22 ms·

Building a Developer Cult

282 points by jgecawich 6y ago

zucker42 6y ago
This article read like a puff piece that I got little more out of than "value your users and build good software". It didn't seem like it offered much substantial or specific advice.
- jbarciauskas 6y ago
  Agreed. There's very little evidence to support the claims about what is discussed here is what made Stripe successful. Intuitively many of the claims seem true but where is the data?
- rtpg 6y ago
  There's probably a bit of "know who your users are". Ultimately the "ease of use" thing is valuable to the developers (the stakeholders above couldn't care less), and Stripe seemed to identify that getting developer buy-in is super valuable for at least one segment of the population
- d1str0 6y ago
  There has been a huge influx of articles from substack lately. I think they are trying to grow their brand.
  - Sebguer 6y ago
    Substack is just a publishing platform, it's not editorial.
    - libraryatnight 6y ago
      Doesn't mean they're not submitting articles around to grow awareness of the platform/their brand.
- fk6aaa545c 6y ago
  Yeah when I read I litterally though it was a perfect piece of parody!
meagher 6y ago
What makes Stripe good now is what made it good way back when they first launched: Handling payments sucks and they make it suck less. The design, etc. is the gravy on top of a successful runaway train.
- tommatsuda 6y ago
  I second that!
- jariel 6y ago
  This is mostly it. Before Stripe payment processing was abysmal. There was no thought at all given to the developer/implementer experience. Stripe basically put a clean and straight forward API and product around the mess. I know java is 'not cool' but it feels like javadocs in 2002 which are generally well organised by virtue of myriad of conventions, as opposed to docs in some other langs. which can be hit and miss, though getting better. Stripe is a pretty good example of good product experience for those having to 'do the work', because they will likely have a lot of say in it, in the long run.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  The remarkable thing about the culture around Stripe is that they still get the credit for the things they did well in those early days, even though they are far from the same service now that they've scaled up. Objectively, today's Stripe is often a relatively expensive and unreliable way to collect money from your customers. The API and developer documentation are no longer as simple and effective as they once were, particularly if you need things like PSD2. Something fundamentally changed about Stripe's support a few years ago, and it seemed like almost overnight they went from routinely having knowledgeable people replying with helpful suggestions to having people who can't even be bothered to read your message before hitting whatever button sends boilerplate reply #74 with platitudes #27 and #53 at the start and end. Much of this is understandable. Obviously you're not going to get senior people from an organisation the size of Stripe today personally responding to messages the way they used to. Some of the complexity due to PSD2 itself has been forced on them. Appealing to a wider range of merchants with more diverse needs is inevitably going to make some parts of the system more complicated. However, the hero worship they still seem to enjoy in various forums, including this one, is remarkably cult-like now. Recommending the Stripe you remember from days gone by, particularly if you haven't recently used any of the other services now competing for the online payments market, might even be harmful to those starting small businesses today, who might be better served by one or more of the alternatives and should at least be considering the full range of options available to them.
zt 6y ago
Look, I know that the idea of being customer focused might seem trite, but I wanted to focus on one thing: it's the little things. "What actually differentiates stripe from the rest of the bunch though? It’s the little things.Stripe obsesses over creating a seamless CX. Small annoyances in applications compound. A user might not churn immediately because you have a bunch of unoptimized functionality or crappy UX, but it’s a recipe to create a grumpy user. And grumpy users aren’t loyal users." This is an idea I've been turning over in my head a bunch recently: the compounding effects of delighting your users. That cumulative innovation that comes from building for your customers....I sometimes get asked "what's the killer idea behind [company X]". But there isn't one big thing. There are many, many small things built on having a relentlessly customer-back attitude. You can't just copy the "idea", you have to copy the way of working and thinking. That's a lot harder. Let's take Brex as another example. It's the segmentation, UX, marketing, rewards, underwriting, etc. It's each of those things broken up into a hundred subcomponents and iterated on. It's an entire ethos and operating model. That's cumulative innovation...not a single idea.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  Execution is key.
  - raghava 6y ago
    Mere "Ideas" are useless.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  If you work in an organization where this isn't the norm-- do you try and change it, or is it best to move on? Sometimes, it feels difficult knowing I made one corner of the product great when there's glaring issues elsewhere, and my team doesn't have the bandwidth (or jurisdiction) to fix all of it.
