Jakub Czakon 🍐’s Post

Here's how Stripe's hero section made them over $95 billion⬇️ Stripe is a dominating force in the financial industry. Worth over $95 billion. In this post, I'm going to break down their hero section So we can learn some lessons. 🧵Let's go: 1/ simple navigation This is one of the most common forms of navigation. Structurally, 1. logo 2. links 3. CTAs And that is for a reason. - enhances website usability - enhances user experience - enhances accessibility Most users will easily be able to use this. 2/ emphasized and compelling headline You can notice that this headline is huge. The reason for this is visual hierarchy. The headline is the first thing that you want the users to look at. That's why it is: 1. big 2. bold 3. colorful The words are also very important: Financial infrastructure for the internet Outstanding positioning. For the WHOLE INTERNET (internet is huge). Immediately builds trust and credibility. 3/ appetizer subheadline The size is pretty small. And the contrast is lower. Because again - visual hierarchy. This piece of information is less important than the headline or the CTA. That's why it needs to catch less attention. Let's look at the words: - "Millions of companies..." - immense social proof - "...accept payments / grow revenue" - everybody loves money, and that is masterfully leveraged here - "online and in person / automate" - a sense of freedom of choice and comfort Brilliant subheadline. 4/ clear and emphasized CTA 1. This button is emphasized with a background color. This makes it stand out, but not stand out too much. 2. "Start now" - Clearly communicates the the action. Short and simple. 3. Contains a right-sized arrow icon. A very small but subtle detail: This gives a feeling of motion to the users. Makes the CTA more appealing. 5/ product demonstration Immediately catches users' attention, and makes them stay on the website. This quickly communicates the value to the users. Because they immediately see what the product/service comprises. Bonus: shows revenue and the charts are going up. Brilliant usage of human psychology. Overall, this hero section is a brilliant example of a high-converting hero sections. I hope you learned value lessons. _____________________________ If you like this post, - follow Aydogdy Agabayev - share with others so they can learn too Peace.

Many happy Stripe users are now even happier! 🙂 Receiving emails like this makes me happy because it means businesses are moving from good to better. In other words, they're switching from Stripe to us! Why are they switching? ✅ Stripe has an easy to use portal. ✅ Correct. We have one too. ✅ Stripe portal is very powerful with many features. ✅ I agree. But wait until you see ours... ❌ Stripe Is highly automated. You can't speak to a human. ✅ Our friendly customer service is ready to assist you. ❌ With Stripe you can't negotiate pricing. ✅ Yeah I know. But with us you could... And the list goes on... ••• If you’re a business owner looking to migrate from Stripe, we’ve built a tool to help you transition smoothly and bring all your customers over. Feel free to contact me. Yoel Breuer. 845-558-6164

To $ or not to $... Kondo is currently free. Should it be? Why free: 1. Some embarrassing bugs show up every now and then 🐛 2. Got a few more cool features cooking before it's a V1 we'd be really proud of 3. Value feedback more than anything else. Don't want price to be a barrier to folks trying and telling us how it can be better 4. Haven't built a stripe integration yet 😅 Why $: 1. Product works and does everything it says on the box / landing page. 2. Some have told me unprompted that they'd pay $ for it as-is 😍 3. Got advice from other founders I really respect that I should just charge *something* for it to validate whether the pain is real enough for folks to pay for 4. Aligns the roadmap we're prioritizing to value that users would actually back with their wallets What should I do? (Also, pretty sure I'm just a noob at this and there's some canonical wisdom out there I should just follow on this but am missing. Maybe it's just No. 3 of Why $.)

