This Thursday, July 29th, the Chargify team will be at the 4th annual Boston TECH cocktail event.

For those of you unfamiliar with TECH cocktail, the company is run by two entrepreneurs and works to connects local technology companies through awesome events like the one we will be at Thursday.

What Happens at the Event?

Boston area startups, investors and others in the tech industry will be gathered at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA to network, showcase their companies and maybe generate some funding interest.

Along with hundreds of attendees, there will be eleven “Showcased Startups” (including Chargify). Each company will have a table set up expo-style where they will feature their company, answer questions and network with other local entrepreneurs.

If you haven’t seen our recent tweets you may not have read about Grasshopper Group. Grasshopper Group is the recently launched endeavor from the company that brought you Chargify and we wanted to share the great news about it.

What is Grasshopper Group?

Grasshopper Group is the parent company of Chargify, Grasshopper, Spreadable and everything else we do in the future. Grasshopper Group will be where we focus our entrepreneurial efforts, like National Entrepreneurs’ Day.  This will allow of our companies & products to evolve, improve and be the best in their respective industries.

How will this effect Chargify?

Since Chargify was already technically “owned” by Grasshopper Group, you will not notice any changes.

In 2010, any company that receives a substantial number of credit card orders faces a grave threat: chargebacks. For those unaware, a chargeback is when a customer reverses an order they made from you and then gets their money back. Originally, chargebacks were created to protect consumers from unscrupulous merchants. Rather than endlessly arguing about unauthorized charges, customers could simply initiate the chargeback and be done with it.

Unfortunately, the ease of initiating a chargeback has created a class of unscrupulous consumers. Increasingly, consumers who have not been wronged in any demonstrable way are using chargebacks heedlessly. Other chargebacks arise from innocent clerical errors. All chargebacks, no matter the source, have the potential to wreak havoc on the cash flow of card-accepting businesses. Below, we’ll explore several ways that companies can protect themselves from chargebacks.

Know Each “Reason Code”

While chargebacks are designed to be easy and automatic for consumers, they cannot simply be executed without reason. Rather, there are four separate “reason codes”, one of which customers must state to their credit card issuer and which they, in turn, are required to provide the merchant.

Venture capitalist Paul Graham expressed an under-appreciated nugget of wisdom in his article on mistakes that kill startups.  Unlike “winning an Olympic gold medal, where the problem is well defined”, building a successful company is actually “more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.”

Therefore, Graham concludes that the worst person to run a startup is someone who “has some great idea they know everyone is going to love, and that’s what they’re going to build, no matter what.” But while plenty has been written about successful startups in general, little has been said about companies that thrived by changing their strategies instead of clinging to those they started with.

Below, Chargify examines six companies whose flexibility took them to new heights.

PayPal

PayPal, believe it or not, was not founded to be the online payment service that it is today. In her book Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston interviews PayPal founder Max Levchin. During the interview, Levchin reveals that PayPal was originally envisioned as a cryptography company, and then later as a means of transmitting money via PDAs. Only after several years of trial and error (and overcoming user fraud that almost destroyed the company) did PayPal find its sweet spot as the default online payment system of millions.

A frequent complaint about web startups is that despite being cool or popular, they lack a clear business model. One textbook example was YouTube. The service had millions of adoring users, but financially speaking, YouTube ran at a loss until Google bought them out in 2006 for $1.65 billion. For a time, the default business model for high-traffic but unprofitable websites was displaying ads. But since effective advertising depends on more than just mass exposure (like targeting) it is not always an effective business model.

A better answer for many has been the “freemium” model, where a company offers its core product or service for free and charges for advanced or special features. Rumors have cropped up in recent years that web giants like Twitter and Facebook, for example, are considering freemium strategies. Below, we’ll profile seven companies that have already mastered the freemium model, and how they did it.

Skype

Web-based telephony company Skype provides an excellent example.

Chargify is officially entering into public beta today, and we couldn’t be more excited!

Having originally launched at the TechCrunch50 Conference (http://techcrunch50.com) in San Francisco, CA on September 14th, 2009, we’ve been steadily growing our beta list this past 6 months while making numerous improvements and adding new features.

Some highlights/ improvements include:

• Through today, Chargify has accepted over 2000+ companies into our beta and we’ll be letting any that are pending in over the coming days – allowing any and all companies who sign up going forward into the public beta

Plan on attending SWSW (South by SouthWest) 2010 in Austin, TX from March 12th - 16th? Or are you already at SXSW enjoying Austin? If so, you are in luck because the Chargify team is there too and will be through the 16th.

Curious to meet the team behind the company? Or maybe you just want to get your hands on some Chargify schwag?

Either way keep an eye out for us. if you need a reference as to who we are check out our About Us page and put a face with the names.

We have a few surprises up our sleeves as well so be sure to keep tabs on us on Twitter @chargify.

This is a guest-post from Sean Harper, co-founder of TransFS.  He is a zealot about making sure business owners get a fair shake from their financial services providers.

1. Know what your requirements are and find a processor that has lots of experience with those requirements.
The worst credit card processing outcomes occur when the business owner doesn’t screen the processors that don’t have experience fulfilling that requirement. Fortunately, there are lots of processors that are experienced dealing with SaaS and web services companies and providing the gateway (auth.net or otherwise) that they need.

Welcome to the Bullring, the blog dedicated entirely to empowering entrepreneurs and developers to start and run successful businesses based on recurring revenue models. 

Let’s lay it out there. Recurring billing is a pain in the ass. Credit cards get declined for a million different reasons, you have to deal with upgrades/downgrades, proration, refunds, credits, customer communication, fraudulent transactions, and the list goes on. It’s no small task to implement a system that handles all of the potential pitfalls of billing on a recurring basis.