You can have a long discussion about the real or implied valuation, but the truth is this company has a great product and terrific momentum. Who's going to stop it from becoming the next paypal?
You can have a long discussion about the real or implied valuation, but the truth is this company has a great product and terrific momentum. Who's going to stop it from becoming the next paypal?
The solutions from old style banks adopting nicer looking APIs still force you to mess around with setting up your own acquiring bank account, etc.
It might not be as easy to use as the Stripe API, but it offers you many more payment options. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this will put Stripe out of business, I'm just saying there seems to be a change in the payment processor landscape and in a few years, people might take these simple online payment platforms for granted.
Before stripe came into the scene, I tried to do a paypal integration into an app once. It was an absolute nightmare. The one time I did stripe integration, my grandmother could have done it :)
Also, it doesn't matter that every bank builds an API once Stripe becomes (or is perceived as) a market leader. People view it as genuine and provide disproportionate value to the leader. People will go out of their way to use the market leading product even if they have to pay more. When you're in a store, think of how many times you buy the more expensive product because you see that as the default brand in that space.
But wasn't PayPal the market leader? Then how could Stripe have taken over? Well, PayPal sucked (for developers). Stripe was 10X better and took over while PayPal slept.
To replace the incumbent you need to be 5-10x better, otherwise nobody bothers to move over. The key to that is to pick the right set of micro problems to solve.
Say what‽ Does Instagram just upload everything? Or do they start uploading a picture as one is editing the comments and such?
But it's the specific photo, not your whole album (that would be pointless ( and expensive) to do).
As in market share, or support/development annoyances?