Is there any service that will handle the backend of the Stripe integration for me? I'm talking about simple charging per product, ex. selling ebooks. Or Squarespace like websites are the only solution here?
How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
141–150 of 195 posts
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
So much this. When I started Leavetrack[1] in 2011, it was so difficult to get setup for recurring payments. I was using Chargify to handle the recurring payments/credit card storage, a company in New Zealand (I am in the UK) to handle the interface to my merchant account in the UK. Total costs: - c. US$40 per month for Chargify (which kept increasing) - £20 per month for the payment gateway - £25 per month + transac…
Re: migrating customers: I just grandfathered all paying customers to a perpetual free plan. Weren't that many of them. Sadly that app never gained traction. You'd think reliable up/down monitoring of unlimited servers at $4/month would be a good deal.
Maybe you weren't charging enough?
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#143Is there any service that will handle the backend of the Stripe integration for me? I'm talking about simple charging per product, ex. selling ebooks. Or Squarespace like websites are the only solution here?
You might want to look into Upwork,[0] PeoplePerHour,[1] or Airpair.[2]
There are also some great third-party e-commerce integrations that are pretty simple to set up: https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/ecommerce
Shoot me an email at edwin@stripe.com and I'd be happy to help you get started.
[0] https://www.upwork.com/hire/stripe-freelancers/
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#144I don't know Patrick, but he has personally jumped in here on HN where appropriate, publicly given out his own email address to handle issues, etc., and continued to do so even after Stripe achieved a $1b+ valuation. While most of their billionaire Silicon Valley contemporaries are very hard people to root for, I am rooting for these guys. They seem like genuinely good people whose success is well deserved, and so fa…
Patrick is awesome! He asked me to have lunch after I tweeted feature suggestions about Stripe. Indeed, which founder of a billion dollar company does that (or has time for that)? Another time, I had trouble getting the Stripe code to work and Stripe's former CTO Greg Brockman debugged my PHP code (!) to fix it for me. I'm not making this up. The CEO wants to have lunch with me (a nobody) and the CTO debugs my code.…
Why do you think Stripe will get acquired (and soon)?
I personally think it'll stay a standalone company because its founders already have plenty of money (from Auctomatic and presumably from taking money off the table during Stripe's funding rounds) and seem intensely motivated to change the world by having a pivotal role in increasing the GDP of the internet (as stated in the article).
That, coupled with its (both the company and its founders) integrity, culture, and care & empathy for people (employees, investors, customers, partners, underserved and underestimated people and markets, and really almost anyone) seems to indicate to me that its core values and objectives will be best served and achieved as an independent entity.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#145> Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Neither company will address the scope of the deal—which was only revealed by Stripe’s addition of Amazon’s logo to its website—but it could help Stripe greatly increase its transaction volume. So, reading into this, amazon presumably invested in stripe, then gave it some transaction traffic to juice…
This is quite interesting. What does Amazon have to gain from using Stripe?
International or some other payment type Amazon doesn't support well or at all in their own payment system seems like the lowest hanging fruit.
Amazon payments seemed like a huge opportunity to me at one point but I think they're sort of moving away from it. This could be a test that could trigger moving all payments to Stripe and eliminating the overhead of their own payments team. Wouldn't shock me.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#146>>>> "Stripe made its debut in 2011 .... had spent two years testing their service and forming relationships with banks, credit card companies, and regulators so customers wouldn’t have to". Can somebody help throw light on: how Paypal was lagging in 2011 when compared to stripe ? -OR- how Collisons went forming better relationship with bank to build a system better than Paypal ?
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Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#147>>>> "Stripe made its debut in 2011 .... had spent two years testing their service and forming relationships with banks, credit card companies, and regulators so customers wouldn’t have to". Can somebody help throw light on: how Paypal was lagging in 2011 when compared to stripe ? -OR- how Collisons went forming better relationship with bank to build a system better than Paypal ?
Paypal's white label product was unusable (literally for some companies). Their banking relationships did not need to be better than Paypal's to have a better white labeled, developer centric payments gateway than Paypal.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
To expand, it's these 7 lines. (Actually 12) - more or less. Maybe not precisely that, but it's the bit where you add a payment form to your website. It's a nice headline, but it really leaves out the tremendous amount of back-end work that went into making that front end easy to use.
The PayPal form is roughly the same number of lines. The real break through for stripe was it was an alternative to PayPal with a modern UI.
> The real break through for stripe was it was an alternative to PayPal with a modern UI.
Paypal's documentation and the sandbox process is so atrocious that I had to question my own intelligence. Turns out the problem was with paypal and not my IQ.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure who'd have the ability to make that type of acquisition, to be honest. Maybe First Data? That would may even be a stretch.
Card issuers (VISA, MC), Amazon, Microsoft, major banks, Ebay, Paypal, Due, Payline, Paysquare. A leveraged buy-out would enable many more potential takers.
Visa and MC are not card issuers. They are card networks.
A card issuer is a person that issues a credit card, so major banks, and Amex who happens to be both a card issuer and card network.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is quite interesting. What does Amazon have to gain from using Stripe?
Amazon's overall goal is to take a cut of pretty much every piece of economic activity. Taking a cut off of every payment made on the internet outside of their own stores is an objective greatly aided by a stripe acquisition
You have to look at it from both sides though: If I started a business with Stripe as a processor, it's in Stripe's best interest for my business to grow as much as possible, because the higher my volume, the more they make. They'll want a good cut, but their goal is a long term relationship. It's not the same thing with Amazon: Every piece of intel I give them is an opportunity for them to eat my business.
I guess that if Amazon threw a crazy enough amount of money at them, then sure, everyone has a price, but how is joining Bezos' empire helping them? There's very little synergy in the other direction, so the premium for such an acquisition would have to be very large.
When you put the premium there, along with how being acquired by Amazon makes the competition more attractive, makes me think that something like that is unlikely.