John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe

We started working on Stripe in the fall of 2009 and we launched Stripe in September 2011, which was about two years later. I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it, I said to Patrick, 'Yeah, let's do it. How hard can it be?' That gives you a sense for our mindset. Then the answer was two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that. When we launched two years later, does anyone want to take a guess how many users Stripe had?

Close. 50. So we had spent two years building out the early product and acquiring those 50 users. When you're spending two years getting 50 users, it doesn't feel like a lot of progress. It feels like things are going pretty slow. This is the challenge: if you're working on a startup that's a bad idea, it's going to feel like slow going. But also, if you're working on a startup that's a good idea, it may feel like slow going too. I think the thing that really allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users, hyper-focused on building a great product, and since we weren't dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to really build the product we wanted. One of the cultures that set in really early on was taking almost abnormally good care of those early users. I think someone wrote a blog post about this, but we set up the Stripe API to email us anytime someone ran into a bug. So when you run into a bug on any site and it shows an error message, on Stripe it would email us and occasionally phone call us. Because we figured that when you're there as a developer integrating this product that you expect to be reliable, running into that bug is a terrible experience and we wanted to fix it. So it would alert us. We would often, we weren't doing anything else at the time, we would often open our laptop and start fixing it and send the user a friendly email like, 'Hey, that bug you discovered just there, it's now fixed.' People's minds were blown by this. Sometimes they even found it a bit creepy. We set up a Campfire room that any of our customers could come into at any hour of the day or night. We even if people were based in the Bay Area, we would let them come by the office and we would just sit over their shoulder and help them integrate Stripe. We had in the bottom right of the Stripe dashboard a little prompt that would change on every page load. It would say, 'The thing you guys should improve here' or 'A feature I really want is' or 'The worst thing about this page is.' And people would fill it out and hit enter. Again, because there were so few users, we would reply within 10 minutes. People found it a lot. What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days, it actually had a really surprising viral effect where people had a really good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word of mouth even to this day. We actually baked viral mechanics into the product. For the longest time it was available in invite-only beta mode. I guess you don't really think of payment processing as a really viral social thing, but the only way for the longest time to get access to Stripe was to get invited by someone who knew us. So again, you had this phenomenon where people were not only signing up for Stripe but being recommended to us by someone who was already using us, who knew how to use us. It really helped not just with user growth but user engagement.