  - fallous 6y ago
    If this is a result of poor execution then I'd stay and change it. If instead it's a result of a cultural or company vision that does not embrace focusing on the customer, their problem (not just your opinion of it), and working constantly towards solving the problem then you should bail. I spent a lot of years in several companies thinking I could correct a bad vision or culture, and unless you're the CEO you can't. Poor execution of a good vision/culture is always correctable, although you should consider what is the root cause of that poor execution... often it's personnel.
tehjoker 6y ago
Was hoping to read about developers participating in Stripe themed rituals that resemble Eyes Wide Shut, a UFO cult, or an End-of-Days Revelation cult. Instead, it's just something about executing business processes with customers and good documentation. American business culture is something to behold.
lsiebert 6y ago
Building developer enthusiasm and passion? that's great. That's what Stripe is doing, and I'm happy about that. Please don't call that a cult though.
- HumblyTossed 6y ago
  Indeed. It is very off-putting. Developer cults do more damage to the developer community than not.
preommr 6y ago
I love stripe and they really do have some excellent designs, but that one screenshot is pretty awful. The contrast between the text and the rainbow image is so poor that it looks like a mistake rather than an intentional design choice.
- henriquez 6y ago
  Agree, I think they accidentally swapped the layers in Sketch or Photoshop or something. Or maybe that’s some cult thing!
  - stu2b50 6y ago
    It's one of those weird swirly gradient things, not really my cup of tea, but it looks _a lot_ better animated, on the page than the still. https://stripe.com/ https://stripe.com/, though I don't suppose anyone is going to have difficulty finding the stripe homepage.
- steviekong 6y ago
  It's a bit weird but the point was that it was striking rather than a dull flat design with a lot of dark colors
debaserab2 6y ago
There was a long time when Stripe was taking a significantly higher transaction fee than most other merchants for cc transactions yet there still was fervent developer push to use it anyways (Note, this hasn't been true for a few years and was only true during the first year or two of Stripe's life). People made all kinds of rationalizations to themselves for using stripe at a much higher cost simply because they didn't want to spend a couple more hours using crappier API's or digging through crappier API documentation. It made no sense to me at the time because while Stripe was nice, it was usually only a matter of a couple hours/days to implement any of the other big payment processors of the time. I guess that shows what the power of cultish developer zeitgeist can do.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  My first business that used Stripe was with them from their early days in the UK, and my recollection is very different to yours. They were potentially a bit more expensive in terms of fees than getting a separate merchant account and payment gateway set up, but not hugely so and at least they were consistent and transparent about those fees. Moreover, they were vastly different in terms of the ease of integration. To take card payments via the traditional big banks and other established services, you didn't just have to put up with awful APIs and worse documentation, you also had to put up with onerous application processes that could take days to collect the required information to apply, then weeks to approve (or not), and even then often imposed severe restrictions for businesses with no trading history up to and including piercing agreements for company officers, large and long-lasting reserves being withheld, etc. The only other game in town for setting up online card payments reasonably quickly and easily at that time was PayPal, which had a reputation somewhere between Satan and the devil even then. Of course none of this is unique today, and there are now many other services available for taking payments via card or many other methods. But in those days, it truly was a game-changer. As much as I criticise Stripe for its more recent failures, I also give credit where it's due: many small businesses, including at least one of my own, would not have gotten off the ground as early as they did without Stripe.
  - debaserab2 6y ago
sgt-serverless 6y ago
I believe they also built a in-house main website, so that the entire company was on the same page on things. It seems like what they are very goo dat, and I think this resonates well with developers, is providing a delightful experience. This goes a long way with enjoying using the product, and you can tell they really care about what they present out to the world.
chrismorgan 6y ago
