Oh, likewise - I think they've real promise, but they're in a crowded marketplace with a lot of really entrenched players.
I guess their principle differentiator is the market they target - but pitching to developers is a big bet. If you've worked around enough enterprises you know by now that developers have little say in business decisions - meaning that their main opportunity is to be chosen by startups, and to hope to high hell that one of them makes it big, and piggyback - and hope to high hell that a big player doesn't use their clout and cash to undercut them and shoulder them out.
Either way, kudos to them for building what's undeniably a good product, but I just don't see it as a gamer-changer in the same way as others seem to.
Honest questions: what percentage of Paypal's revenue comes from eBay? Is Stripe's pricing model unsustainable at the lower tiers? In other words, what's stopping them from serving millions of small merchants instead of a few giant ones?
Paypal/eBay - couldn't find any published figures on this, but looking at eBay's revenues vs. PayPal's revenues, it'd appear that it's a substantial but not dominant share of their revenue.
Pricing model - no, it's great, but as you grow, it becomes uneconomical.
What's stopping them? Fraud. Fraud fraud fraud. They will end up with an approval process, as if they get hit big a few times (they will), their merchant acquirers/clearers will insist on it.
I guess their principle differentiator is the market they target - but pitching to developers is a big bet. If you've worked around enough enterprises you know by now that developers have little say in business decisions - meaning that their main opportunity is to be chosen by startups, and to hope to high hell that one of them makes it big, and piggyback - and hope to high hell that a big player doesn't use their clout and cash to undercut them and shoulder them out.
Either way, kudos to them for building what's undeniably a good product, but I just don't see it as a gamer-changer in the same way as others seem to.