A couple of months ago, I was in a lull between projects. I had three days on my hands to pursue some small, enduring issues but nothing big on my plate. I hate scrolling through tumblr all day, so I started thinking about little projects I’ve had floating around between the tatty pages of notebooks that I could pursue in this interlude.

For those that don’t know me, I work at a UK payments startup called GoCardless. GoCardless almost exclusively serves businesses, providing a payment method called Direct Debit. Traditionally, getting access to Direct Debit has been a bit of a nightmare; GoCardless exists to simplify that.

Internally, we use our B2B product in a very different way to it’s intended use; we’ll use GoCardless to pay each other back for burgers, beers, dinners pretty much anything. It works great: we don’t have to worry about taking cash to the market and we trust each other, so the three working day clearing time that Direct Debit takes is no problem.

There is one problem though: GoCardless is only accessible through a desktop computer. There’s no official interface to the service from a mobile device, which means after a fancy lunch in a park you have to then get back to the office to remember who owes you what.

Shrinking the dashboard

The main product that I’ve been working on for the last twelve months is a web app that any business can sign up to, to manage the creation, scheduling and billing of Direct Debits in a super simple interface. I’m really proud of it and the awesome team we have that built it.

I wanted to shrink our dashboard down to an iPhone app, where I could have the full functionality that the dashboard permits, but in a mobile friendly form.

The prototype I built worked, but the designer in me wanted to simplify the experience more. For businesses, having meticulous control over Direct Debit authorisations, mandates and payments is of paramount importance, but for friends wanting to pay each other back for stuff, it was all too complex.

So I ditched all the features I didn’t want entirely, stopped building a mobile client for our web app, and started building something different.

Feature incomplete

I spent a day in Xcode, stripping out a ton of components, complexity and code and what resulted was dubbed Payyr. Payyr abstracts away much of the inherent complexity of Direct Debit and reappropriates the system for a completely new life as a P2P platform where friends can call in an IOU, instantly.

Because I had the liberty of focussing on such a narrow use case: paying friends back for IOUs, it was easy to dissolve away parts of the GoCardless interface that aren’t essential to supporting this scenario. The startling difference between the screenshots are testament to that.

Join our experiment

A few days ago, we launched Payyr publicly on the GoCardless blog and dubbed it as an experiment (which it very much is). We’ve waived all fees completely to make it an incredibly attractive option to use with your friends.

So please, download it, try it out with your friends, and tell us what you think.

Download Payyr for iPhone