A big reason Stripe got big was because they got their YC cohorts to use it. Payments before that was complicated and even though PayPal existed, most people didn’t know you could process credit cards like Stripe, you don’t need a PayPal account or wallet. It’s why they bought Braintree and that added even more confusion.

The lesson is, marketing to developers works. And the best way to market to them to by making their job easier.

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bostik an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Like with everything in business and engineering, there's a tradeoff. My previous employer used Adyen as major payment provider (for quite some time, too). Their cost structure is sensible, the payment methods they support are convenient[ß], and their functionality is reasonably solid even in the edge cases. But everyone who maintained the payment service kept cursing Adyen for their awful APIs. The python runtime powering the old system had to carry an unmaintainable and effectively abandoned library to be able to process the Adyen payment gateway messages.

From what I understand, Stripe's main value proposition was: "how can we make this gnarly, confusing and complicated system an easy-to-use service that does NOT require the end-user to internalise the entire payment provider state transition universe?" That is obviously a valuable service, but is it valuable enough to charge an ongoing rake of nearly 300 basis points?

ß: for some weird reason people still insisted that they absolutely must be able to pay with Paypal. 2+ years of fighting cross-corporate politics + KYB and still having to stomach insanely high commissions left a properly bad taste.

	▲	bmiedlar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Having built on Authorize.net and a few other gateways before Stripe, I'd say yes - but the value that justifies the rake isn't the nicer API, it's what you no longer have to own. The moment you're paying out to third parties you're on the hook for KYC, identity verification, and the whole compliance/risk surface around moving other people's money. Connect absorbs that. Handing those pieces off so I stay compliant on payouts and can actually focus on the business is worth far more to me than the basis points. With other gateways I was assembling all of that myself.

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indymike 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Another reason is their competitors didn't get it the value prop because everyone had been competing on rates, and little thought given to developer experience... early on a lot of Stripe's competition's apis used fixed field text as the format for transactions.