Ah, the new Stripe design. https://dribbble.com/shots/13676278-Home https://dribbble.com/shots/13676278-Home covers it, and the comments on it are unanimously positive (and also shallow). Yet I open https://stripe.com https://stripe.com and observe a page mostly incapable of hitting 60fps in its animations, which doesn’t scroll smoothly because of this, and which is intensely CPU-demanding (it immediately makes my laptop’s fans spin up, and I imagine it’d be draining the battery far quicker than normal). And that’s what I end up focusing on, rather than any prettiness. I don’t like websites that make my browser slow and my computer noisy, and will tend to close them far more quickly—either immediately, or go in, get the information, get out, rather than perhaps lingering. They’ve focused on subjective prettiness at substantial and unnecessary cost. They could have implemented something just as subjectively pretty that didn’t perform so terribly, but they didn’t. (Fortunately it’s only the front page that suffers in this way.) And on Dribbble: this sort of response is pretty standard: when something popular and pretty comes up, people seldom make any critical comment on even glaring usability problems. When something is obviously a catastrophically bad idea, maybe one or two people pipe up as dissenters, but even then their feedback will be muted. And don’t get me started on how people present their web design screenshots, framing them on a background that is essential to making key aspects of the design work, but which will be necessarily absent in the actual deployment—this is rank dishonesty, in my opinion, but it’s also ubiquitous on the platform. As with Stripe’s popularity, these Dribbble things are a deliberate culture thing (problem, I’d say): the Dribbble community is interested in prettiness and doesn’t want to hear about impracticality or any form of negative feedback. This has probably helped with the platform’s popularity—it lets you feel good, everyone likes what you’ve made. Being largely invitation-only has also helped them create and sustain this echo chamber. (“Echo chamber” is a term too freely used, but it’s quite apt on Dribbble.) Otherwise I might create an account named “Honest Critic” and make a habit of pointing out problems in shots—not to be a downer or to condemn their work, but to help them improve it, and hopefully realise that they should care about these things.
- HatchedLake721 6y ago
  You really think anyone looking for a payment processing for their business cares about CPU and frames per second on a marketing website?
tannhaeuser 6y ago
It's been some time I've worked with web payments (back in 2003 or so when 3DSecure/UCAF was new which would bring up your card issuer's site in an iframe within your shop site, which still looked fishy), but I've always thought a payment infrastructure/comprehensive standard should be mandated by government, on similar legal grounds that a currency is issued in the first place, and for protecting access to the market (the EU already puts strong and maybe disproportionate reporting duties due to MiFid/MiFid2 for deposits, with unclear benefits). Though I'm not very sure, as a payment provider has to do costly things for fraud/money laundering/deposit protection.
arp242 6y ago
I recently built a Stripe integration, and can't say I'm especially impressed. Unless I completely missed some aspects, it mostly just seems like an interface to their database. While this is great for some advanced workflows, the vast majority of use cases are all very similar: "create subscription and customer", "change subscription", etc. Common workflows require quite some coding, and there's no support for transactions! IMO a good API design should be more thoughtful than providing an interface to your database. I don't think the documentation is especially well written, although it's not bad either. What's worse is that the stripe API docs hijacks my CTRL+F key so using my browser search is a massive PITA. This is such a fucking annoying fucking thing that I'll break my "don't say fuck on discussion forums"-rule for this. I fucking hate it. I tried disabling JS but that results in every navigation doing a full page refresh which easily takes over 5 seconds. Also, browsing the docs isn't super slow or anything, but it's also not quite fast enough to feel "natural". The checkout docs actually are pretty meh. Much of it is written in "tutorial" form and unclear on details. As for the site design ... it often takes >5 seconds to load anything after clicking and it easily uses more than 100M of memory per tab. I recently wanted to load a bunch of customers so I opened them in about 10 different and my entire laptop just ground to a halt. I've actually been procrastinating on some Stripe stuff I need to do for the last week because I dislike using the UI so much. Is it all absolutely terrible? No; it's passable, I guess. But do I share any of the enthusiasm in this article? Not even close.
- stu2b50 6y ago
  I think you're seeing what the benefit is, though: it feels like you're just using an API to some company's DB. Payment processing is one area is that just a complete nonstarter to homebrew on your own. It's fucking awful. There's no choice. Bank's still require you to transfer them files via ftp to make transactions. And god forbid the legal, and technical mess when you want to accept foreign currency, or even multiple CC providers.
  - arp242 6y ago
    Yeah, I have no doubt that it's better than what the banks are offering. "Homebrew on your own" is more or less what Stripe's API felt like though; the perspective I'm coming from is that I run a little one-person SaaS company with a simple and fairly standard subscription model, and I was surprised by the amount of "plumbing" you need to do for this.
unityByFreedom 6y ago
A "cult" is an entity with blind followers who would go over the edge like lemmings. Stripe is not that. They just built a good API, have made it more functional and easier to use over time, and have great developer support (go on IRC any time to chat with them). They accept criticism and fix problems. Cults don't do that.
smabie 6y ago
