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Comment by milligrade | Hacker News Reader

It is in Stripe's rational self-interest to choose who they partner with; and thus, they chose the constraints related to those partners.

The real message of this blog post is that Stripe's revealed and stated preferences are not aligned. Their stated preference is that they sell to literally anybody. The revealed preference is that they prioritize relationships that facilitate growth over that stated preference.

It's totally rational on their part. They're actively serving the big market, and writing a blog post about how sorry they are that they're ignoring the tiny market. That's the right division of effort, and it's smart too, because many members of the tiny market will (naively) believe Stripe's stated preferences; even though absolutely all evidence is that Stripe wants, more than anything, to build a big, legal, US-based business. And that's fine.

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>They're actively serving the big market, and writing a blog post about how sorry they are that they're ignoring the tiny market.

Funny. Porn is far from being a small market online. And taking on porn related businesses doesn't mean they have to stop serving other types of businesses.

> Funny. Porn is far from being a small market online.

Are you sure about that? The source I’ve found [1] says it’s a ~$5B market, which is what FB makes in one quarter alone (and only one month for Google).

[1]: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/347252

You're rebutting someone that merely said that the industry is "far from a small market" which was in response to someone claiming it was a "tiny" market. Pointing to one of the largest companies operating a web business is not really a rebuttal. That just says they are far from being the biggest.

I wouldn't call a $5b market a "tiny, niche market" like the GP post stated.

In the overall scheme of payments, $5b is small. You need big volume to make money as a payment processor.

There are many markets that are much smaller than that which Stripe doesn't have a problem with.

I don't know of a better proxy for brand strength but there is this: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Bitcoin,str...

Consider that the spikes in bitcoin are often about scandals in the news with a concerted effort by the state regulated media over the past half decade to brand bitcoin as the tool of criminals and terrorists... and still I think pretty much everybody realizes that most bitcoin users are neither criminals nor terrorists.

And if Stripe wanted to, they could've decided to accept nearly all businesses, but restrict some of the businesses to BitCoin only, as Bitcoin does not apply tough restrictions on partners. And many of the other "problematic" businesses aren't banned by Visa or MC at all... Stripe is flat-out lying when they pretend that every Stripe banned business is banned because of their partners.

No, Stripe's actions make clear that they care more about building a big, profitable, us-based company than they care about facilitating these niche "problem" customers. Which is fine.

They have correctly determined that these other lines of business are worth one pandering blog post in which they pretend that there was absolutely no way for them to serve these markets (an obvious lie), and they go about their business.

It's a smart play. I hope I'd make the same play, if I were in their shoes. Build profitable products for the big market, write a blog post for the tiny one. And maybe, someday, once the big market is sufficiently secure, add the incremental revenue from the tiny market.

No they're not lying that their partners do not want them to touch high risk merchant accounts. At the end of the day, stripe answers to a sponsoring bank, which is highly regulated and are usually very rush averse.

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