This is the story Detective Scoots, which was a Scooter-

Rental company, located inside San Francisco, servicing the

most dynamic and eco-conscious city in America. This was at

a time when the City, San Francisco, boasted among its

accolades the privilege of being on AAA top five “Most

Visited American Cities” list for well over a decade. Yes,

Detective Scoots and San Francisco had it good.

As we stated earlier Detective Scoots was a startup company,

renting electric scooters in the City of San Francisco. Scooter Networks

(Or Detective Scoots in this story.) concentrated its marketing efforts

very successfully on the abundance of local citizens dedicated to green

and sustainable transportation, providing electric scooter rentals to San

Francisco’s massive multi-billion dollar tourists industry, and doing both

utilizing cutting edge innovative smartphone, mobile data, and electronic

scooter technology. One day, while traveling in the local socio-economic

market ecosystem Detective Scoots serviced, it dawned upon Detective

Scoots that if it created and collaborated with a third-party payment

processing company Scooter Networks could defray the cost and risk

liabilities associated with chargebacks, not have to pay out of pocket to

keep its own payment technologies current, and completely shield itself

from malicious financial hacker attacks for its customers credit card

information, as the third party payment processing company would be

the only company storing and possessing customers credit card and

payment information. Whether it’d be to shield and defray costs and

liability, or just so Detective Scoots would have one less thing to worry

about so it could focus instead on running a scooter rental company,

utilizing a third party payer processing company seemed to just make a

whole lot of business sense.

As Detective Scoots (Still Scooter-Networks) began his on-line

investigation into which company would be the best market channel

partner, Detective Scoots came across three different third party

payment processing companies. All of them, at least on their face,

seemed to be the exact same. They all processed payments online, as

well as boasting several other options. However, being a start-up

company founded in 2012, technology driven, growth oriented, and San

Francisco based company; what Detective Scoots valued the most was a

similar corporate culture, flexibility, and reliability of any company he

would consider taking on as a strategic business partner. Whoever

Scooter Networks partnered with, it was going to be with a company that

added value to Scooter Networks and its customers. A company willing

to help Scooter-Networks creator realize their vision of their electric

scooter rental service being utilized on mass, in the manner that public

bicycles are operated in Europe, whereby its users would be utilizing the

scooters one way only across town.

The first company vetted by Detective Scoots was Bill-buddy. Bill-

buddy was a corporate giant, with years of experience, over several

billion in assets, its own credit card line, and more. Bill-buddy was very

big and important. In fact Bill-buddy made it a point to tell Detective

Scoots just how important and superior it was then everyone else,

including Detective Scoots. This was reflected in the processes, rules,

policies, software, options, and services Bill-buddy was willing to offer

Detective Scoots. See Bill-buddy believed itself to be so important it

believed that nothing new could be created or innovated, and Detective

Scoots would have to change its processes, software, and possible

business model in order to use Bill-buddy. Bill-buddy also hadn’t

invested as much into its mobile platform, and believed itself to be the

end all in the third party payment processor market. Needless to say, this

is not exactly the culture Detective Scoots was looking for, and Scooter-

Networks certainly wasn’t going to allow a payment processing

company to dictate how it was going to do business or try to run

Network-Scooters via Bill Buddy’s corporate policies! No… Bill buddy

was still living off the juice of being the first payment processing

company on the internet. Moreover, while Bill-buddy was still the

biggest third party payment processing company, it was far from the

best. Therefore, Detective Scoots continued his investigation.

After finding Bill-Buddy’s culture too big, inflexible, and

impersonal, Detective Scoots ran into a company named 2checkyouin on

line. 2Checkyouin was too small, and nobody had really ever heard of

them. Their financials weren’t as strong as Scooter-Networks would

hope to see in a strategic partner either. In fact they are so tiny and

unknowledgeable, even though they are themselves a third party

payment processing company, one of their boasted about selling points

was the fact that they accept Bill Buddy payments. No wonder Bill

Buddy thinks it’s so cool; it has the smallest guys in the market

accepting their payment, even though they’re direct competitors.

