Collisons Install Payment Systems

A story about how Stripe's founders, the Collison brothers, showed unusual intensity in acquiring their first customers, as told by Paul Graham of Y Combinator.

"We started calling this the 'Collison Installation.' Most companies when they would talk to a potential customer, they would bump into another founder and say 'Here's what we do.' The other person would say 'That's interesting' and they'd respond 'Awesome, I'll send you a link to the beta when we're ready.'

What the Collisons would do was very different. As soon as somebody showed any sign of interest, they would say 'Awesome, do you have your laptop on you? I can just set you up right now. I'll do it for you.' They would literally brute force get customers on board. The person would open up their laptop, and they would literally install Stripe, explain it to them, and onboard them on the spot. They did this to the first 100-200 customers manually.

I wondered why don't more people do this? It's not like this was some outrageous strategy or even that hard to do. The reason people don't do this is two things: shyness or fear of rejection. They think that big things come from big things, but actually big things come from an accumulation of smaller things."