Introducing Increment subscriptions

https://stripe.com/gb/blog/increment-subscriptions

by rolivercoffee • 7 years ago

89 56 7 years ago

stripe.com

marvindanig7• 7 years ago

Yucks, more dead-tree printing. So much for the 'cradle of innovation' from Silicon Valley, lol.

saas_sam• 7 years ago

Do you use a bidet?

krossitalk• 7 years ago

Swapping paper for water isn't much better for the environment long term.

mc32• 7 years ago

Trees for paper are specifically grown to produce paper pulp. They’re not cutting down virgin forest.

You could argue it’s pretty monocultural but otherwise I don’t see much of s problem with it.

ceejayoz4• 7 years ago

The overall manufacturing process pollutes quite a bit, doesn't it?

marvindanig7• 7 years ago

Yeah right, tilling arable lands and pulping more trees isn't a problem at all. Whatever happened to critical thinking.

cptskippy6• 7 years ago

The average American's total paper consumption accounts for less than 1% of their total carbon footprint. So in terms of impact, you would reduce your carbon footprint more by going vegetarian 2 days a week than you would by entirely eliminating your paper consumption.

spamizbad2• 7 years ago

I think more companies should create zines. But maybe not be so corporate about it.. like this... be more authentic. Very powerful culture building tool tho IMO.

ystrickler• 7 years ago

The Creative Independent is an example: https://thecreativeindependent.com/

GrayTextIsTruth2• 7 years ago

Could you elaborate on what makes these feel corporate? The design seems really modern and polished to me.

spamizbad2• 7 years ago

"really modern and polished" strikes my tastes as corporate in the world of zines. Just my opinion tho, not trying to gatekeep.

kradeelav• 7 years ago

zines are interestingly their own subculture that sparked out of sci-fi fandom and punk culture, so anything more "polished" than those origins is going to seem corporate by comparison. This is a pretty good article that gives something to compare to (https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/88911/brief-history-zine...).

ergl2• 7 years ago

Snapchat created Real Life Magazine (https://reallifemag.com) but other than that it doesn't have editorial control.

frandroid2• 7 years ago

*magazines

frandroid2• 7 years ago

I don't know what the downvoters or the Parent think they're saying, but companies cannot produce "zines", by definition. Zines are produced by individuals. A company "zine" is a magazine, no matter how "cool" and lofi the layout.

cedricium• 7 years ago

As mentioned elsewhere, Airbnb also publishes a magazine: https://www.airbnb.com/magazine

vageli• 7 years ago

Is it just me or is it somewhat humorous that the checkout uses Shopify and not stripe?

srehnborg• 7 years ago

I believe, Shopify ultimately uses Stripe for the payment gateway.

brenden2• 7 years ago

Airbnb did something like this back when I worked there. Not sure what came of it. I do remember seeing some copies of it sitting on coffee tables throughout the office.

atestu• 7 years ago

It's still going, I see it on newsstands

paxys• 7 years ago

I have seen so many of these magazines floating around I assumed there was a subscription already.

randall• 7 years ago

Man I wish they had a Kindle edition. Would so subscribe.

GrayTextIsTruth2• 7 years ago

Can anyone speak to the quality of the articles? Thinking about subscribing using my company’s “education allowance”.

mrala• 7 years ago

You can see for yourself, the articles are free to read online: https://increment.com/

101008• 7 years ago

Unrelated: I do a digital magazine too, people can download the PDF. I'd love to give the people to opportunity to buy a printed copy if they want to (and maybe do some profit on the side). I think that's a good SaaS idea: upload your magazine in PDF and let the startup do everything, from pritning to shipping, and get a cut on that.

solarkraft• 7 years ago

My gut says that this must already exist.

reaperducer3• 7 years ago

I can't think of the name of the service, but yes it did exist around 2003ish. I don't know if it's still around.

finger• 7 years ago

Isn’t that the definition of a publisher? They publish your content in a chosen format and you get a cut of the profits? Either way, Amazon, for instance, has a service for publishing books.

ergl2• 7 years ago

This is mostly what Blurb (https://www.blurb.com) does!

wilde• 7 years ago

Blurb is amazing! They printed a photo book that I gave to my fiancée when I proposed. Top quality printing and an easy to use app to create the book.

scraplab• 7 years ago

I was a co-founder of Newspaper Club (https://www.newspaperclub.com) (but left a few years ago). They do this sort of thing, such as printing internal and public papers for Facebook, Mailchimp and Spotify, amongst others.

