Why Greg Taylor’s Clip Failed: The Business Model Mistakes Behind the Startup

Shivangi

Sep 5, 2026 12:46 PM IST

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Synopsis

Greg Taylor’s bar-tab app Clip had everything a startup is supposed to need: big-name pub groups, hundreds of venues, and millions in institutional backing. It still left him with $5,000 and a friend’s couch to sleep on. This case study looks at why traction and funding weren’t enough to save a business built on a 1% take rate.

Greg Taylor founded a bar-tab payments app called Clip (also Clipp) before he built Step One into an A$70m brand. It landed the big pub chains. It attracted serious outside investment. It grew its user base fast. But Taylor was still near broke, living on the couch of a friend with about $5k to his name. This is the story of that business. 

The Founder

Sydney-based Greg Taylor is the owner of his own business and a former elite rower who represented Australia three times, after shattering the record in the Head of the River as a schoolboy in 1999. He had already run several companies before Clip. While studying at university, he started BetterDeal, a website for online reverse-auction of new cars. He ran a business selling ad space on takeaway coffee cups as well.

Before launching Clip, his most successful app was eCoffeeCard, a mobile app that allowed customers to carry multiple café loyalty cards on their phone. It was launched around 2009, just as smartphones were coming into play and café loyalty schemes were scattered across piles of paper cards. It was said to be one of the first of its kind in the Australian app store, and over three years eCoffeeCard had 350,000 users and 1,600 cafes onboard. In 2013, Taylor sold it to Beat The Q for a roaring success then immediately started his next venture using both funds and lessons learned from this launch process.

According to his own biography, Taylor founded seven businesses over about 20 years. The most harmful of them, both financially and in terms of performance, was Clip.

What The Business Was

Founded in 2013, shortly after Taylor’s exit from eCoffeeCard, Clip has placed itself within an emerging market: cashless mobile-first payments for hospitality venues. Pubs, bars and restaurants were still doing running tabs the old-fashioned way, taking your card behind the bar until you went to settle up.

This insight by Taylor sprang directly from his former venture. At the same time that he was running eCoffeeCard, he had partnered with point-of-sale providers to develop a solution for fragmentation in loyalty, which helped him learn how payments actually flowed through hospitality venues. He saw a hole: no one had created, in the way ride-hailing apps had for taxis, a prepaid mobile-payments layer for simply ordering drinks at bars and pubs. Clip was made to solve that void, existing as a payments processor, only taking several per cent of the transactions powered through its platform instead of charging venues with some subscription or licensing fee.

What The Product Was

The product itself was an app on mobile, iOS and Android, that allowed customers to open and manage a bar tab without handing over a card or ID. It was an idea, as Taylor described it at the time, of “Uber for bar tabs.” Users could link a credit card or their PayPal account to the app, while the app would connect with the venue’s point-of-sale system so that a tab could be opened and added to, split among friends and closed from your phone.

Layered on top of the core payments function, it had been designed to eliminate low-hanging friction that existed in running a tab the traditional way: emailing all diners a tax receipt post-purchase (popular with corporate clients covering meals and drinks) and giving regulars at selling venues loyalty points simply for going back to the same spot. Later on, the app introduced a service called DASH that allowed venues to run dynamic time-limited discounts, similar to how hotels and airlines vary prices for their rooms and seats depending on demand.

How It Worked

The flow for a client was simple enough. They then downloaded the app for free, created an account and linked a card or paid via PayPal. They opened a tab through the app at a participating venue instead of leaving their card on the bar, could simply order as per normal, and see running totals and close out or split the bill from their phone rather than having to wait or flag down staff.

In the case of venues, it was more about appeal. Clip plugged directly into large point-of-sale systems, requiring no new hardware and having no splits in the till process for staff. Clip’s dynamic pricing tool could also assist venues with shifting demand into quieter periods, offering discounts on food and drink during low-demand hours. Taylor said this was inspired by the fact that airlines and hotel chains have set dynamic pricing based on demand, but most hospitality venues had not.

