8 ms·

Stripe CEO here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking a look at what happened here. OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd b

by pc 11y ago

Stripe CEO here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking a look at what happened here. OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: patrick@stripe.com.

disappointeddev 11y ago
Sent!
- s_dev 11y ago
  We expect follow up posts if everything gets sorted - even if it embarrasses you or Stripe a little bit.
  - s_dev 11y ago
    Disappointed Dev Update after 24 Hours: "After speaking with Stripe I have decided to end our dealings. Unfortunately the issue could not be resolved. We are looking at alternate providers."
jeffmould 11y ago
This response alone is why I will always recommend Stripe. The support may need support of its own, but knowing that you can get management's attention fairly easily says a lot of great things about the company and the people working there in my book.
- GuiA 11y ago
  Yeah, except not every Stripe customer knows that the real place to get support is (apparently) Hacker News, rather than Stripe support. The fact that the official channels are non responsive but a post on HN gets an immediate response could be construed as a red flag: the company cares more about avoiding bad PR than about having good customer service.
  - pc 11y ago
    Well, the "support" here is just much more visible than everything else that we do. We provide support over as many channels as possible: we employ full-time folks in #stripe on IRC, we monitor Twitter, we send thousands of emails every day, we're rolling out phone support, we chat with customers on IM -- and, yes, we reply on HN. Obviously nobody should have to post here, but we'll certainly respond if they do. Fraud-related cases are particularly hard, by the way. Thousands of people try to defraud us every day. (I guess it's a consequence of being highly-visible and easy to set up.) And so the support for those cases has to be handled a little differently.
    - onetallnerd 11y ago
      Has anyone defrauded you with a bitcoin payment yet? I assume volume is low, but out of that volume has there been any reports of fraud?
      - onetallnerd 11y ago
        It was a genuine question?
    - JoergR 11y ago
      ...as in not responding to email? That is certainly a little different.
    - ritchiea 11y ago
      No knock on the great work you guys have done to make Stripe easy to use and visible but I'm pretty sure thousands of people try to defraud you every day because you're a platform to transfer money. Money is a popular thing to steal.
    - pbreit 11y ago
      > We provide support over as many channels as possible Maybe that's the problem. Might be better to provide stellar support on one or two channels.
- cylinder 11y ago
  These keep popping up and Stripe quickly intervenes after it's on HN. Why not just answer your emails in the first place?
- oqnet 11y ago
  Definitely easier than getting the attention of paypal in the past.
- phn 11y ago
  Complaining on social media shouldn't be required to get management's attention. This is damage control, not that there's anything wrong with that... Please note that I have nothing against Stripe, dealing with money looks very challenging, and these issues are probably not easy to solve/support for each and every user.
akhatri_aus 11y ago
I think this is something that sets PayPal apart. Paypal just doesn't seem to care at all. Their customer service is appalling. That being said Patrick, you can't do this forever, the service & support ought to be well without the need of a call for attention. I think this is the 3rd or fourth one in the past 2 weeks. Is something going on at Stripe? Why are these all happening now?
- pc 11y ago
  Our overall support response times are actually substantially faster than, say, 3 months ago. Part of it is, I think, because we're growing quickly -- even for the same problematic case percentage, there are going to be more in absolute number. (And, as Stripe becomes more prominent, the cases that happen will themselves get more attention.) In addition, the cases that get public attention generally aren't clear-cut. For example, the other discussion on HN a few weeks ago was about a marijuana-related business that most likely violated our ToS. We care a great deal about providing great support at scale. Each of these cases triggers a lot of internal discussion about how we might have been able to do things better.
  - jeffmould 11y ago
    For what it is worth, just my two-cents, but I think even having a customer-facing ticketing system (doesn't necessarily have to be public facing) would help quell some of the unrest. At least for myself, I don't mind a delay in support, but when a request is sent in and it seems to disappear into a black hole it can be frustrating. If there was a way to incorporate support into the dashboard so that users could open/edit/check status of tickets directly from there that would be a great step in my opinion.
    - gknoy 11y ago
      This is a really good point. Having something where you can see that what you asked is at least in the system, and Nth in queue, helps a lot when dealing with the opacity of tech support.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - smeyer 11y ago
