4 ms·

Not sure if you mean now or a few years ago. Either way, don't believe all the stripe marketing hype. I was working at a small startup circa 2015, around 100 e

Not sure if you mean now or a few years ago. Either way, don't believe all the stripe marketing hype. I was working at a small startup circa 2015, around 100 employees. We looked carefully into payment providers to try to reduce costs. Turns out Stripe was very small, we would be their main customer with a 2 digit percentage of all transactions if we moved our payments through them. Stripe had (has?) few customers and little volume. Meaning very little revenues, because that's a small percentage fee of all that. It was a fairly risky business and it wouldn't be sustainable without a fair amount of capital upfront and many years.

chipotle_coyote 7y ago
While it's hard to get confirmed metrics on Stripe given that they're private, it strikes me as unlikely that a 100-person startup would have been Stripe's "main customer" in mid-2015. Analysts estimated their annual revenue to be $450M that year based on a payment volume of $20B, with customers that at that point included Lyft and Slack.
- user5994461 7y ago
  Stripe was in the order of $10B in the previous year and we were above $1B. We were doing well for a small company, can't deny that, but ultimately that's all pocket money when it comes to payments or large companies. Lyft and Slack were much much smaller back then, also private companies that don't publish any numbers. Not exactly great references at the time. If you have to learn something from this, it's that Stripe is a long term play, that really needed the capital to sustain and grow the business. The main growth factor by the way is the second-order effect of growing with their customers, and they're very smart to advertise to the HN crowd.
jariel 7y ago
I trust your personal experience, but I suggest Stripe is now handling quite a materially large chunk of coin. Also, I think your statement about them needed massive capitalisation is fair; they're not Google or MSFT.

chipotle_coyote 7y ago

While it's hard to get confirmed metrics on Stripe given that they're private, it strikes me as unlikely that a 100-person startup would have been Stripe's "main customer" in mid-2015. Analysts estimated their annual revenue to be $450M that year based on a payment volume of $20B, with customers that at that point included Lyft and Slack.

user5994461 7y ago
Stripe was in the order of $10B in the previous year and we were above $1B. We were doing well for a small company, can't deny that, but ultimately that's all pocket money when it comes to payments or large companies. Lyft and Slack were much much smaller back then, also private companies that don't publish any numbers. Not exactly great references at the time. If you have to learn something from this, it's that Stripe is a long term play, that really needed the capital to sustain and grow the business. The main growth factor by the way is the second-order effect of growing with their customers, and they're very smart to advertise to the HN crowd.

jariel 7y ago

I trust your personal experience, but I suggest Stripe is now handling quite a materially large chunk of coin. Also, I think your statement about them needed massive capitalisation is fair; they're not Google or MSFT.