A look inside Stripe’s API platform
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For this edition, I spoke with Cristina Cordova from Stripe. She shared how the company approaches partnerships to help grow the platform. We also discussed how to focus on customers when building new API features. Enjoy the interview!
What is Stripe’s vision?
We say that our mission is to increase the GDP of the Internet. Day-to-day, that means we’re focused on bringing more businesses online and building the infrastructure that will facilitate a more economically connected world.
Theoretically, the internet is borderless, but this is not the case when you want to actually process transactions. Anyone can send an email around the world, but a lot of folks are not able to collect payments online or even purchase from a major online retailer. This is largely due to artificial barriers that surround the movement of money online and those are barriers that we are trying to break down.
We want every single developer and entrepreneur, no matter where they are in the world, to have access to the tools they need to build a global online business.
It should be possible to start and run an online business that is equally as successful in Mexico as it is in the United States. We want every single developer and entrepreneur, no matter where they are in the world, to have access to the tools they need to build a global online business.
How big is the company and how do you organize your engineering efforts around APIs?
Today, we are just over 400 employees globally.
Product engineering works on building out new user-facing products like Atlas and original Stripe products like our merchant dashboard on different platforms and user-facing APIs.
We also have a large infrastructure team working on data, risk, internal tooling and core systems; and a field engineering team aimed at helping developers — partners, users, or just someone starting a business for the very first time — use the Stripe API effectively.
Who are some interesting customers using Stripe?
We process billions of dollars a year for hundreds of thousands of businesses across 24 countries — from mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 500 companies.
One of my favorite stories recently was about one of our Australian users called Chuffed. This is a company with two full-time employees that helps social causes raise money. Through Stripe, they can help causes all over the world raise funds in their local currency. Three or four years ago, they probably would’ve struggled to scale payments globally. Today, about 25% of their campaigns are international.
While Stripe can help a tiny startup do business internationally, that’s also true for businesses that are at scale. When a U.S company is processing millions of dollars a year, they often need to do the exact same thing: expand their global reach. For example, through Connect, Kickstarter was able to launch in 8 additional countries outside of the U.S almost overnight.
How do partnerships impact Stripe’s business?
We work with partners in three areas.
First, there are distribution partners that help businesses on their platform accept and manage payments using Stripe. For example, many businesses today get started on e-commerce platforms like Shopify or invoicing platforms like FreshBooks or Invoice2Go. Stripe partners with these platforms to power the payment aspect for their users.
Second, we work on partnerships that are related to the Stripe product. For example, working with Apple on Apple Pay and Google on Android Pay, to make it possible for Stripe merchants to accept these payment methods alongside credit cards. Another example is working with companies like Plaid to build out our ACH products.
[Note: I spoke with Plaid about their banking API in an earlier interview.]
And last but not least, we work on data partnerships. Specifically, third-party developers building apps on top of the Stripe platform. This includes everything from being able to see your Stripe payments in Slack to connecting your payments data to Stitch Labs for inventory management. We want to ensure that Stripe is seamlessly integrated into other products and services that help you run your business.
Tell me more about some of the interesting data partnerships.
Sure. I think a lot of the great apps built on the Stripe platform enable our users to really easily assess performance.
One example is Baremetrics, an analytics app built on top of Stripe. It can help you easily understand monthly recurring revenue and how it’s changing over time. The service gives you a lot of business intelligence beyond just the info in your bank account.
Another is ChartMogul, which provides you with subscription analytics to help understand how customers are choosing different monthly plans. How many customers are downgrading from gold to silver? How many of your customers weren’t able to pay you last month because their credit card stopped working for some reason? These are crucial for every SaaS business.
Other apps help the workflows that you already have as a business and pull in Stripe data to ensure that you understand what’s driving things from a revenue standpoint.
For example, Intercom is very highly used among the Stripe community. It helps you understand how to automate communication with your customers. If you can understand at any given point who your top customers are and really help you allocate resources appropriately.
What are some apps you’d like developers to build for Stripe users?
We’d love to see more apps that are built around financial reconciliation — a core part of running a business. Typically on a monthly basis, or sometimes more frequently, a business has to do bookkeeping to understand fees, cash flow, etc. These sorts of products would work towards making Stripe a useful product for the finance team as well.
