michaelschade

This definitely isn’t for everyone — and people’s situations will be different — but based on what we’ve seen there are plenty of entrepreneurs who have already (painstakingly) done this or would like to do it. Our goal is to make what people are already doing more understandable and remove roadblocks so this is available to everyone who wants to go this route.

Nope, we're not looking to make money off the incorporation, though we of course hope the companies become successful Stripe customers!

Good question! Every company’s situation will be different (which is one of the reasons we’re working with PwC to provide expert tax guidance and education). But generally speaking, companies that are incorporated in the US will need to pay US taxes, and may also pay taxes in their local jurisdiction.

The corporation we help you setup in the US would be a new entity.

Yes, I totally hear you -- this is why we treat any API unavailability as such a huge deal and feel so bad about it. Whether customers can or should retry is a question we sometimes get from users after API errors and so I wanted to be proactive about answering it. (And our users often have Stripe.js tokens or customer tokens that they can retry.) But, you're totally right; this definitely doesn't solve all cases.

In the unlikely event there's anything I can do to help, definitely drop me an email.

I work at Stripe. We're back up now. Your customers can safely retry any failed payments. We'll post a public postmortem over the next few days with more information.

If you need any help, please drop us a line at support@stripe.com (and feel free to CC me; I'm michael@stripe.com).

Hey, sorry you had a bad experience. We have a dedicated support team that helps with the majority of questions.

Like you say, folks from throughout the company do answer support questions directly too sometimes. The most common case for this is engineers that help out with products they just launched. They have the best answers and can make changes to the product directly in response to feedback; we've found the support quality there is really good.

I'd like to learn more about where we fell short in your case. Could you forward any of the emails to me at michael@stripe.com? And if you have any other thoughts—about this or Stripe as a whole—I'd love to hear them as well!

Hm, the case I saw looks like it's been totally solved, but feel free to forward it to me directly -- would like to check into it. (And thanks for all your help on IRC!)

(I work at Stripe.) Yeah, you're right: we've had some scaling troubles with support in the past. The root cause is basically what Matt's post points toward: our userbase exploded. Our investment in support didn't even come close to keeping up. Long-term, it's critical that our support is not just adequate but excellent, and as a result fixing it has been one of our top priorities.

Our support is actually quite fast these days; we completely answer most questions in under 3 hours now. We just launched our chat beta for account questions this week, so you can ask urgent questions without figuring out IRC or hopping over to email, and we're experimenting with things like phone support and help right inside your dashboard.

We're going to keep working on this. Feel free to email me at michael@stripe.com if you've any follow up questions.

The notifications are all optional: you can opt into daily summary, new payments, and new customer notifications in the app settings.

Thanks for the feedback, Tom! I understand how the USD -> UK transfers would help; we're looking into making that an option.

For accounting, we've found that better reporting tools usually solve the need for less frequent transfers. Would one of the options at https://support.stripe.com/questions/reconciling-transfers-w... make this easier on you? Feel free to email me if not so I can understand more about your setup. Every part of Stripe should be incredibly simple, including accounting, and I want to make sure we get this right.

Re support: you're right that the replies have been slower than they should be, though that's getting better. Basically, our userbase grew massively in 2013 and our support hiring didn't keep up with it. I spend all of my time on scaling the team, and we've more than doubled the size of the team in the past couple of months. More hires are on their way. I realize our internal machinations aren't very relevant—you just care that the result is excellent—and I'd like to be clear that we're working on this. You should expect to see significantly faster replies and more ways to get in touch with us over the coming months.

While you should already be seeing improvement in this area, feel free to get in touch with me directly at michael@stripe.com anytime. I'd love to hear any other feedback, and am more than happy to help with whatever questions you have.

Fixed, thanks!

Rotten Tomatoes required an API key, which meant I'd probably need to build some intermediate service. (I of course wouldn't want to include the API key in the Chrome extension.) I didn't want the extra overhead for that. I looked at other services that did have an API without authentication (like Trailer Addict), but their player required Flash, and lacked a bunch of content (like for TV shows).

YouTube has a better player interface, is more likely to contain obscure content (e.g., from old movies, or relatively unknown TV series), and had a super low barrier to entry, so I went with that.

I remembered poking at IMDB awhile back and that there wasn't an API, but I just found http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1966503/does-imdb-provide.... It seems that endpoint will give me the IMDB movie ID, which you need to show the trailer, so I may end up switching to this.

It's a pretty simple script but, if you're curious, the source is at https://github.com/michaelschade/netflix-trailers.

(I work at Stripe.)

Sorry you haven't gotten one yet! I just sent an invite your way.

(I work at Stripe)

Sorry this wasn't clear! I can imagine it was a shock to have your number appear; I'll make sure we make this clearer when signing up.

For some background: it's a card network rule that you include a customer service phone number; this is intended to help reduce confusion with your customers and to ensure they have an opportunity to reach out to you. Since Google is an aggregator, they may include a phone number they control if you choose to not expose your own.