    People don't need to check his LinkedIn. He's a well-known entity on HN and a cofounder of Stripe. LinkedIn aside, try checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripe_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripe_(company)
ad_hominem 11y ago
The last time Patrick posted his email[1] soliciting feedback, I emailed him but never got a response. I'm sure being a CEO is a busy job, so I understand. And I'm sure he'll respond to OP. But keep in mind just because he posts his email publicly doesn't mean he's actually any more reachable for it. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9646672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9646672
- pc 11y ago
  Hm, I never received anything! Can you send it again? (Two of us from Stripe, myself included, have already been in contact with disappointeddev.)
  - pen2l 11y ago
    Not to knock on you, but I'm starting to see this is a trend. I was on the hn irc channel, and numerous people complained about the same thing. That you're always very willing and ready to offer support here on HN by saying "Sure, just email me!" but when these folks do email you, they are ignored. I don't know if this is a clever PR strategy to contain and direct fallout to a private medium so it never sees light of day, or if it was a genuine mistake. I think and hope it was the latter, but the frequency with which this seems to be happening starts to suggest it may also be a little bit of the former. E.g., just in this very comment thread there's a handful of people claiming you never responded to emails even after explicitly asking them to email you.
    - pc 11y ago
      I wasn't in the IRC room, but I'll go take a look at what happened there -- thanks for the heads up.
      - akshatpradhan 11y ago
        I'm not trying to be negative, but the stripe channel is very active. Why aren't you assigning someone to give 100% attention to this concentrated collection of YOUR users?
dlhavema 11y ago
+5 for the CEO of the company responding in under 45 minutes to a post from a disgruntled customer.
- new_hackers 11y ago
  -1 for CEO to be sitting around reading HN enough to respond within 45 minutes. Get back to work! :-)
- mike-cardwell 11y ago
  This is called PR
natemc 11y ago
Just like when you told me to email you and then never responded. What a joke.
- joshmn 11y ago
  This is the reason I like to use something like BananaTag[0] for all my emails. It helps provide me peace of mind, and transparency, even if the person on the other end has no intention of doing so. [0] http://bananatag.com http://bananatag.com
harel 11y ago
Despite this being a public forum of great scale, and a certain degree of PR involved etc. etc., I think its great that you took the time to respond yourself (or even saw the post in the first place). I was considering a few services for transitioning a home grown billing system (old and tired), and this helped me decide to go with Stripe.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
task_queue 11y ago
As a someone looking for a payment processor, I now know that the only way we'd be lucky enough to receive support is if we wrote a Hacker News thread that made it to the front page. It's weird to find out this way, as I was procrastinating on HN instead of researching.
huhtenberg 11y ago
Patrick, since you are here - The service your provide is excellent, I adore the way Stripe does things in general, but your tech support absolutely positively blows. We've been using Stripe for year and a half now and we had to contact support several times (6-7 ?). Every single time I would hear NOTHING back for few days, then I will log onto your IRC channel and start, basically, bitching. Lo and behold, not a minute later I get a private IRC message asking for an account ID and then I get a reply from the support in another 5 minutes. Invariably, it will start with a cry story how the support is unusually overloaded now. This is absolutely unacceptable. In one case we had issues with two-factor authentication not working, and you'd think it warrants a more-or-less timely response, but, no, it still required the IRC trick to wrestle a reply from your support. Please fix this.
- corywatilo 11y ago
  +1. Similar experiences for years as well.
- Kalium 11y ago
  I am reminded of customer support lines in general, which somehow always seem to be experiencing unusually high call volumes...
  - savanaly 11y ago
    >which somehow always seem to be experiencing unusually high call volumes... That's because the times you call, by the laws of probability, are exactly the times when it is most likely to be busy. The same principle leads patients to estimate the business of a doctor's waiting room higher than the doctor or staff would. There's a name for this type of phenomenon in the abstract, but it eludes me.
    - Kalium 11y ago
      In practice, I think that what we're actually seeing is what happens when customer support is seen as a cost center. The company could spend more on support, or they can add a notice to the call waiting and call it a day.
skazka16 11y ago
How'd Stripe solve the issue if HN did not exist and OP would never emit his disappointment publicly?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

by pc 11y ago

Stripe CEO here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking a look at what happened here. OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: patrick@stripe.com.

