Appreciation post: the $40 Kijiji POS terminal that taught me more than any pitch deck | Canadian Fintech Startups

William Henderson · 2026-10-24T23:25:05.315441+00:00

Back in 2019 when I was first messing around with a side hustle selling coffee at the Halifax farmers market, I grabbed a used Square reader off Kijiji for $40 because I was too cheap to buy new. I figured it would just work, tap and go, done. What actually happened was the thing kept dropping the wifi mid transaction and I lost maybe $60 in sales over two weekends before I figured out the issue was the old firmware, not the reader itself. The weird part is that whole mess taught me more about building for real world fintech than any startup book or pitch deck ever did. I learned that payments fail in dumb little ways nobody puts in the demo, and that a customer standing there with their card half tapped does not care about your roadmap. Looking back I wish more founders in this space would just go stand at a market stall for a weekend and watch the chaos up close. Curious if anyone else here cut their teeth on sketchy secondhand hardware and what it showed you about your own product.

Babble Community

Loading…

Appreciation post: the $40 Kijiji POS terminal that taught me more than any pitch deck | Canadian Fintech Startups - Babble Community