4 ms·

The main thing we can do is free up Courtland to spend more time on it rather than having him sell ads. We're also going to invest in it so that his brother, Ch

by pc 9y ago

The main thing we can do is free up Courtland to spend more time on it rather than having him sell ads. We're also going to invest in it so that his brother, Channing, can join him. On top of that, we expect that there'll be some Stripe users who'd benefit from discovering it earlier in their lifecycle and getting advice and feedback from other community members. Most people building a business on Stripe are doing it for the first time. Longer term, there's a lot that we're interested in adding. (The site isn't even a year old yet -- check out https://indiehackers.com/timeline https://indiehackers.com/timeline. There was no forum or podcast in the beginning.) But we're flexible on the details there and we'll experiment and adapt based on what we learn along the way.

posguy 9y ago
Quick question about Stripe, how do you plan to retain customers long term? I ask this as a person who has moved a couple businesses off Stripe, pricing & corner cases like easy debit support are the main two motivational factors. For example, Centurylink lets you pay online via debit card with just the card # alone. No CVV, address, expiration date, etc. For low fraud industries, this is a way to leverage very cheap debit card rates (eg $0.65 flat for small bank/credit union debit & 0.05% + $0.21 for large banks that are regulated debit), while making it simple to use debit cards compared to a credit card. If Stripe were to offer something like this, it would be a harder sale to make when I come in and review their phone/payment processing/ISP bills and pitch them $XXX savings. Another thing is on credit, not offering over interchange pricing essentially limits you to only working with very small businesses. A supermarket I work with (4 employees including the owner) does $100k volume a month average, and is paying only 0.83% to 0.85% ($830 to $850 a month in total fees on 100k volume) a month, how can Stripe get anywhere close to that? These types of issues could limit Stripe to a small & shrinking niche long term, especially with Mercury offering similar APIs with more features (though less accessible) at rock bottom pricing, and Heartland, Gravity and others piling on in a race to the bottom. IMO the reasonably easy to access & inexpensive API is the differentiator keeping Mercury viable.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Stripe markets to tech companies. Tech companies typically have very strong margins, and are therefore less price sensitive. Ergo, Stripe survives on businesses that print money. Not everyone can afford an iPhone, but Apple still is filthy rich from the people who can.
  - posguy 9y ago
    You'd think, but 2.9% off the bottom line in the form of a large fee every month is something most companies will look to reduce or curtail after a few months or years. If your only processing a few grand a month, Stripe makes sense vs a traditional processor.
  - fictioncircle 9y ago
    Once you hit $20 million in sales ($300-400k), the difference gets very noticeable vs. paying one internal IT and a couple security consultants to audit the work.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      I don't disagree; its no different than AWS: once you get big enough, its time to roll your own or bring it in house. Until then, lots of money to be made selling shovels. No one looks at their SMB customers and says "To hell with that market, they'll just leave once they're big enough!" The market for people building from scratch is enormous.
      - posguy 9y ago
        The thing is, you can't roll your own in house, but you can replace Stripe at a much lower cost with a different vendor. They all process cards after all!
- garaetjjte 9y ago
  >For example, Centurylink lets you pay online via debit card with just the card # alone. No CVV, address, expiration date, etc. WTF? It is amazing that card industry still works with such horrible security.

by pc 9y ago

posguy 9y ago

Quick question about Stripe, how do you plan to retain customers long term? I ask this as a person who has moved a couple businesses off Stripe, pricing & corner cases like easy debit support are the main two motivational factors. For example, Centurylink lets you pay online via debit card with just the card # alone. No CVV, address, expiration date, etc. For low fraud industries, this is a way to leverage very cheap debit card rates (eg $0.65 flat for small bank/credit union debit & 0.05% + $0.21 for large banks that are regulated debit), while making it simple to use debit cards compared to a credit card. If Stripe were to offer something like this, it would be a harder sale to make when I come in and review their phone/payment processing/ISP bills and pitch them $XXX savings. Another thing is on credit, not offering over interchange pricing essentially limits you to only working with very small businesses. A supermarket I work with (4 employees including the owner) does $100k volume a month average, and is paying only 0.83% to 0.85% ($830 to $850 a month in total fees on 100k volume) a month, how can Stripe get anywhere close to that? These types of issues could limit Stripe to a small & shrinking niche long term, especially with Mercury offering similar APIs with more features (though less accessible) at rock bottom pricing, and Heartland, Gravity and others piling on in a race to the bottom. IMO the reasonably easy to access & inexpensive API is the differentiator keeping Mercury viable.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Stripe markets to tech companies. Tech companies typically have very strong margins, and are therefore less price sensitive. Ergo, Stripe survives on businesses that print money. Not everyone can afford an iPhone, but Apple still is filthy rich from the people who can.
- posguy 9y ago
  You'd think, but 2.9% off the bottom line in the form of a large fee every month is something most companies will look to reduce or curtail after a few months or years. If your only processing a few grand a month, Stripe makes sense vs a traditional processor.
- fictioncircle 9y ago
  Once you hit $20 million in sales ($300-400k), the difference gets very noticeable vs. paying one internal IT and a couple security consultants to audit the work.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    I don't disagree; its no different than AWS: once you get big enough, its time to roll your own or bring it in house. Until then, lots of money to be made selling shovels. No one looks at their SMB customers and says "To hell with that market, they'll just leave once they're big enough!" The market for people building from scratch is enormous.
    - posguy 9y ago
      The thing is, you can't roll your own in house, but you can replace Stripe at a much lower cost with a different vendor. They all process cards after all!
garaetjjte 9y ago
>For example, Centurylink lets you pay online via debit card with just the card # alone. No CVV, address, expiration date, etc. WTF? It is amazing that card industry still works with such horrible security.