To play diplomat, I see a lot of Stripe loyalty / Mastercard hate already brewing here, and I think that's a bit unwarranted. Stripe has certainly earned their place as a cherished service, but I would venture to bet a lot of devs worked quite hard on Simplify as well, so it'd be nice to see discussion on the merits of the offering rather than preconceived notions of the provider.
If nothing else, even if 0.05% isn't much, I'm happy to see if they can start a bit of a pricing war here. If it drives payment costs down across the board, all the better.
(I built the first version of Stripe and work here.)
I think the unfortunate aspect of these clones is that they're lazy. I have huge respect for anyone that innovates in payments -- I know how hard it is, and I'd imagine it's even harder to do that as part of a larger company.
What I find disappointing is when a product copies everything about Stripe -- everything from Stripe.js to the "live/test" switch to the "1/2/3" getting started pop-up when you create your account to the nomenclature of "InvoiceItems" to the ordering of tabs in the account settings.
It's certainly MasterCard's (and anyone's) prerogative to do that, but I don't think it's particularly worthy of support from other engineers and makers.
We should encourage each other any time we see great, original work -- creativity is hard, and new ideas are often delicate in the early days. It'd be really cool if MasterCard did that, but Simplify unfortunately doesn't seem to have anything that's new. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!)
The SV expectation/mentality that if someone builds something first they "own" that space is unjustifiable. I'm not say you are saying that, but it is an implicit attitude in the Valley.
Competition (or "clones") were around 100 years ago, continue to exist today and will be around for the next 100 years. Today's innovation is tomorrow's commodity thanks to competition. This is good.
Is it disappointing that MasterCard launched a similar service? Sure, I would too be disappointed and I sympathise.
Having said that, stating that "a product copies everything" is not really true. They can not copy execution, culture, customer service, customer loyalty, etc. You have that on your side.
People think that Ford Motor was one of the first (if not the only) car manufacturer in States in the early 1900s, but it was quite the contrary. The car was a revolutionary technology: it had a combustion engine, it was fast, etc. Over 100 car companies were launched in the early 1900s. All of them car startups. When the technology goes in one direction it is difficult to be the salmon that swims upstream, in the opposite direction. To tell those +100 car startups to "go and innovate, I own the combustion engine on top of four wheels" is simple unrealistic. Expect competition, that's my point.
How did Ford survive having less resources than many others? How did Ford survive the great depression? Execution. It improved the assembly line, vertically integrated to bring more production in-house, etc.
Stripe's case should be no different. Today's technology and innovation is commoditised in months. Execution can't be commoditised. Don't expect competitors to rest on their laurels.
> People think that Ford Motor was one of the first (if not the only) car manufacturer in States in the early 1900s, but it was quite the contrary. The car was a revolutionary technology: it had a combustion engine, it was fast, etc. Over 100 car companies were launched in the early 1900s.
There were over 1,800 automobile manufacturers in the United States from 1896 to 1930. Very few survived and only a few new ones were started after that period.
A lot of the reason for the lack of very many new car companies for decades has been due to insider sponsored regulations meant to target upstarts and using political power to crush competitors (which of course has been tried on Tesla in a variety of ways).
Not suggesting you didn't know that, but it's still worthwhile to point out.
Calling it "lazy" was fair given the points he made. He's not talking about copying products, he's talking about copying the product AND all the little UI/UX details. That really is lazy.
> The SV expectation/mentality that if someone builds something first they "own" that space is unjustifiable. I'm not say you are saying that, but it is an implicit attitude in the Valley.
First I wanted to say I think this is a bit of a non-sequitur because it's not like Stripe invented a new space here, they entered a crowded space which had already seen relatively recent innovation from PayPal and Braintree in preceding years.
But then I got thinking some more and I don't know where you get this idea that there is an implicit attitude that anyone owns anything in SV. Sharing of ideas and me-too companies are everywhere in SV. Sure people consider it kind of a douchey move to do a clone of your friends company after he shared his whole execution plan with you, but I don't think that indicates anywhere near as strong of an implicit ownership as you are describing.
The bottom line here is not that MasterCard are in the wrong, or that it's not beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole, but just that they don't deserve any special applause for some pointy hair somewhere deciding "OMG Stripe are going to eat our lunch, put your 100 best engineers on reverse engineering this API posthaste!"
Yep, I agree with almost all of your comment -- especially around the expectation of owning a space and how that's a totally wrong-headed idea.
My disappointment with MasterCard isn't at all that they're entering the space (hey, that should be good for the world). It just feels lame that they gratuitously copied every single minute detail, far beyond what you'd have to copy to build "a MasterCard version of Stripe". They even copied our code sample gists.