That idea resonated with venue owners instantly. That included large hospitality groups like the ALH (owned by Woolworths’ Australian Leisure and Hospitality group) and the Australian Turf Club, who allowed customers to pay for food or drinks through their racing venues using the app. By the mid 2010s, Clip was running in more than a dozen major point-of-sale systems and launched in hundreds of venues around Australia. At that time the investor updates from Mobile Embrace itself highlighted solid organic growth including a 160 per cent increase in unique users over five months, predominantly driven by word of mouth rather than paid-for marketing. Reviews from that time outline the app as functional in real-world use with lots of Adelaide bars going live over only a year.

The Financials

Each transaction that went through its app, Clip was taking a small cut (roughly 1 per cent) as its revenue model. That number also included customer acquisition, product building, support for venues to run their payments infrastructure and more.

At the same time that did secure a total paycheck from some serious institutional backing. Mobile Embrace, which is listed on the ASX, paid just A$2 million in 2013 for a majority stake in Clip, between A$4 million and A$5 million depending on how you look at it, but in practice bought an estimated 72 per cent of interest via a convertible note received over two years ending mid-2015 as part of more than A$6 million funding raised by the business. The capital went towards product development (including the DASH pricing feature) and allowed Clip to grow into hundreds of venues across the country. 

Taylor says the round almost didn’t happen. In 2013, the company was about three days away from running out of cash and having its servers switched off when a deal with its first investor suddenly closed just ahead of the deadline.

Taylor’s own shareholding in the firm and as to how much personal capital or income he injected into or withdrew from it during its lifetime. His own words document the result. 

According to him, he was left with about $5,000 and no place to live and had a choice between moving back in with his parents in Bendigo or sleeping on a friend's couch (which is what he did). He has previously said in another interview he found himself broke in his late thirties with about £400 to his name after running seven different businesses over a period of 20 years, Clip being the most recent.

Why The Business Failed

The issue was with the pricing model, not the product or customer fit. A 1 per cent take rate can be a thing, one of the few things that can work at unbelievable scale, the kind of scale payment networks are performing with billions of transactions every year. As a startup still adding to its network of venues one pub at a time, almost everything went into reinvestment and nothing left for personal consumption. Taylor has stated flatly that he could not make that number work.

Despite Mobile Embrace’s investor funding product development and expansion, the underlying unit economics remained materially unchanged. Every new venue incurred support, integration and onboarding costs before it generated substantive transaction revenue which meant that growth weighed on cash flow instead of relieving it. The business that makes a fraction of a cent per transaction either needs to do an enormous volume of transactions or take a much larger slice, and Clip had neither of those two things while Taylor was building it.

It is this detail that makes Clip an interesting case study in app success and failure: it didn’t lack for customers, nor investor appetite. It lacked a pricing system commensurate with its expenses.

What Made It Unsuccessful

Weaving the separate threads together, some structural defects emerge as to why Clip didn’t evolve into a sustainable company for Taylor. It was more than slim pickings on the take-rate side structurally. 

• The 1% of transaction value model is designed for scale, not for a startup still in battle to get venue-by-venue adoption. Growth outpaced monetisation. Increased venues and users, the support and development costs of that were always higher but revenue per transaction never came close.
• The economics were not impacted by outside investment, although the ownership picture was. Mobile Embrace’s stake provided Clip with a base of funding, but funding doesn’t solve a pricing model substantially below its costs.
• The company's survival and the founder's state of funds were two different stories. Clip continued to have institutional support even after Taylor said he was personally out of money, and there is no indication in the record that he made any money as a result of that continuing operation.

The Bottom Line

The failure of Clip was not a lack of demand. Pubs wanted it. And, if the figures are to be believed, customers were using it in increasing amounts. A publicly listed company funded it with millions of dollars. What it did not have was a monetisation model which allowed the person who built such a thing to transform all of that demand into a sustainable business.

The facts together tell of a company that did nearly all the things a startup is supposed to do. Gain customers, raise funding and grow operations, yet left its founder with about $5,000 and an acquaintance’s couch to sleep on. Clip is an extraordinary, well-documented case of a company where traction and outside investment covered up, not fixed, a broken revenue model. But after Clipp, Greg started a new business that scaled and did everything right Clipp did not. To know more read here.