Stripe launched 10 years ago today
twitter.com
twitter.com
As other have said here, Stripe was one of those things that just made sense. As a web developer I was tired of jumping through the many hoops of authorize.net or praying that people would complete the purchase path on PayPal. When Stripe came out I (apparently) jumped immediately on it and haven't looked back. It is the only payment solutions provider I offer my clients or use on my own projects.
But the larger impact it has had on me is that it gave me that much more faith in HN as a source of emerging technology solutions. I still comb through batch announcements or check out Show HNs to see what's coming, because I feel like there's a good chance another Stripe is launching today. And it's just as cool that Patrick Collison still is involved in HN. Thanks pc and the rest of you all at Stripe!
I think thoughtfulness sticks because it requires effort, and injects humanity in an otherwise efficiently transactional culture.
Thoughtfulness may be inexpensive to exercise money-wise, but it ain’t cheap. ;)
I still remember how one day there was a message on the announcements newsgroup about how the size of a key was increasing, only three or four days before the we'd start seeing the change in API responses. Dealing with this needed a database migration that I would need more time to schedule, and I sent back a polite-but-direct response to the generic posting email expressing my disappointment with how little notice we received.
A couple minutes later a Google Chat bubble pops up from some guy named gdb (aka Greg Brockman), who I subsequently learned was Stripe's CTO. He apologized, asked why the timeline was tough for me, and when I explained it, immediately set something on my account so that the migration would be delayed by a couple weeks.
8 years later I remain impressed by that level of customer connection from a senior executive, and the technical excellence that allowed them to special-case delay my migration.
Amazing. No surprise from me the success they've had.
Me: We should probably switch to stripe eh?
Joonas: Yah, we should probably switch to stripe.
Brooke: Yup, we should probably switch to stripe.
Joonas: k.
Me: Hey Alex Sexton can you please get Joonas hooked up with what we need?
Alex Sexton: Yup
Joonas: k, done.
I'm not sure finance even noticed, it was really so easy.
Well deserved success to the Stripe team and we have been a happy customer in production since 2014. They even reached out to me once to discuss dashboard/UI change feedback. I know they have a few criticisms lately as they have grown but overall, if I could use the word "disruptor" (which usually is overused and cliched these days), it truly applies to Stripe. Kudos for not making me deal with Paypal and the others for the most part.
They've got a moat the size of an ocean.
I do wonder what Stripe's financials look like given they have raised more funding than most startups ($2.2B raised [0]).
Given these extremely favorable market conditions, I have to imagine they are accelerating an IPO very soon (no inside knowledge).
Mind you, I'm also pretty anti-IPO -- I think that going public usually has a negative impact on a company's products (more push towards profit at the cost of quality and employee QOL). But if you're stuck with a lot of stock that you haven't exercised 10 years on, I can see the engineers getting really frustrated.
I remember, 10 years ago when Stripe launched. Our SaaS was using some shitty merchant account provider. We had to have a merchant account, which after tons of paperwork, we got.
Now, we were a travel technology SaaS (not a travel business), but our merchant provider closed our account without notice, because, according to them, we were selling consumer travel. With just under 100 subscribing customers at the time, this was very painful for us. They NEVER took the time to talk to us and see what our business was.
But just a few months earlier, Stripe launched.
We IMMEDIATELY signed up and did a very light integration. We manually called all our customers and input their credit cards. And we've been with Stripe since that time till today.
Brilliant service. Easy to integrate. Highly recommended.
Because of that pain though, we still are always prepared to go with a different provider if something happens, but so far, the other shoe has NOT dropped.
Stripe took the time to understand that we are a company that provides technology services to travel companies. Not a travel company.
Xero, amongst others, is starting to roll-out support.
The future is looking pretty good for B2B invoices.
BrainTree was decent a few years ago, but PayPal acquired them and that seemed to drain the quality away.
There are other, older competitors that have much worse APIs and docs and support, but my impression is they survive due to implementation lock-in.
* Braintree (acquired by PayPal) * Checkout.com * Adyen (more enterprise oriented)
+ there are a lot of local players, e.g. Mollie is popular in the Netherlands, Payu and Przelewy24 are large providers in Poland, in China people pay with Wechat and Alipay, and in Indonesia with GoPay by Gojek
Stripe provides a lot of services besides payments, but if you just need a payment provide for your on-line shop, whether you go with Stripe or Braintree is not a very big difference. I mean sure, quality of documentation and customer service matters, but the 2 most important factors for people are pricing and support for the payment methods popular in your country (e.g. iDeal in the Netherlands, fast bank transfers in Poland etc.)
Huge congrats, to say you've had an impact is an understatement.
This reminds me of how I personally experienced the pain of writing payment code a year or so before Stripe came out, then quickly moved onto more fun stuff - exactly as described in the "Schlep blindness" essay - http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
I’ll be cheering for them until they get too huge and complacent, and then some brilliant startup will disrupt them and the cycle of nature will continue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883
Interestingly, unlike most HN launches, the majority of the comments were actually positive, instead of "why not just do X instead?".
CTR+F "paypal" in the launch thread. I don't view Stripe as visionary or a break through in payment processing, that goes to PayPal, but Stripe has a better user experience.
This was my point. PayPal disrupted the banks and ACH processors. Stripe perfected the UX/DX.
