One strategy to rule them all — How did Stripe build a fan army
This is the story of how John and Patrick Collison built an army of developers and business owners by creating great experiences.
2005
The 16 years old Patrick was the winning the award of the 41st Young Scientist of the Year.
And his brother, John, scored the highest-ever score received by a student.
Patrick during his first months at MIT founded Auctomatic and joined Y Combinator.
After 10 months, he sold the company for $5M.
But this is was just the beginning.
He was working on several projects. And he constantly faces the same problem. The payment process.
He said,
“Why it’s so difficult to accept payments on the web.”
Something was wrong.
They had only one option, using legacy software— The headache!
They decided to simplify this process
In the next 6 months, they worked on a product, showing it to their friends and making some changes accordingly.
They started to positioning Stripe as a company that makes accepting payments easy. This is how Stripe going to provide great experiences.
Stripe’s installation process is a piece of cake— just copy and paste seven lines of code and there you go!
They started sending out Stripe-branded stickers and t-shirts. They made developers' lives easier. And without any big campaigns, developers wore those t-shirts!
As one customer said, “We integrating payment system in an afternoon and then launch our business the next day.”
The experience of using Stripe is delightful because it’s easy — even for customers’ customers.
Stripe working behind the scenes. This way buyers don’t have to leave a company’s checkout page to buy something.
Great marketing and providing great experiences can be achieved by removing friction from existing solutions.
Folks will be fall in love with you because you made their lives easier.
This is how you can get started:
- Talk to customers, run surveys and observe people’s behaviors to identify friction points in your product (Forget your ego, they’re the boss).
- If you thinking about starting a startup, the first step should be to identifying a real pain point. Then, test your solution (a prototype or a landing page) with the customer. See if they willing to pay or not.
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