But I definitely didn't mean to imply more than that -- some idea that MasterCard shouldn't compete with us, or even that they shouldn't compete with a functionally similar product. On that front, I'm totally cool with it, and may the best product win :-).
> ...but I don't think it's particularly worthy of support from other engineers and makers.
Simplify might be a Stripe clone, but if it's just as reliable, cheaper and allows me to get my hands on my money faster, why shouldn't I consider it? I'm an engineer/"maker" but that doesn't mean that I select commodity services based on emotion or ideology. After all, saving money and getting my money faster supports my ability to continue making stuff.
I need to accept payments online. I am your customer. You should be trying to convince me that Stripe is the best payment solution for my business, not labeling a new competitor "lazy" and suggesting that I avoid it because it opted not to reinvent the wheel.
> We should encourage each other any time we see great, original work -- creativity is hard, and new ideas are often delicate in the early days. It'd be really cool if MasterCard did that, but Simplify unfortunately doesn't seem to have anything that's new.
I really, really like Stripe and think you have built a great service but reading this makes me cringe.
Innovation and first mover advantage do not guarantee success. In fact, sitting back and following can be a smart approach: it's less risky and less costly to let others invest in new ideas and "copy" what gains traction in the market. I know this is blasphemy in Silicon Valley, but it's the harsh reality of business.
We'll see if the market finds Simplify's lower pricing and faster payouts compelling enough, but I don't think it's fair to insinuate that the only source of legitimate, meaningful and effective differentiation comes from building something "original".
I was probably too incendiary in my phrasing, and I agree with what you say. If Simplify solves your problems better than Stripe does, you should use it (and good job to them for doing so). It's our job, of course, to have that not be the case.
The point I was trying to make was fairly narrowly scoped: needlessly copying even tiny details of Stripe is pretty uninspired.
(P.S. Any chance you could drop me an email? I'm patrick@stripe.com.)
> needlessly copying even tiny details of Stripe is pretty uninspired.
I disagree. Copying tiny details is a very smart strategy for non critical parts of your product. Do not try to reinvent the wheel...and the axle and the airbag, all at once.
Designers should focus on what's unique and different about their offering, and leverage from the community the other parts. I'm sure Stripe put a lot of design time into those API details. Simplify is bringing new features to the market (faster payouts and lower prices), and so their time and money is better spent on those than trying to also reinvent API design. And it's better then to just copy verbatim than to put up the first thing that comes to mind.
I could otherwise argue that Stripe's use of JSON and HTML is pretty uninspired because Braintree was doing it years before.
- Legally, we need to be able to verify identities. We want to do this frictionlessly and in real-time rather than with some paperwork sheaf that gets mailed to you a week later. The solution looks different in almost every country.
- Visa, MasterCard, and co. have rules that effectively prevent you from using the same backends in different areas. (E.g., you can't use the same backend in Europe and the US.) So we have to rebuild a lot of our stack in each country.
- The infrastructure for doing daily deposits into bank accounts also differs by country. Often, the basic operation is relatively easy, but figuring out all of the edge-cases is hard.
- The laws in every country differ. Sometimes, we need to obtain licenses or something like that.
- Etc...
We could have hacked around this by partnering with existing payments companies in each area. That's what people usually do -- it's much cheaper and way faster. The downside is that you end up with a much worse product than what you have in the US. For obvious reasons, we didn't want to do that.
So we now have an office in London that's working full-time on bringing Stripe to other markets and we're processing production transactions in four countries.
I'm sorry that it's slow :(. I guess the tl;dr is that a substantial fraction of the work required to build Stripe in the US has to be repeated in each new country -- the work and complexity scales O(n). We're still just 55 people, and it takes time.
(Still, if you'd like to help speed it up, we're hiring!)
I don't suppose you have a rough estimate for UK roll out do you? We're planning on adding a payment gateway to our system over the next 4-6 months or so.
We'd really love to use Stripe after looking at the APIs for every other payment gateway service :)
> Visa, MasterCard, and co. have rules that effectively prevent you from using the same backends in different areas.
What's the reasoning behind that restriction? Could you just re-use your backend stack, but use a different data center / machines, that's isolated from the backend of other countries?
It's because the banks that issue credit cards have most of the negotiating leverage, and they don't want giant US banks competing on their territory on the payment acceptance side. As a result, you need to use a European bank to accept payments in Europe, a Latin American bank in Latin America, and so on. The payments industry is full of these non-obvious (and unfortunate...) power dynamics.
