141–150 of 151 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Low pricing is not a moat.
Low pricing was Amazon's moat. Then the tech bubble crashed and they had to raise prices. Then AWS came along and pricing for non-AWS services didn't matter a thing as AWS margins were so high Amazon could do whatever it wanted in other business lines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would a non profit need to communicate externally for people to make bank transfers directly into their accounts? Does bill pay require a routing number to setup or anything like that? What are the prerequisites for setting that up?
In the US a postal address is literally all you need. I believe in EU it is common to give a routing and account number though I think that is setup to allow input only.
What is Stripe's moat? It's developer friendly but from my experience management will only care about the cost.
HN loves Stripe's Payments API, but in my experience from having worked on payments at a large ecommerce unicorn, APIs from companies like Adyen and Checkout.com are just as easy to work with.
Stripe's real moat is that they offer so many useful products around payments and finance that integrate really well. You can get fraud detection, billing, invoicing etc. from other merchants, or you can build your own, but it's probably cheaper (and much simpler) to use Stripe for all of that.
At the moment this is true from small to medium sized companies. Past a certain size you will most likely be using multiple Payment Service Providers anyway, so the vertical integration is not as useful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. At least not if you're part of a free trade union like europe.
I partially own a company in the EU, the neighbouring countries have different laws and wildly different company tax rates, care to elaborate on your assertive "no" here? Last I looked countries in the EU also set their own tax rates. Feel free to prove me wrong on that matter, we are in a sub-thread about Ireland being a tax haven if you need a reminder.
I was saying that they should in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Low pricing is not a moat.
Low pricing was Amazon's moat. Then the tech bubble crashed and they had to raise prices. Then AWS came along and pricing for non-AWS services didn't matter a thing as AWS margins were so high Amazon could do whatever it wanted in other business lines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Low pricing is not a moat.
Why? If you have scale and the cost base that enables you to sustain the pricing profitably in can be very, very difficult for competitors to enter your market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US a postal address is literally all you need. I believe in EU it is common to give a routing and account number though I think that is setup to allow input only.
Accepting checks is not free, there is a lot of manual labor that goes into depositing them. I believe jxramos was looking for an electronic solution, such as Zelle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Low pricing is not a moat.
This is totally wrong, considering Stripe has enormous negotiating leverage. My employer never bothers switching to any competitor because Stripe match any deal that their competitors present to us. Could you, a single person and $500m of seed funding match Stripe's prices? Not without hemorrhaging cash. One of Amazon's moats is low pricing as well, which can only be achieved with eye-watering scale (their margins ar…
What negotiation are you referring to? Interchange pricing is fixed; they are not negotiating discounts on that.
If you mean Stripe has VC funding to be a loss leader then, correct, but that’s not a moat. Moats are what protect profitable businesses. The resultant scale could be a moat but Stripe is still a small slice of the payment processing market.
Their play here is to upsell premium services. Developer friendliness and moderate pricing (it’s actually not that low) are hooks to get in the door of startups.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because they are a billion dollar mature company. Every company was a startup at some point but at some point they are a mature company that shouldn’t be called startup anymore. Stripe is certainly one of them.
I don't get it. I follow PG's definition of a startup [1]. I think Stripe still qualifies as one. 1. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
am i the only one that thinks fintech is massively overvalued? especially square etc, or anything adjacent. sure they have great growth and revenue but i don’t see any path where profit can justify the value
You aren't the only one. That being said, the markets they play in will probably end up bigger than you might expect. Plus, the competition is pretty bad. Stripe has a good number of people who have 20 iq points + more ambition when compared to the equivalent person working at a competitor.
Lmao. Is that some kind of Poe's Law? Can't believe someone would say anything like this seriously.