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How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

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Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#81

Post by jacquesm »

jameskegel wrote: post #80
jacquesm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hope is they will not be acquired and will keep this stand-alone as a true alternative rather than be eaten and then to lose all their advantages. Acquisitions of companies like this usually spell the end of the line. Here's to hoping Stripe will IPO and will go on to acquire who could now potentially acquire them.

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.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#82

Post by robinjfisher »

IgorPartola wrote: post #33

For me, Stripe was a revelation because they eliminated fixed monthly costs. When I ran a side project that took credit cards, I found the cheapest option to be a $20/month merchant account + $20/month to Spreedly. Others had a few months free trials, etc. but ended up being more expensive over the first year. Stripe, while being more expensive than these options per transaction, actually cost me a lot less to start…

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 + transaction fee for merchant account

So happy when Stripe landed in the UK and I could migrate to a flat fee per transaction which scaled with me. Migrating is hard as you need customers to re-enter card details but an offer of reducing their monthly subscription due to savings in processing costs helped that process. :)

[1] https://leavetrackapp.com/

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#84

Post by skrebbel »

pieterhg wrote: post #65
downandout wrote: post #32

I 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.…

> me (a nobody)

Well, you're got quite the Twitter following, probably nearly entirely in Stripe's target demographic :-)

But yeah, that is cool.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#85

Post by korzun »

legohead wrote: post #24
Kluny wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

Actually it's 1 line.

Actually, it's 371 bytes.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#88

Post by hawflakes »

dboreham wrote: post #75
anonacct37 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that selected stripe to process orders for a product were were launching somewhere around 2012, it was because of the APIs and developer sandbox. Paypal was ugly to work with, felt crufty, etc. Stripe had pip installable modules, awesome documentation (live code samples in docs and sandbox), and was easy to integrate into our tests.

PayPal had a developer sandbox back in 2010 when I wrote our client code. Honestly I don't remember it being difficult or tricky. The worst aspect was their confusing documentation which tended to mix up various different services and APIs such that it was hard to figure out which was the current, appropriate one. Perhaps that was the Stripe advantage: a single obvious course of action to take.

The sandbox was a big hack. I worked there internally and it was a pain even inside.

Maybe it's a bit different now, but I haven't looked back. :-D

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#89

Post by fpgaminer »

I hadn't worked with payment systems for a number of years, but recently added Stripe to a quick MVP I built (bitcoinvoice.com). It took two hours. I couldn't believe how easy it was, and how nice the UX of the whole thing was.

I imagined the usual song and dance of writing a bunch of back-end code to handle all their weird requests, worrying about double checking everything in the requests to make sure nobody can spoof them, etc, etc. Ya know, the dumb stuff that takes hours to write, hours to test, and days to wait for support to get back to you because their test servers are broken.

And then I imagined waiting days for them to approve my account for live transactions, requiring scanned copies of my driver's license with me flashing some sort of gang sign while reciting page 452 of the 1993 re-print of Moby Dick.

Nope. Turned out they have a synchronous API for processing payment so I don't need to handle callbacks on the backend. Turned out the front end code was, yeah about 7 lines (more with a few tweaks). And their documentation injects your keys into the sample code for you (wow)! On top of all that ... they had Go sample code!

And when I went to enable my live account, I'm pretty sure all they asked for was name and address, maybe TIN. Nothing else. No wait. Just ... bam, I was enabled and could start accepting live payments.

It was perhaps the most pleasant API integration I've ever done.

There are _some_ rough spots. They don't really explain Radar, their fraud protection very well. It wasn't clear to me if it was automatically included and handled. shrugs. And though they advertised support for Bitcoin payments, it turns out you have to use their async API to accept Bitcoin payments. I was willing to accept zero-conf payments, so I figured I could just keep using their synchronous API, but I guess not.

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