disappointeddev 11y ago

Sent!

s_dev 11y ago
We expect follow up posts if everything gets sorted - even if it embarrasses you or Stripe a little bit.
- s_dev 11y ago
  Disappointed Dev Update after 24 Hours: "After speaking with Stripe I have decided to end our dealings. Unfortunately the issue could not be resolved. We are looking at alternate providers."

jeffmould 11y ago

This response alone is why I will always recommend Stripe. The support may need support of its own, but knowing that you can get management's attention fairly easily says a lot of great things about the company and the people working there in my book.

GuiA 11y ago
Yeah, except not every Stripe customer knows that the real place to get support is (apparently) Hacker News, rather than Stripe support. The fact that the official channels are non responsive but a post on HN gets an immediate response could be construed as a red flag: the company cares more about avoiding bad PR than about having good customer service.
- pc 11y ago
  Well, the "support" here is just much more visible than everything else that we do. We provide support over as many channels as possible: we employ full-time folks in #stripe on IRC, we monitor Twitter, we send thousands of emails every day, we're rolling out phone support, we chat with customers on IM -- and, yes, we reply on HN. Obviously nobody should have to post here, but we'll certainly respond if they do. Fraud-related cases are particularly hard, by the way. Thousands of people try to defraud us every day. (I guess it's a consequence of being highly-visible and easy to set up.) And so the support for those cases has to be handled a little differently.
  - onetallnerd 11y ago
    Has anyone defrauded you with a bitcoin payment yet? I assume volume is low, but out of that volume has there been any reports of fraud?
    - onetallnerd 11y ago
      It was a genuine question?
  - JoergR 11y ago
    ...as in not responding to email? That is certainly a little different.
  - ritchiea 11y ago
    No knock on the great work you guys have done to make Stripe easy to use and visible but I'm pretty sure thousands of people try to defraud you every day because you're a platform to transfer money. Money is a popular thing to steal.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    > We provide support over as many channels as possible Maybe that's the problem. Might be better to provide stellar support on one or two channels.
cylinder 11y ago
These keep popping up and Stripe quickly intervenes after it's on HN. Why not just answer your emails in the first place?
oqnet 11y ago
Definitely easier than getting the attention of paypal in the past.
phn 11y ago
Complaining on social media shouldn't be required to get management's attention. This is damage control, not that there's anything wrong with that... Please note that I have nothing against Stripe, dealing with money looks very challenging, and these issues are probably not easy to solve/support for each and every user.

akhatri_aus 11y ago

I think this is something that sets PayPal apart. Paypal just doesn't seem to care at all. Their customer service is appalling. That being said Patrick, you can't do this forever, the service & support ought to be well without the need of a call for attention. I think this is the 3rd or fourth one in the past 2 weeks. Is something going on at Stripe? Why are these all happening now?

pc 11y ago
Our overall support response times are actually substantially faster than, say, 3 months ago. Part of it is, I think, because we're growing quickly -- even for the same problematic case percentage, there are going to be more in absolute number. (And, as Stripe becomes more prominent, the cases that happen will themselves get more attention.) In addition, the cases that get public attention generally aren't clear-cut. For example, the other discussion on HN a few weeks ago was about a marijuana-related business that most likely violated our ToS. We care a great deal about providing great support at scale. Each of these cases triggers a lot of internal discussion about how we might have been able to do things better.
- jeffmould 11y ago
  For what it is worth, just my two-cents, but I think even having a customer-facing ticketing system (doesn't necessarily have to be public facing) would help quell some of the unrest. At least for myself, I don't mind a delay in support, but when a request is sent in and it seems to disappear into a black hole it can be frustrating. If there was a way to incorporate support into the dashboard so that users could open/edit/check status of tickets directly from there that would be a great step in my opinion.
  - gknoy 11y ago
    This is a really good point. Having something where you can see that what you asked is at least in the system, and Nth in queue, helps a lot when dealing with the opacity of tech support.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- smeyer 11y ago
  People don't need to check his LinkedIn. He's a well-known entity on HN and a cofounder of Stripe. LinkedIn aside, try checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripe_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripe_(company)