What about SEPA [1]? Didn't it simplify things enough? E.g. I can make bank transfers between EUR accounts from France to Poland (which is not in eurozone BTW) within a few hours (during the week) with a total cost ~€1 which is quite acceptable (of course not for €5 transfers, but the cost is fixed, so it's good enough for bigger transfers).
A Finnish banking startup, Holvi, uses online banks to verify the user's ID. And that is all they require on top of phone verification. If I recall right, they state that 'online bank authentication is the only way to verify user ID online'.
Why others don't do that, but instead ask me to file all these documents by printing and scanning them?
Stripe's terms of use prohibit both weapons and virtual currencies. If Simplify's terms of service prohibit either, I can't find the relevant paragraph. That alone makes Simplify somewhat more attractive.
"a. Illegal Activities
b. Certain Adult Oriented Products and Services
c. Illegal Drugs
d. Counterfeit Goods
e. Gambling Businesses
f. Money Making ("Get Rich") Businesses
g. Tobacco Products"
I actually find it more interesting that quite a few of the obviously copied bits aren't even really worthy of copying if you're already going through the effort of building an entirely new product -- they're pieces of our product that could stand to be improved. :)
The live/test switch is a good example. It confuses everyone: you're just switching between the data that's shown, but everyone thinks you're switching the underlying state of your account. It's something we've had on our list to fix for a long time.
As a Stripe user that's one of the things that stood out to me immediately. This will definitely inspire some change on Stripe's part hehe. That's a good thing since it helps Stripe win in the long run.
Surely you (Stripe) must have known that providers would respond.
If people are saying "Feature X in stripe is awesome", it isn't lazy to copy, it's smart (That's what startups would do). They quickly catch up to your product and hopefully (for them) innovate further.
I get you'd be flustered/angry you have a worthy competitor (with way more resources than you), but companies don't have to be innovators to be competitors. You innovated, and got first mover advantage, now comes the competition.
I don't think he's upset because Stripe has a new competitor. I think he's upset because MasterCard copied every little detail of Stripe, down to the wording and the little UI details. I would be upset, too, if a large company released a product that was a mirror image of mine.
That is fair. I've only seen Stripe from the outside, and haven't even actually implemented it on any projects. Certainly I can appreciate how frustrating and disappointing it is to have some established player in the greater ecosystem come in and build a nearly direct copy of your service. I'm also sure that there's much more to Stripe, and payments in general, than the API and docs, and it's highly unlikely they can come up with a copy of the rest of the company.
This is what businesses do, they copy. Hopefully they improve something, but otherwise the end result is the more competitors, the lower the profit - the more competitive and therefore the more benefit to the end user. No matter what industry you're in, service you're offering - people will copy it / do it themselves. It's really an innovator's dilemma (not referencing the book). Once you innovate and find a better way, the optimal best way - that is how others will do it. The power big giants have is copying to stay competitive (rich get richer..), and really they must to stay alive and relevant - even if it ends up being a zero sum game. Facebook does the same thing, Google does the same - though they produce actual innovation themselves, meanwhile I'm not sure what Facebook has uniquely created, even their beginnings were a copy so it's in their DNA. MasterCard will likely leverage their brand name and try to get long-term partners of theirs using their service and not Stripe or others. They validated your market though, so focus on growth, and perhaps a MasterCard competitor will want to try to buy you at a premium -- assuming that's what you want.
Look at the bright side. This is complete validation for your approach. Now MC is copying your business model and got to market strategy. You're defining the landscape. Powerful stuff.
Original work doesn't exist. Everything is a remix of old ideas. For example, one could argue that Stripe is just a copy of one of the many already existent payment processing APIs, with better marketing. What exactly do you do that's so different? Better ad copy?
And honestly, the things you say are "copied" are fairly lame things that anyone could've done. It's not like they stole any secret sauce, like when Boeing used industrial espionage to steal information on rocket manufacturing from Lockheed Martin.
Competition exists. You don't have a right to monopoly. Suck it up, because you just aren't that original.
What "already existent payment processing APIs" do you think Stripe was a "copy" of? Because as somebody who actually takes a lot of money in CC payments online, I can tell you: Stripe changed everything.
It is something I don't understand... It's not possible to patent/copyright the whole design of website to see it as a whole product? And avoid people to do exactly the same design?
Yet. I don't want to necessarily speak for Stripe, but I seem to recall when they were first opening to the public, one of their main goals was to get to the point where they no longer needed 3rd party providers for the services they offer, and could then drive the costs down. Could be mistaken (or things could have changed).
If nothing else, even if 0.05% isn't much, I'm happy to see if they can start a bit of a pricing war here. If it drives payment costs down across the board, all the better.