PayPal is much larger than Stripe, afaik it's net worth is more and it's revenue is 3x.
- "This is dumb and it'll never work"
vs
- "I'm you're target audience and I would never use this service because XYZ"
Both have negative sentiment but one is FAR more useful and should be encouraged.
Then you come to talk to me about all your pain points afterwards.
That means you have a problem that you’d want to know about early.
A. You aren’t filling a need I have.
B. You aren’t showing that you’ll fill a need I have with enough clarity to motivate me to invest a bunch of time into the product.
C. Your description of your intended audience is low-specificity enough that I’d waste your sales time talking to them.
D. Your description of your intended audience is low-specificity enough that if you give it to half your engineering team, she will spend lots of effort building something misaligned with the other half.
Early on, the entire target audience are customers and potential customers. The later I define as everyone that have not yet been talked to but would make the switch if they learned about the product in its current form.
Either you are a customer or a potential customer or you are just not that interesting.
- People who would make the switch if the messaging about the product was improved
- People who would make the switch if the product had less friction
?
Your loss.
That is correct.
The reason is that the number of people in the "I would make a switch if …" camp is large, and most of them are dishonest about their intentions – not deliberately, but dishonest nonetheless. They will never be customers, no matter what you do. Meanwhile you get distracted by random people on the internet instead of focusing on your actual customers or potential customers.
This is super fair and requires some courage to stick to.
That's why it's a target, you're aiming for it, but always a chance you could miss.
Have any of y'all seen College Humor's CEO series? I laughed until I cried, I've met so many of these IRL.
Anyways the Venmo CEO spoof is what I'm reminded of here. It's not that users don't like the product/feature, it's that they are dumb and/or using it wrong.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl1USudaFHvka8yIKXlAd...
A decade has gone by and all they've managed are:
US, Canada, Mexico
UK, EU
UAE
India
Singapore, Malaysia, Philipines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan
Australia, New Zealand
Brazil
There are billions of people who stand to benefit from greater access to participation in ecommerce, but who are left out in the cold because banks won't give them merchant accounts. I once spoke to a banker who didn't know what a merchant account was.
Congrats on your success, Stripe. Please consider doing good with it.
https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/paystack-joining-stripe
Both having invested in the Series A, along with eventually acquiring 'em.
I'm glad Stripe is a making small steps.
And I doubt their attitude is like, "oh yeah, eff Latin America and Africa, they can rot for all we care", presumably it's harder to roll out in poorer, less developed countries.
From a regulatory standpoint (the big hurdle in fintech), not so, which is why I lumped them all together. A single team/office could handle all the EU countries.
> presumably it's harder to roll out in poorer, less developed countries.
On the contrary, the more developed a country, the more regulation and red tape there is to deal with in finance.
Tons of developing countries have super aggressive financial/general regulations, for example India requires all data be stored in-country so you can't shard across geozones [https://www.lawfareblog.com/key-global-takeaways-indias-revi...]. In fact, the countries with the most complex financial compliance are almost all developing [https://www.bnamericas.com/en/news/five-of-10-most-complex-c...].
But the bigger thing is generally how advanced the existing finance infra is. Lots of countries have really slow bank transfers, processing a refund requires handing in physical paperwork, etc. Stripe relies on having underlying bank infra that's somewhat functional.
As far as the EU, the regulatory environment is manageble, but the payment landscape is very different from the US where Stripe originated. For example, in Germany only around 30% of users pay for stuff online via card [https://askwonder.com/research/german-market-what-s-breakdow...], that means for every country a ton of new payment methods have to be added for the service to be actually useful.
I don't think Stripe deserves to be a major player since they are acting like the Gestapo.
From your first communication it's a very combative communication style and it continues that way to the end.
"By the way, lest you think Kelsey was being super considerate above, she made sure to time several of her messages so that they arrived at three and four AM to make it rather harder to reply. Sometimes timing can be a quasi-malicious act."
Business may need to determine if its worth doing business with a customer. For stripe, it may simply not have been worth trying to business with you. The good news - TONS of other providers in this space, including for very high charge back industries (adult, tatoo, strip clubs etc) so you should be able to get services if needed.
As to my communication style, you are entitled to your opinion. I won't cut your credit card off because you voiced it.
Given the absurdity of the situation, I was tactful.
It also looks like the site changed from the initial email to later emails but the author is confused as to why stripe is confused.
http://www.beitesheldonate.org/ was maybe first website? Then a books website?
What can happen is they look into things more closely and see they are doing donations perhaps without a clear exempt entity (ie, not setup as a charity) or any number of things.
Anyways, to say that stripe should be shut down and is the "Gestapo" seems a bit misplaced. The crimes and methods of the Gestapo were truly horrific if you pay attention to WWII history - I'm still having trouble connecting stripe's behavior to the Gestapo.
I am quite cognizant of what the Gestapo did. They discriminated slowly but surely on the basis of the religious identify of people who were Jewish. Our church was Messianic Jewish as was indicated on the site. Some of our members had, in fact, relatives in the Holocaust.
His description seems very clearly a bookstore. He even names a book.
The rejection is very vague. Maybe he got more detail later. It would be helpful if for example it’s a non exempt entity, they specifically told him that so he could decide to remedy or appeal if they were incorrect.
I fail to see how they might have gotten confused. They clearly allow fundraising or else they wouldn't be a partner with givebutter.