We briefly ran a full online marketplace for individual copies printed on demand and shipped, with a revenue split, but it was too difficult to make the economics work.

However, if you need to print a few hundred copies and send them all round the world, I expect they can organise that.

anant90• 7 years ago

I wonder how many great marketing opportunities/channels are written off because they seem to deviate from the values of focus or frugality? And inversely, how many distractions are hiding under the cover of unconventional marketing? I genuinely don't know.

tw1010• 7 years ago

Curious: Do people find value in reading increment? I've tried reading it a few times but have often found it to be too many words for too little deep insight. Would love to be convinced otherwise though.

reaperducer3• 7 years ago

People have been saying "print is dead" for almost a century now, and somehow it hasn't happened.

I read an article a couple of months ago which stated that magazine subscriptions are up, and so is printed catalog distribution and sales from those catalogs.

Anecdotally, subscribing to Apple News only whetted my wife's appetite for the printed versions of the magazines she sees on her iPhone. She's since subscribed to the print versions of three of them.

We were at the rodeo one day and one of the magazines had a booth. I mentioned to the people from the magazine that my wife subscribed to their publication because of Apple News, and they said they hear that a lot.

Of course, I've also read that some publishers are not happy with the revenue cut they get from Apple News, so perhaps its not right for every publisher.

bradstewart2• 7 years ago

Agreed. Also anecdotally, but I feel the same way with photographs. While digital photos are amazing and I never want to go back, I also really, really enjoy printed albums. Especially for photos of a trip or special event. I find it way easier to capture, remember, and re-tell the story by flipping through a book.

marvindanig7• 7 years ago

Have you tried the book on Ladakh by Satie Sharma on the iPad? I loved it for exactly these reasons.

https://bubblin.io/book/ladakh-by-satie-sharma/1

detaro2• 7 years ago

That's something I often tell people a bit unmotivated with their photography: Go and get some of your images printed! It's surprising how much of a difference it can make.

joegahona• 7 years ago

I read an article a couple of months ago which stated that magazine subscriptions are up

Would love more context on this. Up from when? Up for whom? Which countries? The details matter in something like this.

"Print is dead" is hyperbole but I thought it was pretty established that print is struggling compared to the mid/late-'90s or mid-'00s. https://www.statista.com/statistics/184055/estimated-revenue...

mchusma• 7 years ago

Please introduce core missing features to billing and payments first before print magazine subscriptions.

The most obvious one to me: allow people to test their applications in production. Allow them to generate a temporary fake card number, expiration, and cv2 that Stipe can authorize as if it is real.

Allow you to generate and expire it from the console and via the API.

We had people on stripe's support team for 6 months tell us we can't test in production on real cards. We didn't want to, but we do have to test production check out flows, and currently the only way to do it is with real cards.

Someone senior finally told us "of course everyone tests production, you have to. Just nobody likes it. "

I would put out a call for at least 10 to 100 customer requested features first before a print magazine.

I think it's been almost 5 years since stripe has introduced a feature we actually wanted. I'm not trying to be a troll, but this super obvious payment testing thing really bothers me because 100% of customers who build apps for payments should be using it. And it's not built.

sudhirj• 7 years ago

Aside from Stripe not doing what customers are asking for, there are very good reasons why fake cards in production is a really bad idea:

* the fake cards can leak, and your customers can start using them on your site. I'm not sure how you want to handle this. If this is production your code shouldn't have to be checking for card number patterns, and since you don't get the full card number anyway, I'm not even sure how you would.

* Part of your bookkeeping is that all production transactions are reported as income, both to your CPA and to the IRS / tax authority of your country. You're going to have a major headache trying to explain what's going on to the auditors. These fake transactions will forever be part of your audit trail.

* It'll screw up your reporting - your analytics, revenue, churn rate etc will be artificial, and you'll have a hard time getting people to trust them the moment it's even possible to fake those numbers with test cards.

We have a ticketing system, and yes we do use our own cards to buy low value stuff on production. We then trigger the normal return / complaint flows to get actual refunds back (Stripe doesn't charge you anything for refunds), so it's really no skin off anyone's back, and it does properly test both your purchase and refund flows fully.

Introducing Increment subscriptions

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