One approach you might consider is to have your phone number respond with a message suggesting users email you or visit a certain page on your website. The important bit is just that your customers have a clear way to get in touch with you.

Hey there, George. Very sorry we missed you this morning. I'll be in touch by email shortly.

In general, we are usually in chat several hours earlier than the posted times, but list those hours to make sure we're setting proper expectations. We're working to officially increase the coverage to be sure we're always there for you.

There is Pay Pad by Billy Coover (https://www.pay-pad.com/alerts), which offers an iOS dashboard and push notifications.

Hey there,

I'm very sorry about this. This isn't acceptable.

I'd like the opportunity to dig into your case to figure out what happened. Can you get in touch with me at michael@stripe.com?

Going forward, please also feel free to reach out to me directly at any point if you run into similar problems again.

Michael

That's exactly right: it's safe to continue using Stripe (you'll receive your money on time) and you should expect a great experience going forward.

Your bank shouldn't add any extra fees, but if they do, just let me know and I'll reimburse. We will make sure that you are consistently paid on time.

You're right – we messed up here, and I am sorry for that.

There were some upstream difficulties in transferring USD funds to Canadian bank accounts. As entrepreneurs ourselves, we understand how important it is to have transfers go through reliably–your business depends on this–and so we are wiring the funds (of course, at no cost to you) as an immediate fix. We are continuing to monitor the transfers situation and we will make sure that you continue to get your money correctly and on time.

We could have communicated this more clearly, and are working in parallel to improve this going forward (though we of course hope to not see any problems like this). To that end, we are looking into proactive emails for these situations on the off-chance that this happens in the future.

Again, I'm very sorry that you are having to deal with this. We've built Stripe so that you don't have to think about the complexities of accepting payments online–including receiving your money–and I hope that you'll let us show you how important this is. I'll be watching this HN thread, but you're also welcome to email me directly at michael@stripe.com if you ever need anything.

There is! If you sign up at https://stripe.com/global, we'll reach out once we're ready to start beta testing.

As a brief bit of background: these charges are accepted because card brands do not always decline if the CVC fails (and AVS has no effect); instead, they're taking several signals into account. We expose as much data as possible to give you full control (https://answers.stripe.com/questions/what-controls-for-fraud...).

That said, I really appreciate the feedback. We're actively working on better fraud controls that should be ready soon!

I just received my first pair last month, and am actually wearing them right now. I recommend giving it a shot–the subscription is inexpensive and the socks are really great quality.

Also pretty cool that he open-sourced the subscription software behind SOTM Club (https://github.com/SockClub/subscribely -- disclaimer, I work at Stripe, which the project uses).

I'm not sure about the ability to give as gifts (that'd be a great idea, if it's not supported), but the pricing is on the front page:

"Unlike the country club it only costs $11/month and it will help you get a job."

Are you talking specifically about the notifications?

If so: GNTP is what I'm using for the notifications throughh Growl and there's already a Growl for Windows that supports GNTP (http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/help/gntp.aspx). I haven't used, so not sure if/how well it works.

Otherwise, if you're talking about the configuration and headless service aspect, I could see some room for a more generalized template. I wonder if already exists for that.

Love it, the interface is great.

I'd like to see query parameters stored in the URL instead. As others have mentioned, it'd be nice to be able to bookmark pages and you currently can't. In addition to the bookmarking use case, I'd want to be able to email links to the results (e.g., so my dad could check them out).

It was also initially confusing to return to the homepage to find my past query, not the search form. Even if you don't get around to embedding search parameters in URL right away, consider adding a clear button to erase all of my input and let me start fresh.

More of a nitpick, but when I made a typo on my zip code on the main page and hit submit, it also erased my entry for the search box. The form data should be persisted even if there is an error, and the problem input should be highlighted in red or something.

I made a conscious effort to do that more on a recent talk that I gave, and I felt so much better with the results.

It's surprising just how difficult it is to force yourself to pause for even a few seconds, but the payoff in terms of your audience having an opportunity to understand what you've said is completely worth it.

To that end, also give consideration to a screenshot of a (or, similarly, a stylized/cartoony) browser on Google Voice or a similar service. Don't even have to have a phone to easily carpool, then.

Looks great.

From what I can gather, the carpooling is done on a recurring basis, where it messages you every week day. I'd love to see a single use option.

My friends and I carpool all the time, but it's neither for school nor work. So, while a service like this would be extremely helpful (the process has gotten smoother for us, but it's still somewhat a hassle to coordinate), we would only have a use for it if we can initiate a carpool group on an as-needed basis. I'm thinking an interface where the service persists the group itself (names and numbers), but only sends out carpool messages when one of the group members requests it.

I suspect that this would also help with user acquisition since recurring services that text you can scare users away, especially if they're unsure about the service and want to give it a quick try.

Also: given that the service, as it is right now, does seem to be a recurring thing, you might want to add some information that makes it clear if/how you can leave a carpool group at any time. I wouldn't want to submit my number if I'm subscribing to a lifetime of carpooling reminders that I may no longer want.

I'll be keeping an eye on this project!