Chasing growth, most founders think about scale. But what makes scale possible isn’t technology—it’s trust.
Brothers John and Patrick Collison are the founders of Stripe, a FinTech unicorn valued at over $100 billion. Headquartered in Dublin and San Francisco, its 7,000 employees build tools for payment processing, fraud detection, company formation, and an ever-expanding landscape of technology-enabled services.
What took them from scrappy startup to critical infrastructure was just nine lines of code. Copy and paste those nine lines into your website and voilà—credit card payments through Stripe.
Simple, right? Not quite.
Nine Lines of Code
As the brothers worked to scale Stripe, they had a recurring issue. Potential customers wouldn’t act. They would gain some interest, but that was where the conversation stalled. Curiosity alone was not enough. No code, no customer.
The Collisons were confident in the product, and knew if they could get the code installed, customers would stick with them. But more importantly, watching customers interact with their product would help them understand things they could never learn from a distance.
When a prospect agreed to try Stripe, the brothers didn’t just send a link and hope for the best. Instead, they’d say, “We appreciate that, now hand over your laptop,” and they’d install those nine lines right then and there.
This hands-on approach became known as the “Collison Installation.” It removed friction, but more to the point, it gave the brothers a front-row seat to watch how their product worked in the wild.
During each installation, the brothers observed what no remote demo could: the split-second hesitation before clicking submit, the patchwork systems needing integration, and the candid questions that exposed real needs.
As Paul Graham writes, “Sometimes we advise founders of B2B startups to take over-engagement to an extreme, and to pick a single user and act as if they were consultants building something just for that one user…keep tweaking till you fit their needs perfectly, and you’ll usually find you’ve made something other users want too.”
Sometimes Understanding is Unscalable
Delightful solutions don’t scale. Not at first. Each is built painstakingly, brick by brick, bespoke.
Stripe faced plenty of competition. What made them different wasn’t technology alone—it was how they adapted it. Sitting beside customers showed them exactly what to build next. That understanding transforms a clever tool into something people can’t and won’t live without.
Steve Jobs used “insanely great” to describe Apple products. He wasn’t just using “insanely” as a synonym for “very”—he meant focusing on quality to a degree that would be considered pathological in everyday life. When the Collisons asked someone to hand over their laptop and sat quietly watching them interact with Stripe, more than a few probably got that insane vibe.
For founders in the earliest stages, the product is rarely great. It’s buggy, incomplete, missing features. You make up the difference with attentiveness—genuine curiosity about how your customers work.
Scale begins with understanding. And understanding often hides inside the unscalable moments.
Do Your Own Collison Installation
I think about those nine lines of code a lot. Initiative and understanding all rolled into one.
Isn’t that the best way to start a relationship? Business or otherwise?
When someone tells me they’re interested in Passing Notes to Strangers, Dave Flynn on the Radio, or an excellent blog post every Monday morning, I don’t send them a link and hope for the best. I sign them up on the spot. I’ll take their phone right there and make it happen.
I haven’t added five-star reviews on their behalf yet, but I’m warming up to the idea.
Likewise, some of my best friendships got rolling because one side or the other went first. Someone said, “I like the cut of this guy’s jib, let’s play golf, have a beer, or see a show.”
Inertia is a powerful force. Even people with the best intentions will sit on something indefinitely. As creators, sellers, entrepreneurs, friends, shoot, even family, we can help. Don’t mistake a polite “I should check that out” for a commitment. If someone’s genuinely interested, eliminate the gap between intention and action.
Grab the phone. Install the code. Sign them up yourself.
Where can you do your own Collison Installation? Think about where things stall, then ask yourself: what if you just took them by the hand and did it with them?
The Collison Installation isn’t just a Stripe story—it applies to anyone trying to turn curiosity into customers.
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