> Anyone, anywhere can rebel against the system with Stripe. If you consider working with a system that the government has perfect transparency into and that is deeply integrated into every major financial institution in the world rebellious, I just don't even know what to say.
unnouinceput 6y ago
I liked this article. Is a prime example of how a shameless asskissing article should look like, this should be on top of every campaign manager as a must read for upcoming election battle.
- fk6aaa545c 6y ago
  And then sockpuppet it to the the top of HN and pay for the top comment to be asskissing too. Well done Stripe.
gregdoesit 6y ago
If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses and has something many others, including Stripe cannot compete with efficiently: (far) lower pricing, higher market coverage. The developer experience for Adyen is decent - no complaints, perhaps a bit less “magical”. They will definitely have a fraction of the customers, but those customers are huge. They get and seek little to no publicity compared to Stripe, yet have built a similarly sized business from the Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which is remarkable. It’s a completely different market strategy, and company strategy. Read the Adyen values to see how different the two companies are[1] - Adyen putting “merchants” first, with a mention of support, while Stripe prioritizing developers and small businesses. And company culture could not be more different either - saying this as someone who knows both Adyen and Stripe employees. Both are companies to admire, and show that there is no “one” good way to build immense value. It will be fascinating to see what happens as these two companies expand to compete with each other (meaning Adyen starting to go after small businesses, and Stripe after the largest merchants, with a differentiated pricing model). [1] https://www.adyen.com/about https://www.adyen.com/about
- sejtnjir 6y ago
  Why is it remarkable that the company is based in Amsterdam? I live there. There's a decent but not great startup culture. The services infrastructure is fantastic and there are many massive multinationals based here.
  - j-james 6y ago
    I believe that "remarkable" was referring to Adyen getting and seeking little to no publicity compared to Stripe, yet having a higher market valuation, rather than its location in the Netherlands.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
BenGosub 6y ago
Stripe is the most popular option out of not many options. So, when you ask a developer what's their favorite payments API, chances are they are going to say Stripe. Which isn't surprising at all. It's just yet another post on how Stripe are customer centric.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fk6aaa545c 6y ago
Amazing article. Wait what? It's not satire?????
concordDance 6y ago
This is a PR release from Stripe isn't it? http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
hampfi 6y ago
I believe, that there are plenty of areas where you could succeed by literally just building what is already here but making it actually good. Less features but better quality including with UX.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
This actually reads more like a content marketing PR piece for Stripe than a summary of useful and actionable information for a startup.
brunojppb 6y ago
In my previous job, I implemented the backend integration with Stripe and also the frontend for iOS (Native Swift App). It was a piece of cake to get the whole implementation done across the stack. Six months later, our company decided to switch to Adyen so we could target more local payment methods in different countries. Back then, Stripe wasn't so flexible on that. With Adyen, we could for example offer "carte bancaire" in France and "iDEAL" in the Netherlands with zero changes on our accounting and backend infrastructure. I have to be honest, from the developer perspective, Stripe is light years ahead of Adyen regarding docs and simple to integrate (simple != easy). But once we deployed Adyen, our sales skyrocketed after we enabled local payment methods for specific countries across Europe. If you are outside of the US, you should really consider Adyen instead of Stripe from the business standpoint. I am still a super fan of Stripe btw.
- hackerindie 6y ago
  Wow honestly haven't heard of Adyen until reading several of the comments in this post. Thanks for sharing your experience and for the tip!
- lucaswb 6y ago
  I work for Adyen in our developer experience team. It might have been some time since you integrated but we would love to hear about your experience integrating to Adyen and how we can make it more simple. (You can reach me at directly at lucas@adyen.com or reach out to our team at developer-experience@adyen.com)
  - brunojppb 6y ago
    Hey Lucas, thanks for the kind response! It has been around 2 years since I implemented and honestly it wasn't that Adyen was bad or anything, but the mental model was different from Stripe. Back then, Adyen was already fully async but Stripe wasn't so it required some learnings. And once it was implemented, I was actually blown away with the flexibility. In my current company, I am actually advocating for Adyen and we had a few calls with the sales team already, so it will most probably happen for us next year.
_alex_ 6y ago
I stopped reading when the author described a feedback button as the epitome of customer obsession. Is that really the bar?
shay_ker 6y ago
dang - can you change the title on this? It's less about "building a developer cult" and more about "How Stripe builds for Developers".

