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If you are wondering how Stripe could even start with just 7 lines of code, it's a bit misleading: With Stripe, all a startup had to do was add seven lines o
by eggbrain 9y ago
If you are wondering how Stripe could even start with just 7 lines of code, it's a bit misleading:
With Stripe, all a startup had to do was add seven lines of code to its site to handle payments: What once took weeks was now a cut-and-paste job.
I.E. the simplicity of the Stripe platform (taking only 7 lines of code for developers) was how they succeeded, not that they built a startup at first with just 7 lines of code.
- michaelthiessen 9y agoThanks for un-click-baiting this.
- rpod 9y agoThanks. There's a misleading headline if I ever saw one
- forkLding 9y agoI'm thinking for the layman who doesnt code which Bloomberg also targets, this distinction is pretty negligible so in a way its not totally clickbait because its still seven lines of code, for developers it seems to be the code you write whereas the title could go anyway Also really appreciate Stripe, registered for Delaware with them
- saurik 9y agoTo the layman, I imagine this reads as either "they spent a few minutes writing one paragraph and made $9B" or "they agonized for years over something as small as a single paragraph that was worth $9B"; neither of these are reasonable interpretations. It is only to the advanced technical reader that I think there is any hope of them interpreting it in the correct manner.
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- adam12 9y agoI think it would be even more misleading for a layperson.
- tajen 9y agoIt participates to negating the difficulty of building and delivering a product, thereby giving said laymen a sense of entitlement over "undeserved wealth".
- Kluny 9y agoTo expand, it's these 7 lines. (Actually 12) <form action="/your-server-side-code" method="POST"> <script src="https://checkout.stripe.com/checkout.js" class="stripe-button" data-key="pk_test_6pRNASCoBOKtIshFeQd4XMUh" data-amount="999" data-name="Stripe.com" data-description="Widget" data-image="https://stripe.com/img/documentation/checkout/marketplace.png" data-locale="auto" data-zip-code="true"> </script> </form> - 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.
- shimon_e 9y agoThe PayPal form is roughly the same number of lines. The real break through for stripe was it was an alternative to PayPal with a modern UI.
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- artur_makly 9y agoAnother great reminder to all you founders - don't underestimate the power of great product design.
- omarchowdhury 9y agoAnd don't underestimate the power of new and... different. Many founders pass on markets they think have no room for innovation or new entrants, only to leap into some small marketless crevice.
- ckinnan 9y agoNope. The Stripe advantage over PayPal is that Stripe operates more like a merchant account, where the buyer sees the seller's name on the credit card statement. PayPal injects itself into the checkout process, Stripe is basically a white label. Stripe also has easier underwriting. I suspect Stripe is taking more business from merchant accounts/gateways than PayPal, because they are different markets.
- dschiffner 9y agoI hate click-bait headlines as much as anyone else... but nowhere in this headline does it say that they started with 7 lines of code.
- tedunangst 9y agoThe typical interpretation of "turned 7 X into Y" isn't "7 X plus another million X turned into Y". Last night I turned a pat of butter into a steak dinner. Never mind I also started with a steak, thats an irrelevant detail.
- quickthrower2 9y agoJesus turned water into wine. But really he had a bottle of Pinot to start with.
- mmahemoff 9y agoSo it's the equivalent of saying "How this inventor made $X billion with the flick of a switch" after they spent decades inventing the light bulb.
- johndavidback 9y agoIt was a bit interesting to see, and perhaps not at all surprising, that they've been around since 2010. And they crossed the billion-dollar-valuation threshold 4 years later.
- failrate 9y agoMore like how turning on lights is easy for billions of people because someone else did the hard work of the power lines, generators, switches, light bulbs, etc.
- failrate 9y agoActually, it would be more like all of that stuff already existed, but it was a woeful and Byzantine process to get all of it lined up for your particular lightbulb.
- riazrizvi 9y agoContrary to some of the other commenters I think figuring how the title is true is an interesting game. It's the type of clickbait I don't mind.
- wang_li 9y ago"How two brothers from Ireland raised prices and added friction to the flow of money."
- TotallyHuman 9y agoLooking forward to a proper cryptocurrency that will eliminate all middle-men!
- tracker1 9y agoThere's a few misconceptions in the article beyond that. and the more modern bits are written by banks, credit card companies, and financial middlemen, none of whom are exactly winning hackathons for elegant coding. Hackathon code is never elegant... it's always piecemeal at the end in order to get it "done."
- smsm42 9y agoI suspect whoever wrote that sentence has an extremely vague idea of what a hackathon is ("some coding contest??").
- hobofan 9y agoWhich is already a better picture than what most people have when I tell them I attended a hackathon: "So you all get together to try and hack the security system of a company?"
- smsm42 9y agoSurprisingly, that description may be exactly true if you understand the word "hack" just right :)
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- adam12 9y agoThe only reason why I started to read the article. I guess that's why they call it clickbait.
- free2rhyme214 9y agoThat's exactly what I was thinking. The API is definitely more than 7 lines of code.
- WheelsAtLarge 9y agoIt is misleading. It deemphasizes what can be learned from the article. What helped this company get traction was ease of use, the 7 lines of code made it easy to use, and also, that the reason this company even got off the ground is the 2 brothers and their focus on getting the company to where it is. It seems to me that whatever they would have chosen to do would have had some success. Again, it highlights the point that it's not the idea, they're a dime a dozen, it's the people that implement the idea.
- kbenson 9y agoI don't think it's misleading, it's just that there are different preconceptions based on the audience. If there was an article about "How two brothers turned a 3 oz piece of metal into a billion dollar startup" and it was a highly machined part that fit a really useful case in the auto industry, we would rightly assume they were talking about what they sold, and that a lot more work went into actually making and perfecting it. If the same article was read by machinists, they might take issue with it like people are taking issue with this headline, but that's because of the context they are perceiving it in.
- codazoda 9y agoI feel like I just wasted 15 minutes digging for that and being disappointed that their MVP wasn't a 7-liner. Guess I should have come to the comments first.
- adventist 9y agoThat is what i do :)
- sidcool 9y agoI would guess hacker news audience would know it.
- A1phab3t 9y agoIt's infuriating. Ok, 7 lines of code that form the tip of an iceberg of thousands of lines of code fronting months of contract and negotiation work. WTF.