Then there are data warehouse tools. An example would be to join all of your Stripe data with other interesting customer data for querying and analysis.
[Note: Segment Sources recently launched to solve this problem.]
For example, analysts want to understand how many new customers signed up after a marketing campaign or how many transactions were created from an A/B test. It would be great to make it easy for someone who only knows SQL.
Another area is customer support tickets. As a business owner, if I can blend my Stripe transaction data with my support system, it can help prioritize or group tickets into useful categories like first-time customers or repeat business.
Accepting credit cards online was just the starting point for Stripe. What inspired new products like Relay or Atlas?
I think one thing you can get really stuck on as a company that starts out in payments is that customers come to you only with their payment problems. Luckily, a lot of Stripe users look at us as a development platform and infrastructure service for their business. They often see us as a strategic partner, and that really guides our approach to developing new products.
With Relay, for example, that came out of partner conversations with companies like Twitter and Facebook that all build commerce products on top of Stripe. That informed us of how we should build the product and develop the right APIs.
Prior to Atlas, we were constantly hearing from users about the difficulty of starting a global business, particularly in developing markets. Many of them looked to incorporate an entity in established markets like the U.S. or U.K. just to gain access to better business and banking services.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the Atlas launch video, but one of our merchants, Platzi, started out in Latin America and then realized that none of the payment companies there could help them accept payments globally. So the founder, Christian, flew to the United States and spent a lot of time and money setting up a corporate entity and gaining a bank account just to be able to work with Stripe.
These pain points really resonated. The Stripe team has a surprisingly high number of former entrepreneurs and people who were born outside of the United States as well. Our founders, for example, came to the U.S. from Ireland and tried to build a brand-new service here.
How could we enable more businesses to get started without having to put thousands of dollars into plane tickets and lawyers and compliance fees to start a company?
With Atlas, we took what was otherwise an expensive and laborious process, and streamlined it into a simple, easy-to-use product. Ultimately, it’s about building the infrastructure for not only accepting payments, but also enabling you to build and run a global business — no matter where in the world you are based.
Stripe is definitely well-known for thorough API documentation. Walk me through how that started.
It was all about listening to our users when they had something to say — on Twitter, IRC, email, etc. We build our documentation as developers want to see it because they’re our core customers. We’ll get on Gchat with developers to bounce ideas off of them like what a new API example should look like.
Our philosophy is to gear documentation towards how to use an API, rather than how it’s built. And we don’t just build documentation, we build guides early on in the process — even for our first beta users. It may not be perfect, but it’s a great start when first onboarding customers.
We have people on our product team specifically dedicated to building out great documentation. It really helps to have people who specialize in writing about topics in a very technical way.
The first person we hired in this role was Larry Ullman who, prior to joining, wrote a large number of blog posts about developing with Stripe. Funnily enough, he wrote one of the first programming books that our CEO, Patrick, learned how to code with.
How does Stripe generally approach developing new products?
When we’re developing and refining a new product, we open up a Slack room with beta users. It enables both sides to get to the heart of an issue really quickly. Stripe also runs a few email lists with Google groups for API announcements and discussion.
In general, we take a really collaborative approach and aim to generate feedback as quickly as possible. For example, a few years ago, a number of our users came to us with some slightly odd questions about how to “provision recipients” and add bank accounts to their Stripe accounts. And not just a few bank accounts, but hundreds of them.
We realized that these companies were trying to run marketplaces on Stripe and began to consider building our first product to support these platforms. So we reached out to a bunch of existing users and potential new customers, like Lyft, and explained what we were thinking.
It turned out that a lot of these marketplaces were using really archaic systems to pay out to sellers. They had whole finance teams manually issuing payments and sometimes they’d accidentally enter “$10,000” instead of “$10.00”.
These teams were happy to meet in-person and share these stories. And they told us about other needs they had, like how to handle taxes or accounting for the sellers on their platforms. These conversations culminated in our marketplaces product, Connect. That’s definitely a time when our customers really helped us build things along the way.
Many companies launch APIs with a “If you build it, they will come” strategy. Stripe takes the opposite approach and focuses on customer feedback when building new products. By starting with a long-term vision and iterating on this feedback, they’re building a true platform.
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