| HN Mirror

> This is hard for dev people (like myself) to realize, but if you're looking for commercial success, marketing is generally worth more than the quality of your product.

Disclaimer: I have an MBA.

I don't think that's the case. The factors that contribute to commercial success very much depend on the market that you're operating in and on your company's individual circumstances.

They can include product quality, marketing and PR, cost structure, reach, scale (and economies thereof), revenues, growth, cash flow, and management's ability in a range of areas from crisis management and dealing with bad publicity, to setting the strategy and taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.

For startups who will need to raise more investment rounds, attractiveness to investors also becomes a factor.

Processing credit card payments is a mature market with a commoditised product/service and clear business model. Everyone pretty much offers the same service and, for most customers, price (i.e. how much commission they charge) is the most important differentiating factor[1]. It's a very different market from, say, smartphones, where people are prepared to pay a premium for a "better" product (e.g. the iPhone) despite the fact that they all have the same basic functionality.

When it comes to competing on price, you ideally want to have a lower cost base than your competitors, so you can lower your prices (i.e. charge lower commissions), while still making a profit. One way of reducing your cost-per-transaction (or cost-per-customer) is to exploit economies of scale.

You achieve economies of scale by getting more customers and transaction volume. Marketing is an obvious way to achieve this. And, in a zero-sum market like credit card payments, every customer you win is a customer your competitors can't have.

That's why companies like Stripe are focused so much on growth and expanding into different geographical markets. If they can achieve scale quicker than their competitors, they'll have a competitive advantage and they'll be able to undercut competitors who haven't managed to achieve the same scale (e.g. Balanced).

Other markets are different. In some, customers discriminate on product quality instead of price, or technical excellence (i.e. efficiency) enables a lower cost base.

1: Occasionally, a payments processing company will distinguish itself by establishing a lead in a particular area (e.g. ease of integration) but the competitive advantage is usually short-lived. On this thread, there's much commentary about specific features but these don't matter to the vast majority of customers.