282 points by jgecawich 6y ago

This article read like a puff piece that I got little more out of than "value your users and build good software". It didn't seem like it offered much substantial or specific advice.

jbarciauskas 6y ago
Agreed. There's very little evidence to support the claims about what is discussed here is what made Stripe successful. Intuitively many of the claims seem true but where is the data?
rtpg 6y ago
There's probably a bit of "know who your users are". Ultimately the "ease of use" thing is valuable to the developers (the stakeholders above couldn't care less), and Stripe seemed to identify that getting developer buy-in is super valuable for at least one segment of the population
d1str0 6y ago
There has been a huge influx of articles from substack lately. I think they are trying to grow their brand.
- Sebguer 6y ago
  Substack is just a publishing platform, it's not editorial.
  - libraryatnight 6y ago
    Doesn't mean they're not submitting articles around to grow awareness of the platform/their brand.
fk6aaa545c 6y ago
Yeah when I read I litterally though it was a perfect piece of parody!

meagher 6y ago

What makes Stripe good now is what made it good way back when they first launched: Handling payments sucks and they make it suck less. The design, etc. is the gravy on top of a successful runaway train.

tommatsuda 6y ago
I second that!
jariel 6y ago
This is mostly it. Before Stripe payment processing was abysmal. There was no thought at all given to the developer/implementer experience. Stripe basically put a clean and straight forward API and product around the mess. I know java is 'not cool' but it feels like javadocs in 2002 which are generally well organised by virtue of myriad of conventions, as opposed to docs in some other langs. which can be hit and miss, though getting better. Stripe is a pretty good example of good product experience for those having to 'do the work', because they will likely have a lot of say in it, in the long run.
Silhouette 6y ago
The remarkable thing about the culture around Stripe is that they still get the credit for the things they did well in those early days, even though they are far from the same service now that they've scaled up. Objectively, today's Stripe is often a relatively expensive and unreliable way to collect money from your customers. The API and developer documentation are no longer as simple and effective as they once were, particularly if you need things like PSD2. Something fundamentally changed about Stripe's support a few years ago, and it seemed like almost overnight they went from routinely having knowledgeable people replying with helpful suggestions to having people who can't even be bothered to read your message before hitting whatever button sends boilerplate reply #74 with platitudes #27 and #53 at the start and end. Much of this is understandable. Obviously you're not going to get senior people from an organisation the size of Stripe today personally responding to messages the way they used to. Some of the complexity due to PSD2 itself has been forced on them. Appealing to a wider range of merchants with more diverse needs is inevitably going to make some parts of the system more complicated. However, the hero worship they still seem to enjoy in various forums, including this one, is remarkably cult-like now. Recommending the Stripe you remember from days gone by, particularly if you haven't recently used any of the other services now competing for the online payments market, might even be harmful to those starting small businesses today, who might be better served by one or more of the alternatives and should at least be considering the full range of options available to them.

zt 6y ago

Look, I know that the idea of being customer focused might seem trite, but I wanted to focus on one thing: it's the little things. "What actually differentiates stripe from the rest of the bunch though? It’s the little things.Stripe obsesses over creating a seamless CX. Small annoyances in applications compound. A user might not churn immediately because you have a bunch of unoptimized functionality or crappy UX, but it’s a recipe to create a grumpy user. And grumpy users aren’t loyal users." This is an idea I've been turning over in my head a bunch recently: the compounding effects of delighting your users. That cumulative innovation that comes from building for your customers....I sometimes get asked "what's the killer idea behind [company X]". But there isn't one big thing. There are many, many small things built on having a relentlessly customer-back attitude. You can't just copy the "idea", you have to copy the way of working and thinking. That's a lot harder. Let's take Brex as another example. It's the segmentation, UX, marketing, rewards, underwriting, etc. It's each of those things broken up into a hundred subcomponents and iterated on. It's an entire ethos and operating model. That's cumulative innovation...not a single idea.

