Stripe is a content company

September 2020

I can’t stop thinking about Stripe – one of Silicon Valley’s most treasured tech companies – from a content strategy standpoint.

Stripe is a riddle. It has millions of users, yet it hides in plain sight. It’s easy to describe what it’s doing — simplifying online payments and streamlining startup registration — but it’s hard to describe what it is. At least not in the way Google is a search engine, Facebook is a social network and Amazon Web Services is cloud computing.

What’s most fascinating for me, though, is how Stripe balances its under-the-radar nature with an incredible — maybe even groundbreaking — content and publishing operation.

So to try and exorcise these thought loops from my brain, I’m going to outline how Stripe wields words, then make the case for it actually being a tech-differentiated content company. Stripe yourselves in!

Why Stripe is so fascinating

It’s worth a lot of money: $64 billion at the time of writing and one of the world’s most valuable tech unicorns.
Its founders are terribly interesting: Stripe was started by brothers Patrick and John Collison, two incredibly thoughtful Irish lads who make great podcast guests.
It’s unknowingly used by millions: Everyone who buys stuff online will, sooner or later, have their credit card details funneled through Stripe’s network (probably without noticing).
It’s hard to describe: When someone has to explain what Stripe is in a single sentence — usually because it’s worth a lot of money or its founders are terribly interesting — they often resort to vague language like ‘payments infrastructure’ or ‘part of the internet’s financial plumbing’. Good lord, how boring. That last explanation makes it sound like a maker of WiFi-connected toilets.
It’s a great example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: Once you learn Stripe exists, because you heard it’s worth a lot of money, has interesting founders, or you read it about it being a payments…inter… infra… thing (yawn), you notice its name pop up everywhere. I see it all the time at the bottom of checkout pages when shopping for things like Bain masks and Lego pirate ships.

Why Stripe is actually a content company

You use content to connect to Stripe

Say you want your funky new website or startup to accept credit card payments through Stripe. To do this, you need to plug into Stripe’s APIs. And to do this with all the smooth earned confidence of a person who follows instructions, you need to read the relevant Stripe Docs.

Stripe Docs is Stripe’s Library of Alexandria. It’s an online repository of knowledge filled with guides that explain in crisp, plain English, how to hook your website into Stripe’s many services: credit card payment forms, billing, fraud detection, the whole enchilada — even instructions on how to set up your new business in a US tax haven for US$500.

Stripe uses content to connect to you

In true Nietzschean fashion, while you stare into Stripe’s content, Stripe uses content to stare back:

It publishes a literary magazine aimed at developers: Since 2017, Stripe has been putting out a print and digital magazine focused on teamwork and technology called Increment. It’s a serious publication, with well-known contributors from the techosphere such as Owen Williams, Glenn Fleishman and Susan Fowler.
It runs an indie book publisher: Not content with one kind of print media, Stripe also runs Stripe Press, a publisher of brightly-bound books about technology and society, such as the diary of the creator of Prince of Persia.
It bought an online community: In 2017, Stripe acquired Indie Hackers, an online community dedicated to internet-based side hustles and entrepreneurship. Members discuss topics on a Reddit-style homepage, track their projects and — if they’re successful — get interviewed and featured by founder Courtland Allen.
Its founders use content curation as a media strategy: Both Patrick and John Collison have made memorable appearances on podcasts like The Tim Ferriss Show, The Ezra Klein Show and Invest Like the Best, where they discuss big ideas and book recommendations (Patrick even keeps a digital library on his personal website). These interviews show the breadth of each brother’s reading diet while also pushing a kind of soft power for Stripe as a place where thinkers and tinkerers can turn their interests into economic activity.

Its own employees call it a content company

Patrick McKenzie, originator of Patio11’s Law, has described Stripe as, “a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware.”

Takeaways

1. Well-chosen words can achieve almost anything

As Stripe shows, words even have the power to make invisible internet infrastructure exciting.

2. Your documentation is also your product

If customers have to interact with technical documentation alongside your product, then that technical documentation is also your product. Ergo, you should invest heavily in making that content terrific, not tedious. Be the Stripe Docs you want to see in the world.

3. Blur the boundaries of your content marketing

Your content marketing stack can include traditional channels like online blogs or magazines, but don’t be afraid to pull a Stripe and branch out into other areas: niche publishing/republishing of written works, custodianship of user-generated content, and content curation on other people’s platforms and media properties. The ROI may surprise you. As Byrne Hobart noted in his newsletter, one of the second-order effects of Stripe Press is its potential to act as an outer-funnel for their recruiting activities, with the eye-catching books likely to attract the attention of a lot of technical and literary folks whom Stripe would love to hire.

Counterpoints

“Lies! Stripe is Infrastructure-as-a-Service. They even embed servers in Visa’s data centres. No content company would do that.”

You wouldn’t expect a content company to put theme parks at the centre of its business model either, yet there’s Disney. Differentiation is one hell of a drug.

“Does this mean other platforms like Amazon Web Services are also content companies?”

Yes. Content is vital to all internet infrastructure (and internet businesses generally!). It’s like the term ‘technology’. It means nothing specific, yet encompasses everything important.

Connections

Books are infrastructure too

Turns out the books-infrastructure relationship is a two-way street. As Craig Mod wrote in Wired in 2018: “A ‘book’ is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible.”

Content really is everything

Content isn’t just about the words and pictures. What we see on the page is the tip of the iceberg. Content is about the business model, the value proposition, the culture, the systems and processes, the roles, the mental models and the structures. It’s political and emotional.

— Laura Robertson (@laurazoee) June 25, 2020

Content focus = value creation

Stripe’s focused content efforts, combined with its motto to “grow the GDP of the internet”, reminds me of futurist Tim O’Reilly’s ethos that technology companies should “create more value than [they] capture”.

As it so happens, O’Reilly also publishes a lot of great technology content through his company O’Reilly Media. Coincidence? 🤔