One year in #stripe • Hacker News Board

Re: One year in #stripe

#21

Post by cperciva » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 6:12 AM UTC

matthewarkin wrote: post #10

Cieplak wrote: post #2

I'm skeptical of the data backing the language popularity chart because there is no mention of Python. It seems unlikely that Python devs never come into the IRC support channel. Ranked by general usage rather than by number of support requests, I might guess that Python would be ranked similarly to Ruby.

Yeah, to my recollection I can't recall a single person joining the irc room with a python code base, I can't really say why or why not, but it should be noted that it is popularity in terms of support, not in terms of api requests. The naive interpretation would be that people using stripe with a python codebase in general need less technical support with the integration.

My logs have quite a few people talking about using python, but most of them are in 2013. Shifting demographics, perhaps?

Re: One year in #stripe

#22

Post by erict19 » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 6:24 AM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #20

michaelschade wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Stripe.) Yeah, you're right: we've had some scaling troubles with support in the past. The root cause is basically what Matt's post points toward: our userbase exploded. Our investment in support didn't even come close to keeping up. Long-term, it's critical that our support is not just adequate but excellent, and as a result fixing it has been one of our top priorities. Our support is actually quite fast…

When can I expect to be able to have my completely China based business use stripe? I love that alipay can be integrated seemlessly but I really don't have any reason to pay to convert to USD only to pay again to move my money back to RMB.

I've heard similar issues with startups I work with in SE Asia and East Africa. In a similar vein to the Alipay integration you mention, I was also recently meeting with a handful of startups in Nairobi, and we were discussing how an integration with M-Pesa would be awesome, in particular as Safaricom recently opened up their API.

Re: One year in #stripe

#23

Post by rhubarbquid » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 6:31 AM UTC

Cieplak wrote: post #2

I'm skeptical of the data backing the language popularity chart because there is no mention of Python. It seems unlikely that Python devs never come into the IRC support channel. Ranked by general usage rather than by number of support requests, I might guess that Python would be ranked similarly to Ruby.

I've been doing contract work for a company that uses Python and Stripe, so I found that surprising too.

Re: One year in #stripe

#24

Post by mck- » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 6:35 AM UTC

nathancahill wrote: post #4

> 430 hours writing messages or about 11 work weeks. (Hey Stripe guys, where can I send an invoice?) But really, someone at Stripe should cut him a check. I've always thought markin was part of the Stripe team. The IRC room is pretty much the closest thing to support that Stripe has (still no public phone number, ticket system?), and he's the lifeblood of it.

Reading the other comments re: support being a top priority, if I were Stripe, I would try to recruit him for a position as Head of support :) he's been contributing more to the community than Stripe employees it seems..

Re: One year in #stripe

#25

Post by metafunctor » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 8:09 AM UTC

matthewarkin wrote: post #10

Cieplak wrote: post #2

I'm skeptical of the data backing the language popularity chart because there is no mention of Python. It seems unlikely that Python devs never come into the IRC support channel. Ranked by general usage rather than by number of support requests, I might guess that Python would be ranked similarly to Ruby.

Yeah, to my recollection I can't recall a single person joining the irc room with a python code base, I can't really say why or why not, but it should be noted that it is popularity in terms of support, not in terms of api requests. The naive interpretation would be that people using stripe with a python codebase in general need less technical support with the integration.

We have a Python codebase, it just wasn't relevant to the couple of questions I've asked on #stripe, so didn't even mention it.

The Stripe Python library + Stripe's API docs are pretty good, and never really had any issues on that level.

Re: One year in #stripe

#26

Post by jcrites » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 9:39 AM UTC

gspleen wrote: post #12

h8trswana8 wrote: post #3

Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature. You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days. We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email…

My team received similar support recently. Want to know why their support sucks? Everyone in the company is on rotating support desk duty. I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey. Once I read into that a bit more their support delays, lost emails, and shoddy advice all made a lot more sense.

> I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey.

This is a good idea and I'd recommend it. Perhaps not as a mandatory forced rotation, but as something that everyone on a team is encouraged to contribute to.

Understanding the customer experience, and their problems and day-to-day frustration, are extremely valuable for informing product development and business priorities generally. That said, if software engineers are doing it and it's not their primary job function, then I'd suggest that only where there's no SLA. Full time support is probably necessary for things that have an SLA (probably only an unpaid forums / IRC type of thing). Meeting a fast SLA while giving high quality responses is difficult, especially under high growth, and requires the attention of dedicated people who can be measured on it.

But yes I've found involvement in the day to day customer experience to be beneficial and enlightening even for roles that don't directly interact with customers routinely. It helps you understand your customers. The best team will be one where everyone has a connection to and understands the customers, their problems, how the business helps them, and where it can improve.

Re: One year in #stripe

#27

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 10:33 AM UTC

michaelschade wrote: post #14

h8trswana8 wrote: post #3

Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature. You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days. We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email…

(I work at Stripe.) Yeah, you're right: we've had some scaling troubles with support in the past. The root cause is basically what Matt's post points toward: our userbase exploded. Our investment in support didn't even come close to keeping up. Long-term, it's critical that our support is not just adequate but excellent, and as a result fixing it has been one of our top priorities. Our support is actually quite fast…

You don't have phone support? Madness. Charge for it if you want to discourage use - premium rate number, per-incident charge, whatever - but there should be a turnaround of more like 5 minutes for the case of "I can't take any payments!"

Re: One year in #stripe

#28

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: One year in #stripe

#29

Post by Mahn » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 12:05 PM UTC

h8trswana8 wrote: post #3

Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature. You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days. We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email…

As a data point, or startup works with a variety of payment processors in Europe (in addition to credit cards and PayPal we accept back transfers, prepaid, POS cash, SMS, phone, etc), and to date I have yet to find a company in this sector that doesn't have slow, atrocious and unreliable support. Even if you carefully craft extremely simple one line emails to help them read and process them faster, you are still going to get the lowest amount of effort possible consistently; let alone discussing something complex. And good luck if something crashes on weekend.

Re: One year in #stripe

#30

Post by teh_klev » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 2:02 PM UTC

Mahn wrote: post #29

h8trswana8 wrote: post #3

Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature. You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days. We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email…

As a data point, or startup works with a variety of payment processors in Europe (in addition to credit cards and PayPal we accept back transfers, prepaid, POS cash, SMS, phone, etc), and to date I have yet to find a company in this sector that doesn't have slow, atrocious and unreliable support. Even if you carefully craft extremely simple one line emails to help them read and process them faster, you are still goin…

We're UK based and we use PayPoint (we were originally SecPay customers, and SecPay got bought by PayPoint). On the whole I've found their support pretty good, I usually ping them an email which raises a support ticket automatically then follow up by calling them if it's a show stopper issue.

Back in the day when they were SecPay, they rolled out 3D secure but it wasn't usable for automated repeat transactions. I explained the problem and they fixed the issue in around two weeks.