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
Execution is key.
- raghava 6y ago
  Mere "Ideas" are useless.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
If you work in an organization where this isn't the norm-- do you try and change it, or is it best to move on? Sometimes, it feels difficult knowing I made one corner of the product great when there's glaring issues elsewhere, and my team doesn't have the bandwidth (or jurisdiction) to fix all of it.
- fallous 6y ago
  If this is a result of poor execution then I'd stay and change it. If instead it's a result of a cultural or company vision that does not embrace focusing on the customer, their problem (not just your opinion of it), and working constantly towards solving the problem then you should bail. I spent a lot of years in several companies thinking I could correct a bad vision or culture, and unless you're the CEO you can't. Poor execution of a good vision/culture is always correctable, although you should consider what is the root cause of that poor execution... often it's personnel.

tehjoker 6y ago

Was hoping to read about developers participating in Stripe themed rituals that resemble Eyes Wide Shut, a UFO cult, or an End-of-Days Revelation cult. Instead, it's just something about executing business processes with customers and good documentation. American business culture is something to behold.

lsiebert 6y ago

Building developer enthusiasm and passion? that's great. That's what Stripe is doing, and I'm happy about that. Please don't call that a cult though.

HumblyTossed 6y ago
Indeed. It is very off-putting. Developer cults do more damage to the developer community than not.

preommr 6y ago

I love stripe and they really do have some excellent designs, but that one screenshot is pretty awful. The contrast between the text and the rainbow image is so poor that it looks like a mistake rather than an intentional design choice.

henriquez 6y ago
Agree, I think they accidentally swapped the layers in Sketch or Photoshop or something. Or maybe that’s some cult thing!
- stu2b50 6y ago
  It's one of those weird swirly gradient things, not really my cup of tea, but it looks _a lot_ better animated, on the page than the still. https://stripe.com/ https://stripe.com/, though I don't suppose anyone is going to have difficulty finding the stripe homepage.
steviekong 6y ago
It's a bit weird but the point was that it was striking rather than a dull flat design with a lot of dark colors

debaserab2 6y ago

There was a long time when Stripe was taking a significantly higher transaction fee than most other merchants for cc transactions yet there still was fervent developer push to use it anyways (Note, this hasn't been true for a few years and was only true during the first year or two of Stripe's life). People made all kinds of rationalizations to themselves for using stripe at a much higher cost simply because they didn't want to spend a couple more hours using crappier API's or digging through crappier API documentation. It made no sense to me at the time because while Stripe was nice, it was usually only a matter of a couple hours/days to implement any of the other big payment processors of the time. I guess that shows what the power of cultish developer zeitgeist can do.

Silhouette 6y ago
My first business that used Stripe was with them from their early days in the UK, and my recollection is very different to yours. They were potentially a bit more expensive in terms of fees than getting a separate merchant account and payment gateway set up, but not hugely so and at least they were consistent and transparent about those fees. Moreover, they were vastly different in terms of the ease of integration. To take card payments via the traditional big banks and other established services, you didn't just have to put up with awful APIs and worse documentation, you also had to put up with onerous application processes that could take days to collect the required information to apply, then weeks to approve (or not), and even then often imposed severe restrictions for businesses with no trading history up to and including piercing agreements for company officers, large and long-lasting reserves being withheld, etc. The only other game in town for setting up online card payments reasonably quickly and easily at that time was PayPal, which had a reputation somewhere between Satan and the devil even then. Of course none of this is unique today, and there are now many other services available for taking payments via card or many other methods. But in those days, it truly was a game-changer. As much as I criticise Stripe for its more recent failures, I also give credit where it's due: many small businesses, including at least one of my own, would not have gotten off the ground as early as they did without Stripe.
- debaserab2 6y ago

sgt-serverless 6y ago

I believe they also built a in-house main website, so that the entire company was on the same page on things. It seems like what they are very goo dat, and I think this resonates well with developers, is providing a delightful experience. This goes a long way with enjoying using the product, and you can tell they really care about what they present out to the world.

