This is the seventeenth issue of GeekPlux Lab, and each issue will be published simultaneously on the weekly page of my blog . At present, 2,320 students have subscribed to this week’s magazine. You are also welcome to subscribe by email . You can receive the update push as soon as possible.
There were a few more paying readers last week, thank you very much, I didn’t dare to continue paddling. 
At the same time, more than 100 new friends are also welcome. I hope we can make progress together happily. Through the previous two paid articles, I have a deeper understanding of the two revenue models of subscription and advertising, and also understand why all creators love and hate the mechanism of paywalls. I will continue to explore, so I hope Don’t be surprised, readers, I will summarize some experiences when I have a deep enough understanding. In addition, I haven’t released my background data for a long time. I may wait until after the 20th issue. I hope that my entire history and data can bring you some reference and inspiration, and avoid some detours.
Closer to home, in this issue, let’s talk about one of the most popular unicorns in the world – Stripe . This article is divided into two parts :
- Part of the discussion surrounding an open letter it released this month (April 2022)
- Part of it summarizes its product-led, developer-centric , extremely successful growth model .
Students who have never heard of this company may have no experience with overseas payment at all, or they may not understand the overseas entrepreneurial market at all. I listed the world’s largest unicorns in 2021 in #3 , with Stripe in third place, behind ByteDance and SpaceX. I won’t introduce too much here. In short, it is a company that helps enterprises to open up all financial services at low cost . The core is payment. Since “ancient”, payment has been a track where great companies can easily be born. Foreign “ancient” has VISA, Master and PayPal, today there are Block and Stripe, and domestic “ancient” has UnionPay, Alipay, WeChat Pay, and today there are… …OK, not today…
Just three days ago (April 22, 2022), Stripe said in a blog that it would support cryptocurrency payments (USDC will be supported at the beginning), which undoubtedly gave Stripe nitrogen in the race to connect with the payment systems of various countries around the world. The article stated that by the end of this year, Stripe will support encrypted payments in more than 120 countries. But this is just a small milestone on Stripe’s road to opening. This month (April 2022), Stripe released an open letter explaining their current development and future vision. It’s not long, a total of 7 pages PDF, but There is a lot of information in it, and it lists a lot of data . I will analyze it in detail below, but I still recommend everyone to read the original text . For example, at the beginning of the Startups section of the letter, it said:
We try to better understand what they’re up to, what they need, and what could help more get started. We want to support startups from the first lines of code through IPO and beyond.
This sentence made me feel so moved that I got wet, so I read the whole text in one breath. Stripe is a very developer-friendly company, because its founder was a programmer, and Stripe’s earliest name was /dev/payments , which was probably only understood by programmers, so it was later renamed Stripe. It is precisely because of its developer-centric promotion strategy that it has a smooth growth route, which will be summarized in the second part of this article.
Discussion on Open Letter
How much money does Stripe make?
The letter begins by saying, “In 2021, Stripe will process more than $640 billion in payments, a 60% increase over the previous year.” Through this sentence we can calculate the current annual income of Stripe. Because Stripe takes 2.9% + 30 cents per payment, the annual revenue is roughly 6400 * 3% = $19.2 billion.
Compare that to another popular fried chicken company, Block, which reported annual revenue of $17.6 billion, so Stripe is slightly higher.
Block’s market cap is around $74 billion, while Stripe is currently valued at $95 billion. Therefore, readers can estimate how much Stripe can rush to in the future when it IPOs.
Stripe’s Mission and Great Vision
Stripe has always claimed that its mission is to grow the GDP of the internet and help the development of the internet economy. Specifically, it intends to do it in the following four ways:
- Increasing the rate of new business creation by lowering the cost and complexity of getting started
- Helping established enterprises adapt their business models to the internet – Helping established enterprises adapt to the internet
- Increasing cross-border commerce by simplifying and standardizing the complex international payments landscape
- Lowering the costs of scaling by providing simple, reliable, secure, and developer-friendly APIs and services.
To sum up, the pattern is very big, and it is indeed on this road. The letter details Stripe’s efforts on each:
- Startups: Reduce startup costs by launching products such as Payment Links, Stripe Tax, Stripe Invoicing, Revenue Recognition, and Stripe Atlas. Taxes and invoices are naturally a headache for many small companies, and Stripe can help you in one go. In addition, Stripe has also begun to invest in some fintech opportunities.
- Large enterprises: Stripe Terminal and Stripe Connect continue to make efforts to help old and large enterprises rejuvenate, because once the things of many traditional enterprises are connected to Internet payment, they can take off again. Stripe’s Global Payments and Treasury Network (GPTN) now supports 50 payment methods in 72 countries. The cryptocurrency payment mentioned at the beginning of this article also takes GPTN, and hopes to reach 120 countries by the end of the year.
- Cross-border: Between 2019-2021, the volume of cross-border payments at least doubled in every region where Stripe operates
- Infrastructure: This part mainly talks about how Stripe ensures security and stability. Stripe now handles more than 500 million API requests every day, and during the Black Friday (overseas version of Double Eleven), it also handled 99.9998% of API requests. Then I spent a long time in the letter telling the story of how they used typed Ruby to refactor the backend and TypeScript to refactor the frontend. When I read this, I was thinking, can anyone understand this except programmers…
creator economy
Stripe counted 50 creator economy platforms operating on them: Indexing the creator economy , they think the creator economy will be a big trend in the future, many people will create one-person companies and then settle in less developed cities. And there will be more and more platforms around the creator economy. These platforms naturally require payment systems, and Stripe is the best choice.
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Past recommendations:
- Creator Economy – Examples
- How to be financially free without working hard
- How to be the best in the world in a field
Disclaimer : This article is from the author and does not represent any institution or company, nor does it constitute investment advice.
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