Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a Developer Cult

subvert.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 132 posts

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#51

Post by ivanhoe »

gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

When doing B2B with big corps developers opinion is not of such huge importance, they're not making any calls about closing the deal. Also integration will almost always be a part of the deal, so again devs care less, they'll have someone to come over and help set it up. It's in a big contrast with startups and small teams where it's usually up to devs to choose which payment processor will be used and how, and they'll be the ones expected to integrate it.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#52

Post by edwinwee »

arp242 wrote: post #22

I recently built a Stripe integration, and can't say I'm especially impressed. Unless I completely missed some aspects, it mostly just seems like an interface to their database. While this is great for some advanced workflows, the vast majority of use cases are all very similar: "create subscription and customer", "change subscription", etc. Common workflows require quite some coding, and there's no support for trans…

(Edwin from Stripe here.) Most people like our built-in search since it lets you quickly navigate and see related things. But if you don't, you can hit Ctrl+F+F to use native browser search. You can turn it off entirely by unchecking "Open on Ctrl-F."

Docs now save to your cache, so loading should feel pretty immediate.

What should we be more clear about in the Checkout docs? We're working on improving them, but it'd be useful to hear what you think. (Could you email me [edwin@stripe.com] and jackerman@stripe.com?)

We also made the Stripe Dashboard 20% faster since March. There's more work to be done here, though—and performace (specifically the customer page) is at the top of the list.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#53

Post by Cthulhu_ »

zt wrote: post #5

Look, I know that the idea of being customer focused might seem trite, but I wanted to focus on one thing: it's the little things. "What actually differentiates stripe from the rest of the bunch though? It’s the little things.Stripe obsesses over creating a seamless CX. Small annoyances in applications compound. A user might not churn immediately because you have a bunch of unoptimized functionality or crappy UX, but…

You need both; you need a solid core, a reliable and fast service - both in the literal sense (e.g. back-end services) and in the figurative (your business process, so to speak), and on top of that you need to build a solid user experience.

And that's still not all, you ALSO need to do marketing and sales.

To take an example, there's about a bajillion 'todo' or 'notes' apps, I think because they are easy - simple data models, at the core. Because that is finished quickly, developers focus on the UI / UX, which is extra emphasized because they often live in the Mac / iOS atmospheres.

Some will do marketing on top of that, pretty landing pages, get featured in the app store and the low effort app news sites. But there's a lot (on HN for example) that miss out on that.

But that's just one highly competed area, there's not much you can do now to get a foot in the door - it's not a market "ripe for disruption" as the HN crowd likes to say.

Financial transactions on the other hand is really hard to get right at the core. Adyen is doing a pretty decent job there, I'm sure Stripe does as well, but they emphasize more on the UX and smaller customers. There's also others like Buckaroo, Icepay, MultiSafepay, and a couple others.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#56

Post by [deleted] »

BenGosub wrote: post #48

Stripe is the most popular option out of not many options. So, when you ask a developer what's their favorite payments API, chances are they are going to say Stripe. Which isn't surprising at all. It's just yet another post on how Stripe are customer centric.

[deleted]

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#57

Post by fk6aaa545c »

unnouinceput wrote: post #32

I liked this article. Is a prime example of how a shameless asskissing article should look like, this should be on top of every campaign manager as a must read for upcoming election battle.

And then sockpuppet it to the the top of HN and pay for the top comment to be asskissing too. Well done Stripe.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#58

Post by porker »

arp242 wrote: post #38
stu2b50 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're seeing what the benefit is, though: it feels like you're just using an API to some company's DB. Payment processing is one area is that just a complete nonstarter to homebrew on your own. It's fucking awful. There's no choice. Bank's still require you to transfer them files via ftp to make transactions. And god forbid the legal, and technical mess when you want to accept foreign currency, or even multi…

Yeah, I have no doubt that it's better than what the banks are offering. "Homebrew on your own" is more or less what Stripe's API felt like though; the perspective I'm coming from is that I run a little one-person SaaS company with a simple and fairly standard subscription model, and I was surprised by the amount of "plumbing" you need to do for this.

That's why companies like Paddle.com exist.

I used them for a side project. Once you find the right documentation it's straightforward to integrate, but finding it took 3 days and 2 support requests.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#59

Post by unityByFreedom »

shaan7 wrote: post #33
unityByFreedom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A trap I see /a lot/ is that people focus on delighting their users before they even know what delights their users or what their users care about. That's odd. The point of focusing on users is to discover what users want. If you're not doing then you're not really focused on users.

But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process. Also, +1 to the parent comment. I worked at a startup where we made exactly that mistake - we delayed releases until it met a high standard of UX - took us more than couple of years. By this time, competitors that built a _much_ crappier produ…

> But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process.

If these two things are not equal then you're doing it wrong.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#60

Post by henvic »

gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

Indeed. I think I never heard about Adyen before moving here to the Netherlands (September 2019) to work as a software engineer.

Not only I discovered my company uses it, but plenty of other business I interact on a daily basis (from the market to utility-ish services) do.

Post reply on HN