Ask HN: Idea for Short-Term Loan App

There are a couple of apps slowly coming onto the market for solving the "payday" loan issue of sub-prime candidates needing quick cash. They all approach the issue in a similar way by evaluating individual backgrounds and credit scores and taking the risk in loaning them cash from an account, then charging interest.

My idea is to have a platform where you can connect people who need a short term loan with folks willing to help crowdfund that loan. Users would post their story of why they need the loan and the total amount they need (similar to GoFundMe) and would crowd-source the funds with other users who empathize with their situation. Each new user would have a limit, probably around $250, that they can ask for. We can incentivize lending money to other users and paying the funds back by increasing this total limit, thereby creating social credit on the platform. For example if a user pays back their original $250 loan the total amount they can ask for increases to $300. If a user lends another user $20, the total loan amount they can ask for in the future would go up to $270.

The transactions could possibly be done through Venmo and could charge a %5 transaction fee before lending total amount to the user. There will most likely be a lot of "bad actors" initially, so every account would require maybe a phone number upon sign-up. Overtime anyone who hasn't paid back their loan will be banned, and users will be able to rate other users to have better transparency on who is using the platform appropriately.

Other similar ideas I've seen trying to approach this issue are LendUp, Kiva, LendingClub, Earnin, GoFundMe etc.

I'm definitely interested in seeing how Earnin' plays out.