After dunking a bit on Robinhood, I want to look at a brand that is less contentious: Stripe.
Why should you care? If you’re building something that you want people to understand and be attracted to, telling the right story is critical. Studying how others accomplish this — both successfully and not — is a great starting point.
Good brands are constantly communicating their message. The most effective ones weave a compelling narrative. A story rather than just a collection of statements. While this is done across lots of channels, for now I’m sticking to analyzing one of the simpler ones: company websites.
A good website gives you just enough space to sell someone on Why. Why you’re worth spending time with, why they should trust you, and why you’re special.
Stripe’s does a pretty good job of communicating a lot without feeling overly overwhelming.
I’m going into this with the knowledge that Stripe provides infrastructure for accepting card payments (debit & credit), along with a few other things that they’ve added recently.
A platform, a toolkit
While they do emphasize the “online payments” aspect in their headline, they don’t say much about it after. That’s interesting… a credit card processing company that doesn’t hammer on about processing credit cards.
Instead, Stripe wants to be seen as a software platform. A collection of tools and services for running internet businesses. Dare I say, an API. This suggests their ambition. Compare Stripe to a payments processing incumbent like PayPal.
Stripe was born a payments company, but they see themselves as much more. What’s the opposite of boring finance? Sexy software.
Not only a platform, but one being used by some of the “world’s most innovative technology companies”. In fact, “millions” of them handling “billions of dollars.” A friendly, accessible tech product that is battle tested.
Nothing to fear
The visual design is careful to feel friendly. The colors are soft, angles and icons are playful, and animations are fun. These all work towards creating a feeling more like a “friendly new tech product” than an “old world finance company” — exactly what Stripe is aiming for. An API that you can play with, not an intimidating financial product.
The copy is wordy, which makes the experience a bit heavier than I would prefer given the rest of the design. Also a bit of a quibble, but I find contradiction between the overall soft playfulness and the sharp edges of the angles in the header.
For developers?
Outwardly, the next screen declares developer-friendliness. Clean, simple APIs to do everything you need, in a variety of languages (as subtly illustrated by the fun animation of the gear icon).
However, the developer friendliness message is a secondary one. This screen starts off with reminders of the innovative companies using Stripe. And this is the second screen.
Stripe’s primary focus seems to be targeting decision makers and product people, but remaining strong enough with devs that they won’t have a problem with the choice.
Ready for the big leagues
Stripe builds up a coherent message that they’re a platform for building an Internet business, and they only need about 2000 pixels. Much of the effectiveness comes from what they do not do. There’s no list of products. Other than mentioning payments, you have no idea what others could be until you scroll towards the bottom of the website (omitted here, for brevity). They don’t throw lists of features at you.
They do present an alluring narrative. They cite the innovative tech unicorns that they support — Slack, Asana, etc. Stripe is telling us: “The most innovative companies are using Stripe, what could be possible in your business if you also used Stripe?”
They’re trying to make a difficult transition here — from startup necessity to a sort of IBM of fintech. Judging by the above screens, my guess is they have no problem getting business from new companies. But, at least for now, the juiciest potential clients are old companies. What they really want is to capture them. And what’s for sale? A bit of that innovation magic, which every older company is desperate for. No other payments processor is offering that.