Why would GitHub add authority? It only really helps when your target audience is technical. But choosing payment providers is not a technical decision for lots of companies.
Stripe's initial success was largely driven by technical people pushing for it because of how easy their API was. Don't underestimate the impact of technical leadership on decisions like this:
> “For us it was quite visceral: these products are not serving the needs of the customers, so let’s build something better,” John Collison argues. “In old-fashioned legacy companies it’s the CFO choosing the payments system. They think all systems are alike, so they just sort the bids from suppliers. But if ... you have a two-person team, both of you writing relatively complex code and solving complex infrastructural problem, you need a simple payments API that – once installed – doesn’t keep changing.”
> ... The company grew swiftly, driven largely by word-of-mouth between developers.
Stripe is a B2B company, and the hardest part of B2B, by a country mile, is sales.
If you have to do sales, selling to a small company is also far easier than to a large company. A startup that just joined ycombinator, and is setting up a marketplace, is easy to sell to: They need something that works, and they can integrate with tomorrow. If you are instead fighting for the ebay payment contract, expect to have a long negotiation process, multiple bidders, and a very narrow profit margin. And after all that work, which every bidder put in, only one company wins, and will probably not make a lot of money. If you are big, you shrug it off. If you are a small company, you die. On top of that, the large customer will always be afraid of you going away, while they will not with your larger competitor, so all else being equal, you are probably losing! So if you are a startup doing payments, you absolutely want to aim for small targets.
Also, startups grow. Sometimes they grow a lot. Stripe didn't get the lyft contract when they were a giant. They got the contract when they were a small company with their office down the street, and rode the growth of Lyft's processing volume. This kind of plan is something Lagos should be trying too.
So it makes perfect sense to try to sell to a technical audience: You aren't going to succeed selling to almost anyone else.
elsewhere in this thread, there's a tweet where OP is bragging about getting three articles onto the front page of HN this week. Whatever this audience is, we are apparently the target.
I might understand the reasoning that it could have reduced authority if hosted on their blog. Their branding makes them more recognizable, which makes them more likely to be noticed as a competitor, which removes neutrality.
> It only really helps when your target audience is technical.
Their product is an "Open Source Metering & Usage-Based Billing" solution on that Github repo, so it does seem like they're using posts on Github to drive people to use their product.
