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Stripe founders installed it themselves
Behind the scenes, payments were handled in a very startup-y way, since there were no bank deals yet. Today Stripe is a billion-dollar company.
Anyone who wanted to use it got a visit. The Stripe founders came to the office and integrated it into the customer's product themselves.
Part of the reason was desperation, because they wanted anyone at all to use it. The other part was practical: doing the integration in person turned up bugs before the customers could find them.
How did the Collison installation get its name?
The name comes from Paul Graham, a co-founder of Y Combinator, who described the practice in his 2013 essay Do Things That Don't Scale. He wrote that when a prospective user told Patrick and John Collison they would like to try Stripe, the brothers offered to set it up on the spot, on that person's own laptop. Graham called it the Collison installation. The brothers started Stripe in 2010, and it opened to the public in September 2011.
Why does watching users reveal so many bugs?
Usability researchers Jakob Nielsen and Thomas Landauer reported in 1993 that testing with about five users uncovers roughly 85 percent of a product's usability problems. Someone watching a person work through an unfamiliar setup sees the hesitations, wrong guesses, and confusing steps that never show up in a bug report. The builder already knows what each step is supposed to do, which hides those stumbles from the inside. The figure came from a mathematical model Nielsen and Landauer built of how usability problems get found.
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