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Developers got it, everyone else didn't
Payments for developers
When Cristina Cordova joined Stripe, friends and family had mostly never heard of it. She would explain that it was payments for developers, so people could accept payments online. The follow-up question was whether people could already do that: they could pay for things online, so what was new?
The real problem
The answer was that the product is really for developers. For an engineer, getting payments integrated into a site is harder than it should be, and that is the problem Stripe was aimed at solving. She treated early Stripe as a developer tools product.
Two camps
Engineers got it right away when she told them. They had seen it on Hacker News. Everyone else didn't really get it, which left two camps. A product whose audience knows what it is has probably got something going in a positive direction.
Why was online payment integration so hard?
Accepting a card online used to mean stitching together a merchant account, a payment gateway, and security compliance. Developers had to read thick documentation from several vendors, and each vendor had its own approval process. Card networks also set security rules, known as PCI compliance, that apply to anyone handling card data. Stripe's approach was to bundle those steps behind a single interface for developers.
Why does Hacker News matter to developers?
Hacker News is a discussion site run by Y Combinator, launched in 2007 under the name Startup News. Its readers are largely programmers and founders, and a post that rises on its front page can send thousands of visitors within hours. Developer tools often spread there first, since engineers share products they find useful. Many technical products have gained early users from a single popular thread.
Why do developer tools spread by word of mouth?
Developers often choose their tools themselves, without waiting for a company purchasing process. They try a product, and if it works, they recommend it to teammates. That bottom-up path means adoption can start inside a company before anyone in management has heard of it. Many successful developer tools grew this way before building sales teams.