ad_hominem 11y ago

The last time Patrick posted his email[1] soliciting feedback, I emailed him but never got a response. I'm sure being a CEO is a busy job, so I understand. And I'm sure he'll respond to OP. But keep in mind just because he posts his email publicly doesn't mean he's actually any more reachable for it. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9646672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9646672

pc 11y ago
Hm, I never received anything! Can you send it again? (Two of us from Stripe, myself included, have already been in contact with disappointeddev.)
- pen2l 11y ago
  Not to knock on you, but I'm starting to see this is a trend. I was on the hn irc channel, and numerous people complained about the same thing. That you're always very willing and ready to offer support here on HN by saying "Sure, just email me!" but when these folks do email you, they are ignored. I don't know if this is a clever PR strategy to contain and direct fallout to a private medium so it never sees light of day, or if it was a genuine mistake. I think and hope it was the latter, but the frequency with which this seems to be happening starts to suggest it may also be a little bit of the former. E.g., just in this very comment thread there's a handful of people claiming you never responded to emails even after explicitly asking them to email you.
  - pc 11y ago
    I wasn't in the IRC room, but I'll go take a look at what happened there -- thanks for the heads up.
    - akshatpradhan 11y ago
      I'm not trying to be negative, but the stripe channel is very active. Why aren't you assigning someone to give 100% attention to this concentrated collection of YOUR users?

dlhavema 11y ago

+5 for the CEO of the company responding in under 45 minutes to a post from a disgruntled customer.

new_hackers 11y ago
-1 for CEO to be sitting around reading HN enough to respond within 45 minutes. Get back to work! :-)
mike-cardwell 11y ago
This is called PR

natemc 11y ago

Just like when you told me to email you and then never responded. What a joke.

joshmn 11y ago
This is the reason I like to use something like BananaTag[0] for all my emails. It helps provide me peace of mind, and transparency, even if the person on the other end has no intention of doing so. [0] http://bananatag.com http://bananatag.com

harel 11y ago

Despite this being a public forum of great scale, and a certain degree of PR involved etc. etc., I think its great that you took the time to respond yourself (or even saw the post in the first place). I was considering a few services for transitioning a home grown billing system (old and tired), and this helped me decide to go with Stripe.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

task_queue 11y ago

As a someone looking for a payment processor, I now know that the only way we'd be lucky enough to receive support is if we wrote a Hacker News thread that made it to the front page. It's weird to find out this way, as I was procrastinating on HN instead of researching.

huhtenberg 11y ago

Patrick, since you are here - The service your provide is excellent, I adore the way Stripe does things in general, but your tech support absolutely positively blows. We've been using Stripe for year and a half now and we had to contact support several times (6-7 ?). Every single time I would hear NOTHING back for few days, then I will log onto your IRC channel and start, basically, bitching. Lo and behold, not a minute later I get a private IRC message asking for an account ID and then I get a reply from the support in another 5 minutes. Invariably, it will start with a cry story how the support is unusually overloaded now. This is absolutely unacceptable. In one case we had issues with two-factor authentication not working, and you'd think it warrants a more-or-less timely response, but, no, it still required the IRC trick to wrestle a reply from your support. Please fix this.

corywatilo 11y ago
+1. Similar experiences for years as well.
Kalium 11y ago
I am reminded of customer support lines in general, which somehow always seem to be experiencing unusually high call volumes...
- savanaly 11y ago
  >which somehow always seem to be experiencing unusually high call volumes... That's because the times you call, by the laws of probability, are exactly the times when it is most likely to be busy. The same principle leads patients to estimate the business of a doctor's waiting room higher than the doctor or staff would. There's a name for this type of phenomenon in the abstract, but it eludes me.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    In practice, I think that what we're actually seeing is what happens when customer support is seen as a cost center. The company could spend more on support, or they can add a notice to the call waiting and call it a day.

skazka16 11y ago

How'd Stripe solve the issue if HN did not exist and OP would never emit his disappointment publicly?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]