chrismorgan 6y ago

Ah, the new Stripe design. https://dribbble.com/shots/13676278-Home https://dribbble.com/shots/13676278-Home covers it, and the comments on it are unanimously positive (and also shallow). Yet I open https://stripe.com https://stripe.com and observe a page mostly incapable of hitting 60fps in its animations, which doesn’t scroll smoothly because of this, and which is intensely CPU-demanding (it immediately makes my laptop’s fans spin up, and I imagine it’d be draining the battery far quicker than normal). And that’s what I end up focusing on, rather than any prettiness. I don’t like websites that make my browser slow and my computer noisy, and will tend to close them far more quickly—either immediately, or go in, get the information, get out, rather than perhaps lingering. They’ve focused on subjective prettiness at substantial and unnecessary cost. They could have implemented something just as subjectively pretty that didn’t perform so terribly, but they didn’t. (Fortunately it’s only the front page that suffers in this way.) And on Dribbble: this sort of response is pretty standard: when something popular and pretty comes up, people seldom make any critical comment on even glaring usability problems. When something is obviously a catastrophically bad idea, maybe one or two people pipe up as dissenters, but even then their feedback will be muted. And don’t get me started on how people present their web design screenshots, framing them on a background that is essential to making key aspects of the design work, but which will be necessarily absent in the actual deployment—this is rank dishonesty, in my opinion, but it’s also ubiquitous on the platform. As with Stripe’s popularity, these Dribbble things are a deliberate culture thing (problem, I’d say): the Dribbble community is interested in prettiness and doesn’t want to hear about impracticality or any form of negative feedback. This has probably helped with the platform’s popularity—it lets you feel good, everyone likes what you’ve made. Being largely invitation-only has also helped them create and sustain this echo chamber. (“Echo chamber” is a term too freely used, but it’s quite apt on Dribbble.) Otherwise I might create an account named “Honest Critic” and make a habit of pointing out problems in shots—not to be a downer or to condemn their work, but to help them improve it, and hopefully realise that they should care about these things.

HatchedLake721 6y ago
You really think anyone looking for a payment processing for their business cares about CPU and frames per second on a marketing website?

tannhaeuser 6y ago

It's been some time I've worked with web payments (back in 2003 or so when 3DSecure/UCAF was new which would bring up your card issuer's site in an iframe within your shop site, which still looked fishy), but I've always thought a payment infrastructure/comprehensive standard should be mandated by government, on similar legal grounds that a currency is issued in the first place, and for protecting access to the market (the EU already puts strong and maybe disproportionate reporting duties due to MiFid/MiFid2 for deposits, with unclear benefits). Though I'm not very sure, as a payment provider has to do costly things for fraud/money laundering/deposit protection.

arp242 6y ago

I recently built a Stripe integration, and can't say I'm especially impressed. Unless I completely missed some aspects, it mostly just seems like an interface to their database. While this is great for some advanced workflows, the vast majority of use cases are all very similar: "create subscription and customer", "change subscription", etc. Common workflows require quite some coding, and there's no support for transactions! IMO a good API design should be more thoughtful than providing an interface to your database. I don't think the documentation is especially well written, although it's not bad either. What's worse is that the stripe API docs hijacks my CTRL+F key so using my browser search is a massive PITA. This is such a fucking annoying fucking thing that I'll break my "don't say fuck on discussion forums"-rule for this. I fucking hate it. I tried disabling JS but that results in every navigation doing a full page refresh which easily takes over 5 seconds. Also, browsing the docs isn't super slow or anything, but it's also not quite fast enough to feel "natural". The checkout docs actually are pretty meh. Much of it is written in "tutorial" form and unclear on details. As for the site design ... it often takes >5 seconds to load anything after clicking and it easily uses more than 100M of memory per tab. I recently wanted to load a bunch of customers so I opened them in about 10 different and my entire laptop just ground to a halt. I've actually been procrastinating on some Stripe stuff I need to do for the last week because I dislike using the UI so much. Is it all absolutely terrible? No; it's passable, I guess. But do I share any of the enthusiasm in this article? Not even close.

stu2b50 6y ago
I think you're seeing what the benefit is, though: it feels like you're just using an API to some company's DB. Payment processing is one area is that just a complete nonstarter to homebrew on your own. It's fucking awful. There's no choice. Bank's still require you to transfer them files via ftp to make transactions. And god forbid the legal, and technical mess when you want to accept foreign currency, or even multiple CC providers.
- arp242 6y ago
  Yeah, I have no doubt that it's better than what the banks are offering. "Homebrew on your own" is more or less what Stripe's API felt like though; the perspective I'm coming from is that I run a little one-person SaaS company with a simple and fairly standard subscription model, and I was surprised by the amount of "plumbing" you need to do for this.

unityByFreedom 6y ago

A "cult" is an entity with blind followers who would go over the edge like lemmings. Stripe is not that. They just built a good API, have made it more functional and easier to use over time, and have great developer support (go on IRC any time to chat with them). They accept criticism and fix problems. Cults don't do that.

