From the team who brought you Mindie, One Cash is a new payment app for iOS, but with a twist. This time, it isn’t about paying back your friends like countless other apps. It’s all about tipping $1 to people you admire… or more. Here’s how it works.
“Current payment apps are mostly about paying back your friends. We wanted to create something public and something that would let you support creators,” co-founder Grégoire Henrion told me. “And we wanted to create a fun app.”

When you first launch the app, the setup process is quite straightforward. You just have to let the app access your Twitter account and enter your U.S. credit or debit card. After that, you can tip anyone who has a Twitter account.
One Cash relies exclusively on Twitter’s social graph. You can search for any Twitter user and see if they are already using the app. If they haven’t heard about One Cash, they will receive a tweet and they can install the app to redeem the tip.
But compared to other payment app, One Cash is fun. Once you have selected someone, you swipe your finger up to throw a $1 bill to this person — there isn’t any fee. There is no confirmation screen, just a simple gesture. CTO Baptiste Truchot has done a great job hiding the complexity of a payment app. What if you want to send more than a dollar? Just make it rain:

One Cash borrows many UX tricks from messaging apps. You can add a bio to your profile and messages to your tips. Your transaction history looks like a conversation screen. You get a notification when someone sees your tip, and people can answer with a thank you selfie. All of this is important to make the app more personal.
And this is also key to understanding One Cash’s true purpose. It isn’t about sending a few dollars to your friends. The startup wants to create a simple way for content creators to accept donations. If you’re a professional YouTube, Vine, Instagram or Snapchat content creator, you might want to start accepting donations from your fans.
There are a few ways already, including subscription services like Patreon. But none of them are as simple as One Cash.
“Our niche is creators who have a big enough audience to attract tips and are too small to get advertising dollars,” Henrion said. “It would also be great if big Vine stars could use tipping in addition to advertising.”
In order to achieve all this, One Cash users get a unique profile URL so that they can share it with their followers. Here’s how my profile looks, for example.
Many content creators are still figuring out how they can turn their audience into a paycheck. YouTube found a way to help these creators with pre-roll ads. But Instagram, Vine and other platforms have yet to provide a native way to generate money for its power users. One Cash fills this gap with a well-designed app, and I hope I’ll be able to tip my favorite Internet stars in the coming months.

