This is awesome, I built this exact same thing back around 2008. However, I didn’t use plaid or any verification. I’d print whatever you wanted on the account and routing number lines. I just bought a stack of mailer checks and printed it from my laser printer and mail them out. MICR line ink is supposed to be magnetic but I think all the scanners are optical as I never had any complaints or issues as I personally was probably the biggest volume user.

How did you design and build your homepage? I find that building the landing page and making it look like a professional, beautiful design is one of my biggest hurdles. I'm an experienced web developer but without a design to work off of - and especially accounting for mobile and dynamic sizing - I really struggle with this part of the work so I'm wondering what other people's workflows are for it.

As someone who has struggled with this before, your fastest way is to look for pre-built templates on github or buy one's you like.

Looks like GP is using the pocket template from tailwindui - https://pocket.tailwindui.com/

There are hundreds of people selling pre-built components, landing pages, templates etc. This at least gets you up and running and not stressing over design. As a dev who lacks design sense, this was immensely helpful.

Other option as sibling points out is to use bolt or lovable and give it explicit instructions on what kind of design to use. For example, with lovable, try this prompt "use neo brutalist design."

This is a massive insight for me. That entire landing page is a template with small edits. No wonder it looks so good. You nailed it. Thanks for this. I think the last time I looked into templates I wasn't impressed with what I found, and I think I underestimated what was available now in 2024.

Try bolt.new or similar

Do you have risk loss / fraud issues?

Not really. We don’t touch customer money- we just print and mail checks on their behalf.

We do require bank verification via Plaid, which proves the user has a valid username and login to their bank.

We perform further KYC checks for suspicious payments.

Brilliant idea! I recently had a difficult time trying to get a cashiers check at a few nearby banks/credit unions I wasn’t a member of. It’s incomprehensible to me they weren’t willing to accept a fee in order to charge my debit card for the amount of the check + fee ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Probably regulations, KYC requirements, etc.

are you using lob to print/mail everything?

Nope. Lob doesn’t have instant bank verification which was a deal breaker for us.

In fact there are several providers that offer checks via api but none of them worked for us, so we rolled our own :)