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Yeah I don't know if goodwill is the best term. I think of "goodwill" as sort of an intangible inertia that comes from positive recognition - in people's minds,

Yeah I don't know if goodwill is the best term. I think of "goodwill" as sort of an intangible inertia that comes from positive recognition - in people's minds, media, etc... I think losing reputation and volume with the start-up community is probably very costly. An interesting thought is they might not have a viable alternative? If their cup is already too full, they have to cut back somewhere. Providing good service, at scale, while also growing rapidly is debateably impossible.

Silhouette 11y ago
From a purely selfish point of view, I think the more interesting questions are around what the small businesses and startups have as viable alternatives for collecting money from their customers. Obviously there are several other card payment services these days that might not be quite a easy to integrate as Stripe but might have compensating advantages in other respects. However, there are other payment methods that might wind up being better bets anyway as they are increasingly available to smaller businesses through other new services. An obvious example here in the UK is GoCardless for Direct Debits, which easily beats Stripe on most of the important metrics but has the huge disadvantage of only being available to customers with a local bank account. However, SEPA is already starting to change what "local" means in that context, and if they start partnering up with other alternative payment schemes internationally, I could see them becoming a very good option for a lot of smaller businesses if they can avoid the same fate as Stripe. The elephant in the room for me is whether there is now an opportunity for someone to out-Stripe Stripe. After all, they established the viability of the market for processing payments for small businesses, and they now seem willing to surrender that market as they move on to bigger things. That leaves quite an attractive gap for a new entrant to become the default payment service for startups for a while (probably before either following a similar growth path or being acquired by one of the incumbents, so you have multiple potential big exits as well).

Silhouette 11y ago

From a purely selfish point of view, I think the more interesting questions are around what the small businesses and startups have as viable alternatives for collecting money from their customers. Obviously there are several other card payment services these days that might not be quite a easy to integrate as Stripe but might have compensating advantages in other respects. However, there are other payment methods that might wind up being better bets anyway as they are increasingly available to smaller businesses through other new services. An obvious example here in the UK is GoCardless for Direct Debits, which easily beats Stripe on most of the important metrics but has the huge disadvantage of only being available to customers with a local bank account. However, SEPA is already starting to change what "local" means in that context, and if they start partnering up with other alternative payment schemes internationally, I could see them becoming a very good option for a lot of smaller businesses if they can avoid the same fate as Stripe. The elephant in the room for me is whether there is now an opportunity for someone to out-Stripe Stripe. After all, they established the viability of the market for processing payments for small businesses, and they now seem willing to surrender that market as they move on to bigger things. That leaves quite an attractive gap for a new entrant to become the default payment service for startups for a while (probably before either following a similar growth path or being acquired by one of the incumbents, so you have multiple potential big exits as well).