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IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

indiehackers.com

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Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#141

Post by pryelluw »

wheelerwj wrote: post #133
minimaxir wrote: post #6

While going from a blog-to-acquisition in less than a year is an impressive feat, there have been suspicious circumstances around IndieHackers submissions to Hacker News including clickbait titles that are frequently fixed by HN mods, and in one case, explicit voting manipulation with an attempt to bypass the voting ring detector via linking to /newest: http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg This acquisition sends a disappoi…

> disappointing message that growth hacking works. 1) its not disappointing that growth hacking works. Growth hacking is supposed to work. Growth hacking is just marketing 2.0. 2) it is disappointing that spam tactics get rewarded. But that has nothing to do with Stripe... mostly. I also think IndieHackers is lite on legitimate content, but its a great content marketing play by Stripe. Anything to suggest otherwise i…

Would you define legitimate content? Super interested.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#142

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway88743 wrote: post #93
ag_47 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Don't hate the player, hate game, though. welcome to the jungle.

As long as Stripe knows what they bought. The way I see it, they didn't buy a popular website, but a determined person willing to do anything to get what he wants.

[deleted]

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#143

Post by holtalanm »

minimaxir wrote: post #6

While going from a blog-to-acquisition in less than a year is an impressive feat, there have been suspicious circumstances around IndieHackers submissions to Hacker News including clickbait titles that are frequently fixed by HN mods, and in one case, explicit voting manipulation with an attempt to bypass the voting ring detector via linking to /newest: http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg This acquisition sends a disappoi…

or, you know, the HN submissions from IndieHackers are actually popular. God forbid.

I find myself actually _liking_ the IndieHackers posts, because they are inspiring.

I know; there's no way I could be a real individual because all of the IndieHackers popularity is falsified. /s

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#144

Post by bbcbasic »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #130
nugget wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your numbers are low. They didn't buy a suburban lawn care business. I'd ballpark >$1m up front and >$250k annual comp with upside going forward, in some mix of cash and stock. Great move by Stripe. Congrats to Courtland for the exit and what seems like a win-win for both parties.

You're ballparking 1 million upfront and >250K for a site that made barely 60K a year? That seems extremely optimistic and emblematic of dot.bomb numbers.

By that logic YC and other VCs are continuously and systematically making bad investments every year.

You need to look at it as the total value this will provide Stripe. It's a community of people who will buy their service. It's good will too.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#145

Post by posguy »

pc wrote: post #73
inputcoffee wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for commenting and responding. Can you say a little more about how you hope to ensure it becomes successful? I mean, what can Stripe do to help the site? You might spend some money on it, but that might have been done more cheaply without acquiring it. Do you plan to add some sort of features? advertise it broadly?

The main thing we can do is free up Courtland to spend more time on it rather than having him sell ads. We're also going to invest in it so that his brother, Channing, can join him. On top of that, we expect that there'll be some Stripe users who'd benefit from discovering it earlier in their lifecycle and getting advice and feedback from other community members. Most people building a business on Stripe are doing it…

Quick question about Stripe, how do you plan to retain customers long term? I ask this as a person who has moved a couple businesses off Stripe, pricing & corner cases like easy debit support are the main two motivational factors.

For example, Centurylink lets you pay online via debit card with just the card # alone. No CVV, address, expiration date, etc. For low fraud industries, this is a way to leverage very cheap debit card rates (eg $0.65 flat for small bank/credit union debit & 0.05% + $0.21 for large banks that are regulated debit), while making it simple to use debit cards compared to a credit card. If Stripe were to offer something like this, it would be a harder sale to make when I come in and review their phone/payment processing/ISP bills and pitch them $XXX savings.

Another thing is on credit, not offering over interchange pricing essentially limits you to only working with very small businesses. A supermarket I work with (4 employees including the owner) does $100k volume a month average, and is paying only 0.83% to 0.85% ($830 to $850 a month in total fees on 100k volume) a month, how can Stripe get anywhere close to that?

These types of issues could limit Stripe to a small & shrinking niche long term, especially with Mercury offering similar APIs with more features (though less accessible) at rock bottom pricing, and Heartland, Gravity and others piling on in a race to the bottom. IMO the reasonably easy to access & inexpensive API is the differentiator keeping Mercury viable.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#146

Post by kirillzubovsky »

pc wrote: post #18

Patrick from Stripe here. I wanted to quickly chime in to emphasize that our goal in acquiring Indie Hackers is to simply ensure that the site becomes as successful as possible. The Stripe upside we're hoping for is that more companies get started and that they're more successful . We already see a very large fraction of new internet companies choose Stripe; we're mainly hoping that Indie Hackers can help us grow the…

You guys are my favorite startup and it's great to see that you're not just focused on the bottom line, but also doing good for the world. Very few do. Keep on rocking, pc!

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#147

Post by holtalanm »

throwaway88744 wrote: post #135
sanswork wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like he's murdering people to get ahead not that he is targeting a social network with content that is generally relevant and popular. The anything in this case is focused promotion.

> You make it sound like he's murdering people You are putting words into my mouth. He clearly wrote: > I've made a ton of submissions in the past 8 months and experimented with various combinations of stories/titles that the HN audience might like, without always being successful. (Probably one out of every 4-5 submissions turned into an angry mob haha) 20%-25% of his submissions made readers angry. Nevertheless he…

so by your logic he should not do whatever he can to create the most effective submission possible?

That seems counter-intuitive since really all HN cares about in the end is quality content.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#148

Post by toomuchtodo »

posguy wrote: post #145
pc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing we can do is free up Courtland to spend more time on it rather than having him sell ads. We're also going to invest in it so that his brother, Channing, can join him. On top of that, we expect that there'll be some Stripe users who'd benefit from discovering it earlier in their lifecycle and getting advice and feedback from other community members. Most people building a business on Stripe are doing it…

Quick question about Stripe, how do you plan to retain customers long term? I ask this as a person who has moved a couple businesses off Stripe, pricing & corner cases like easy debit support are the main two motivational factors. For example, Centurylink lets you pay online via debit card with just the card # alone. No CVV, address, expiration date, etc. For low fraud industries, this is a way to leverage very cheap…

Stripe markets to tech companies. Tech companies typically have very strong margins, and are therefore less price sensitive. Ergo, Stripe survives on businesses that print money.

Not everyone can afford an iPhone, but Apple still is filthy rich from the people who can.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#150

Post by minimaxir »

holtalanm wrote: post #147
throwaway88744 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You make it sound like he's murdering people You are putting words into my mouth. He clearly wrote: > I've made a ton of submissions in the past 8 months and experimented with various combinations of stories/titles that the HN audience might like, without always being successful. (Probably one out of every 4-5 submissions turned into an angry mob haha) 20%-25% of his submissions made readers angry. Nevertheless he…

so by your logic he should not do whatever he can to create the most effective submission possible? That seems counter-intuitive since really all HN cares about in the end is quality content.

> so by your logic he should not do whatever he can to create the most effective submission possible?

Ideally without breaking the HN rules.

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