I just finished The Mom Test. Most people don't talk about the ending. Here's my take on "customer slicing" This part got me nodding along hard. Talking to your customers is great but if you start getting different answers from every conversation... 🧵 You need to look at what Rob calls "customer slicing". It's essentially niching down to a smaller target market. It's very tempting to target a broad customer. BUT you can never please everyone. I'd found that different types of customer expect different things from my product. Find the ONE profile that is the most promising: E.g. @pricewell targets founders using Stripe - Non-technical founders building with Bubble - Founders who hired devs but don't want to pay them to integrate Stripe - Founders who have a dev team but want control over billing

Developer productivity is measured using information (entropy/entropy reduction) and described in bits (and not in the size of the files, but the descriptive uncertainty). The semantics of this differ, but fundamentally this is the most sane measurement, much like length, volume...etc. If folks are interested in the evidence and proofs we have of this, def reach out! #informationtheory #developerproductivity #kolmorogov #chaitin #work #techdebt

Speed matters! And truly, speed is all about getting your customer's feedback, processing it, and implementing the learning. We built a v0.1 of our product and pitched it to 50 founders. Got responses and feedback / suggestions for a whopping 96 unique features (some marginally similar). And that's the reality. Everyone you talk to will give you their insights. Its your job to process it. How we do it will be a post for later ;) Then we decided we wanted to integrate CRMs with our existing infrastructure. 37 hours and we integrated it end-to-end. And today, we did our final piece of v1 integration - Stripe. Now our revenue stack is ready. If you're using your in-house teams to integrate data and track metrics, save your resources and get Obsidian.

I think there's a lot of non obvious reasons for this, but one speculation I have is that a very tricky metric such as focus time allows for an open ended and neutral discussion of tricky and otherwise contentious topics in a productive manner. It's got all the hallmarks of being "uselessly vague": - everyone can agree it's useful - no two people have the same explanation of why - it's not a direct outcome or an essential property (focus time... for what? focusing... how?) - it can't meaningfully be measured objectively or numerically but, I think those are actually strengths in this case. It lets people in the organization voice their concerns and attribute it to focus time, and it pushes things through that might otherwise get abandoned by needing proof. "our process is too heavy and nobody communicated well" isn't a conversation anyone wants to have. "we need more focus time to deliver value" could be the same conversation but everyone is far more open to it. The flexibility of a "uselessly vague" metric means that it can function simultaneously as a NPS score, an attrition indicator, a quality of life measure, and act as a proxy for a large amount of hard things that wouldn't get attention otherwise. Lean into the fuzzy and let people build narratives around it. You'd be amazed what a sprinkle of alignment and a dose of "maybe we don't need to prove this with numbers" can do when paired with honest intentions and a shared goal

Lots of confusion here so it is. Stripe 101: 1. Customer id on user or org creation 2. Create products in stripe portal and put in db so Frontend can consume(ids change quite often so having single source of truth helps vs doubling in backend and frontend) 3. Checkout session api for first time subscription. Update subscription api if org and adding more users 4. Billing api so users can update existing subscription, see invoices and the like Congrats you are now a stripe expert.

New developers are at awe at how much code they write. Veteran developers are at awe at how little code they write. I see this time and again in many clients: - I’ve had one client whose “CTO” built their own message queue instead of using a proven OSS product… Sure it was cool and I geeked out about it but it was also an epic waste of time. That lack of experience cost the company $75,000 in direct time spent and probably $2,000-$5,000 monthly in maintenance costs that only the CTO could fix. - a dev agency built their own billing subscription system instead of using the many services out there. My client paid an extra $50,000 for a really really bad version of stripe. - another client had gotten their support system built from scratch instead of using one of the many customer service SaaS products out there… ———— Don’t build it yourself unless you have a good reason and that good reason should be backed by financial proof that it makes sense. Sometimes it’s just not fun being wise…. DM me and follow RedCorner if you think your devs are just wasting time and burning daylight. I offer a free technical assessment to give you an idea.

Most startups choose Stripe for billing, but soon realize there’s more infrastructure needed to manage pricing & packaging. This "additional infrastructure" usually involves building & maintaining admin panels, feature flags, entitlements, and a bunch of UX for plan management (e.g. upgrade paths, usage meters, customer portals, pricing tables, etc). Developers shouldn’t have to build or maintain any of this—none of it is core to their product. At Schematic, we call this "the last mile of pricing & packaging." Central to what we're trying to do for customers is make it easy for developers to outsource this last mile, so they can focus on shipping new value and avoid getting bogged down in the latest pricing or billing initiative.