Detective Scoots was seeking a market channel partner. It was not

looking to have to carry a company too new to have developed a

corporate culture of its own yet, and was so uncreative it was simply

copying what the Bill Buddy the market leader was doing. No this

company would never do as a strategic market channel partner, and so

Detective Scoots continued investigating.

Then Detective Scoots found a company named Stripe, and it was

just right. Stripe was the sort of company that had as much to offer as

Bill Buddy, but was still willing to work and create with Scooter

Networks. Stripe had solid financials of over a billion and a half, and a

strategic partnering with a company like Stripe that is on the rise just as

much as Scooter Networks is itself would help secure and promote any

third or fourth round funding that either company may seek in order to

expand. Moreover, Stripe was the premier mobile third party payment

processing platform and company, and very willing to customize its

offerings for Detective Scoots. For example Stripe was willing and able

to build a joint application with Scooter Networks, because Stripe truly

wanted to collaborate.

Moreover, Stripe software already functioned much like the

software and applications Scooter Networks was already utilizing, as

Stripe offers monthly to yearly subscription, and coupon discount

features. At the same time, Stripe as the local startup “Company of

Engineers.” Stripe culturally had a great deal in common with Scooter

Networks, as far as desire to grow, willingness to take on new ideas and

collaborations, and try out new mutually beneficial arrangements. So

you can see the story has a happy ending as Detective Scoots (AKA

Scooter Networks), finally found the perfect company for a strategic

market channel partner who was just right.

So what are some quick take aways from this horrific attempt to

make this presentation more interesting, besides the fact that this wasn’t

a very good Detective story? Hopefully, it’s that while we may be no

good at fantasy, in reality we can save Scooter Networks a ton of money

in data storage, servers, liabilities, software upgrades, risk aversion, and

more, all of which will have a very real and profound outcome on your

bottom line. If you are not already partnered with a third party payment

processing company, and especially if you already are let us show you

that we can do more for you for a lower price. For example we are aware

that part of your target marketing demographic is the billion dollar

tourist industry in San Francisco. Therefore, Scooter Networks may be

interested in allowing on line customers of vacation booking company

websites like Hotels.com or others to make prepaid reservations for

scooter rentals. As your third party payment processing partner we will

collaborate with those companies, and make sure that you can get paid in

advanced for any reservations of scooters from travel and vacation sites.

However, that is merely one example of the flexibility, fluidity, and out

of the box strategic thinking we bring to the table, as your strategic

market channel partner.

Finally, what you’ll quickly discover with Stripe as your strategic

third party payment processing partner is that you will receive a high

level of customer service, in the form a personal account liaison that is

available for you almost 24x 7 (We do have to sleep some time.). Not

even Pay pal merchant account services will offer you that sort of

attention. Your liaison officer will be dedicated to our strategic

partnership, knows your name, knows which company your are with,

and understands what you and your company are all about. It is the

personal touch that will let you know that you’ve found the right

company, with the right corporate culture, the right package of services,

protections, and dedication to customer service to partner with, who at

the same time still has maintained their “let’s build something new”

entrepreneurial spirit about them.

We hope the story helped put things in perspective, and at least

broke the ice. When it comes to market channel collaboration, Stripe is

the way to go! We understand that you may not feel you need a third

party payment processor market channel partner, or that you are happy

with your current company. However, before you do something you’ll

hate yourself for later in life (Like blow us off, or not hear us out.), why

don’t we all sit down for lunch on us, and see if we can’t better explain

to you the unlimited possibilities that partnering with us brings you. We

are just the right size and have the required motivation to build with you,

and to offer you customization like no other company out there.

So, how about it? Lunch is on us… Your office or ours? Whichever

you prefer. We would appreciate greatly the opportunity to sit down

with you, get to know each other, and allow the chemistry created from a

truly dynamic market channel partnering and collaboration to begin. We

look forward to hearing from you. Call and ask for Joel Drotts, he’s our

Strategic Partners and Corporate Relationships guy. He’s dying to hear

what you thought of his story. Talk to you soon.

Cheers,

Stripe Payments Processing