How Stripe got its users
Documentation treated as a product. It ranks on every technical payment query and converts the developer before the decision maker.
Confirmed. The team said it publicly, or the signals leave no room for doubt.
Reproducible, but it will cost you real money, real months, or a skill you may not have.
The edge you do not have: A level of documentation investment no small team can sustain
- A documentation surface that compounds instead of decaying
- Users who arrive already integrated, because the platform they already use ships you by default
- A permanent docs team, plus engineering budget for the docs tooling itself
- A warm founder network dense enough to hand-install the first accounts
- The nerve to publish nothing while the private beta runs
Editorial SEO in 2026
The channel most damaged by AI answers. It still works if you bring data or an opinion, not a summary.
Everything on this channel →The play
6 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Sign your first customers by hand: when a founder says yes, integrate them on the spot, on their own machine.
done whenEvery early account went live during the meeting where it was sold.
- 2
Run a private beta with no marketing, and open public signups only once users talk about the product unprompted.
done whenYou open signups with no marketing push, because users are already sending you people.
- 3
Ship docs with a live working API key on the page and copy-paste samples in several languages.
done whenA stranger can run a real call straight from the docs page, without setting up an account.
- 4
Run a public Capture The Flag security contest for developers, then open-source the contest code.
done whenDevelopers who are not your customers enter, and the code stays public after it ends.
- 5
Ship an embed layer so other platforms carry your payments, then sign the big site builders as your distribution.
done whenNew users arrive already integrated, signed up by a platform you never sold to directly.
- 6
Make docs and resource guides your SEO asset instead of the blog, and build your own authoring stack to publish at volume.
done whenYour guides pull more organic traffic and links than your blog, and a writer can publish without an engineer.
The product itself
read from stripe.com, live“Une infrastructure financière qui booste votre croissance. Acceptez des paiements, proposez des services financiers et p”
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
One of the largest private tech companies
What else they ran
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.