with this set of people.

Why we started Sling

I’ve been obsessed with peer-to-peer payments ever since starting to work at Monzo, where peer-to-peer drove a huge amount of our growth. I found it weird then – and still find it weird – that this is still basically an unsolved problem in a lot of the world. And yet the technology to solve this problem was invented many years ago. It’s an eminently solvable problem.

Even now, in the UK, if you want to send people money the conversation goes like this: “Do you have Monzo? No. OK. Do you have Revolut? No. OK. What’s your sort code and account number?” And then you have to open your bank app and type in the sort code and account number… and then send…

And this is before you start transferring across borders and currencies. At that point transfers are not only clunky, they’re also usually very slow and very expensive.

We believe that you should be able to pay anyone in the world with just a couple taps and that transfers should be instant and super cheap. It shouldn’t matter what currency you’re using, and you shouldn’t have to know someone’s account number or IBAN in order to send them money. And it should just work everywhere.

You already expect most things to work this way. You can send text messages, photos, videos and email to anyone in the world instantly and basically for free. The internet has touched most aspects of our lives. Why hasn't the internet truly transformed how money and payments work yet? We think it’s time. 

My asks

If you wouldn’t mind I’d greatly appreciate it if you would:

• Download the app (iOS, Android)

• Join Sling Friends on Slack and give us feedback