Building a Developer Cult
If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen.Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them.So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses and has something many others, including Stripe cannot compete with efficiently: (far) lower pricing, higher market coverage.The developer experience for Adyen is decent - no complaints, perhaps a bit less “magical”. They will definitely have a fraction of the customers, but those customers are huge. They get and seek little to no publicity compared to Stripe, yet have built a similarly sized business from the Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which is remarkable.It’s a completely different market strategy, and company strategy. Read the Adyen values to see how different the two companies are[1] - Adyen putting “merchants” first, with a mention of support, while Stripe prioritizing developers and small businesses. And company culture could not be more different either - saying this as someone who knows both Adyen and Stripe employees. Both are companies to admire, and show that there is no “one” good way to build immense value.It will be fascinating to see what happens as these two companies expand to compete with each other (meaning Adyen starting to go after small businesses, and Stripe after the largest merchants, with a differentiated pricing model).[1] https://www.adyen.com/about