smabie 6y ago

> Anyone, anywhere can rebel against the system with Stripe. If you consider working with a system that the government has perfect transparency into and that is deeply integrated into every major financial institution in the world rebellious, I just don't even know what to say.

unnouinceput 6y ago

I liked this article. Is a prime example of how a shameless asskissing article should look like, this should be on top of every campaign manager as a must read for upcoming election battle.

fk6aaa545c 6y ago
And then sockpuppet it to the the top of HN and pay for the top comment to be asskissing too. Well done Stripe.

gregdoesit 6y ago

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses and has something many others, including Stripe cannot compete with efficiently: (far) lower pricing, higher market coverage. The developer experience for Adyen is decent - no complaints, perhaps a bit less “magical”. They will definitely have a fraction of the customers, but those customers are huge. They get and seek little to no publicity compared to Stripe, yet have built a similarly sized business from the Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which is remarkable. It’s a completely different market strategy, and company strategy. Read the Adyen values to see how different the two companies are[1] - Adyen putting “merchants” first, with a mention of support, while Stripe prioritizing developers and small businesses. And company culture could not be more different either - saying this as someone who knows both Adyen and Stripe employees. Both are companies to admire, and show that there is no “one” good way to build immense value. It will be fascinating to see what happens as these two companies expand to compete with each other (meaning Adyen starting to go after small businesses, and Stripe after the largest merchants, with a differentiated pricing model). [1] https://www.adyen.com/about https://www.adyen.com/about

sejtnjir 6y ago
Why is it remarkable that the company is based in Amsterdam? I live there. There's a decent but not great startup culture. The services infrastructure is fantastic and there are many massive multinationals based here.
- j-james 6y ago
  I believe that "remarkable" was referring to Adyen getting and seeking little to no publicity compared to Stripe, yet having a higher market valuation, rather than its location in the Netherlands.
- steveklabnik 6y ago

BenGosub 6y ago

Stripe is the most popular option out of not many options. So, when you ask a developer what's their favorite payments API, chances are they are going to say Stripe. Which isn't surprising at all. It's just yet another post on how Stripe are customer centric.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

fk6aaa545c 6y ago

Amazing article. Wait what? It's not satire?????

concordDance 6y ago

This is a PR release from Stripe isn't it? http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

hampfi 6y ago

I believe, that there are plenty of areas where you could succeed by literally just building what is already here but making it actually good. Less features but better quality including with UX.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

This actually reads more like a content marketing PR piece for Stripe than a summary of useful and actionable information for a startup.

brunojppb 6y ago

In my previous job, I implemented the backend integration with Stripe and also the frontend for iOS (Native Swift App). It was a piece of cake to get the whole implementation done across the stack. Six months later, our company decided to switch to Adyen so we could target more local payment methods in different countries. Back then, Stripe wasn't so flexible on that. With Adyen, we could for example offer "carte bancaire" in France and "iDEAL" in the Netherlands with zero changes on our accounting and backend infrastructure. I have to be honest, from the developer perspective, Stripe is light years ahead of Adyen regarding docs and simple to integrate (simple != easy). But once we deployed Adyen, our sales skyrocketed after we enabled local payment methods for specific countries across Europe. If you are outside of the US, you should really consider Adyen instead of Stripe from the business standpoint. I am still a super fan of Stripe btw.

hackerindie 6y ago
Wow honestly haven't heard of Adyen until reading several of the comments in this post. Thanks for sharing your experience and for the tip!
lucaswb 6y ago
I work for Adyen in our developer experience team. It might have been some time since you integrated but we would love to hear about your experience integrating to Adyen and how we can make it more simple. (You can reach me at directly at lucas@adyen.com or reach out to our team at developer-experience@adyen.com)
- brunojppb 6y ago
  Hey Lucas, thanks for the kind response! It has been around 2 years since I implemented and honestly it wasn't that Adyen was bad or anything, but the mental model was different from Stripe. Back then, Adyen was already fully async but Stripe wasn't so it required some learnings. And once it was implemented, I was actually blown away with the flexibility. In my current company, I am actually advocating for Adyen and we had a few calls with the sales team already, so it will most probably happen for us next year.

_alex_ 6y ago

I stopped reading when the author described a feedback button as the epitome of customer obsession. Is that really the bar?

shay_ker 6y ago

dang - can you change the title on this? It's less about "building a developer cult" and more about "How Stripe builds for Developers".