dang - can you change the title on this? It's less about "building a developer cult" and more about "How Stripe builds for Developers".
Building a Developer Cult
111–120 of 132 posts
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't say much but I'll say that Adyen is light years ahead of their competition much more than they let on. Source: Worked in software for payments processing a couple billions a year.
Can you say a little bit more? I'm intrigued!
Example would be intelligent acquirer routing based off historical information and that individual transaction. Most of what is done in the industry usually refers to this as bin routing.
This is much more known now but not as known 6-10 years ago and guess who was very aggressive at maximizing this before I saw Stripe make a solid effort at this...
They've also got some of the highest quality transaction volume, who is doing a chargeback on Netflix? Nobody. Lot of possibilities down the road when you have access to this kind of volume.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#113If 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…
Curious, does Stripe have a "Get the kids to take up smoking strategy" or do startups drop Stripe generally once they reach a certain size?
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#114If 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…
Curious, does Stripe have a "Get the kids to take up smoking strategy" or do startups drop Stripe generally once they reach a certain size?
I think a lot of the big valuation is based on hoping the former is true. Stripe has a few big customers, and some of them are companies like Instacart that are younger than Stripe and have been on the platform since the beginning
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#115If 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…
Curious, does Stripe have a "Get the kids to take up smoking strategy" or do startups drop Stripe generally once they reach a certain size?
You can make a very good business of consulting people off of Stripe. Developers do love it, and for good reason (as the article points out). But it is expensive. If you are running $1,000,000 in credit card transactions per year at $29 each you will pay almost $40,000 in fees. Get up to $10,000,000 in transactions and you are now at $400,000 (this is basic pricing without volume discount, but they are still more expensive than most other interchanges). Suddenly it makes sense to look at other credit card processing technologies. There are a lot of costs to processing credit cards. But, if you have a CFO at your startup, they'll definitely run the numbers.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#116If 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…
Curious, does Stripe have a "Get the kids to take up smoking strategy" or do startups drop Stripe generally once they reach a certain size?
I think "Get the kids to take up smoking strategy" is a fairly accurate description of their Atlas program https://stripe.com/atlas
And their slogan "Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet" https://stripe.com/about also alludes to the strategy of helping actually create more online businesses, as opposed to just getting all online businesses to use Stripe.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It will be fascinating to see what happens as these two companies expand to compete with each other Very unlikely, as both markets (smb payments and enterprise payments) is unlimited, there is a few chance they will try to compete with each other. On the other hand almost no company is able to be a leader in both the smb and enterprise space, because as you mentioned it, the cultures need to be different, the custo…
> both markets (smb payments and enterprise payments) is unlimited What? There are only so many companies in need of (or open to changing) payment processing software at a given time. When it comes to larger firms, those numbers get smaller. That's the opposite of unlimited.
Well, as a single illustrative data point, retail sales numbers were announced for Canada this morning. Coming out of the pandemic lock-down total sales up 18%, online up 100+% but still only accounts for 8% of total retail. That leaves a lot of greenfield market to go after without ever competing.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#118In my previous job, I implemented the backend integration with Stripe and also the frontend for iOS (Native Swift App). It was a piece of cake to get the whole implementation done across the stack. Six months later, our company decided to switch to Adyen so we could target more local payment methods in different countries. Back then, Stripe wasn't so flexible on that. With Adyen, we could for example offer "carte ban…
I work for Adyen in our developer experience team. It might have been some time since you integrated but we would love to hear about your experience integrating to Adyen and how we can make it more simple. (You can reach me at directly at lucas@adyen.com or reach out to our team at developer-experience@adyen.com)
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#119There was a long time when Stripe was taking a significantly higher transaction fee than most other merchants for cc transactions yet there still was fervent developer push to use it anyways (Note, this hasn't been true for a few years and was only true during the first year or two of Stripe's life). People made all kinds of rationalizations to themselves for using stripe at a much higher cost simply because they did…
I am sure many developers don't remember just how much crappier the "crappier APIs" were. Back when Stripe became popular the alternative was XML and SOAP, documented in an outdated PDF that would get emailed to you, or if you're lucky, hosted behind 3 login walls. Then, once you start integrating, you realize that their dev environment is offline every other request, and doesn't match the production environment. So…
That’s not really true though. Both PayPal and Authorize.net had a REST API when Stripe came out.
Re: Building a Developer Cult
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It will be fascinating to see what happens as these two companies expand to compete with each other Very unlikely, as both markets (smb payments and enterprise payments) is unlimited, there is a few chance they will try to compete with each other. On the other hand almost no company is able to be a leader in both the smb and enterprise space, because as you mentioned it, the cultures need to be different, the custo…
> both markets (smb payments and enterprise payments) is unlimited What? There are only so many companies in need of (or open to changing) payment processing software at a given time. When it comes to larger firms, those numbers get smaller. That's the opposite of unlimited.
I wouldn't be surprised if "so many" turns to be > 1 000 000.