Patrick Collison explains how Stripe found product/market fit by obsessing over user behavior. The team ran a public support chat, got email alerts for every API request, and added a feedback box with negative-priming prompts to surface problems fast enough to fix them in under 15 minutes.
Chapters
We really tried very hard to understand in very granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on. Just to give you some examples, we had a chat room for providing support. When people were integrating Stripe, it was actually a public chat room, which had some downsides because if we'd broken something or if somebody had some embarrassing issue, everyone would see us. We thought that was good because it would actually put more pressure on us to have the product be good. And we had literally every time, sort of for the first, I don't know, call it 10 users of Stripe, every time somebody sent an API request to Stripe, it sent an email to us. So we were like looking at every single API request. And if we saw users do something weird, we're like, well, why did they do that, right? Or kind of, where were our docs confusing or whatever? We did things like every time anyone ever hit an error that generated like a high priority email to us, and so we would sort of try to immediately go solve it. And that also kind of generated sort of, I think, this, this pleasant kind of user experience where, I mean, it's frustrating when you hit an error in some service, but we could then often sort of 15 minutes later, reach out to them and say, hey, we saw that you have encountered this problem, it's all fixed now. These are all kind of examples, I would say, of the sort of general pattern of sort of really trying to be kind of hyper attentive to all the micro details of sort of what people were doing with the product and kind of iterating rapidly in response to it. And generally speaking, I think that sort of pre product market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. And so if it's 20 users, you can kind of in some sense afford to just look at everything they're doing and try to understand what's working, what isn't. And actually on this point, we had a thing at the bottom of every webpage. We had a little sort of text box, but we had placeholder text in it to sort of try to prime people to tell us things. Most of the prompts were negative. It was like the worst thing about Stripe is, or the worst thing about this page is, or I really hate the way Stripe or whatever. At that stage you have to be kind of masochistic. And so again, we'd be sort of always waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to do list for the day ahead.
