Funnel teardown: Stripe (Payments infrastructure)
Founder(s): Patrick and John Collison

Stripe's funnel is documentation. The marketing site sets the appointment; the docs close the deal; the brand is built one developer at a time.

TL;DR: Stripe's funnel is structured around developers evaluating payment infrastructure: the marketing site states the simple proposition, the documentation answers every implementation question, the case studies anchor the brand to credible companies. The lesson for indie founders: when your buyer evaluates by trying the product, documentation IS the closing surface and should be treated as part of the funnel.

What they sell: Payment processing infrastructure with subscriptions, billing, fraud prevention, payouts, and a deep API ecosystem.
Who it's for: Developers, indie SaaS, growing companies, and enterprises accepting payments online.
Pricing: 2.9% + 30¢ per successful charge (US standard, verified 2026-05-17). Custom pricing at scale.

Hook pattern: Single-line value proposition
The hero communicates one promise: 'payments infrastructure for the internet.' There is no story, no founder narrative, no industry framing. The implicit argument is that developers know what they need from a payments platform and the hero exists to confirm Stripe is that thing. Compression beats persuasion when the buyer is already qualified.

Story pattern: Documentation-as-story
The story is in the docs, not the marketing site. Stripe's documentation is famous in developer circles for clarity, completeness, and code samples in every major language. The docs are the closing surface — a developer evaluating Stripe reads them while deciding, and the experience of reading them tells the story that the marketing copy cannot.

Offer pattern: Single transparent rate plus custom enterprise
Headline pricing is one line: 2.9% + 30¢. No setup fees, no monthly fees, no minimum volume. This simplicity is the entire pricing-page argument — developers evaluating against PayPal, Square, or legacy processors see the simplest comparison and convert without deeper analysis. Enterprise pricing exists behind a sales conversation, which captures large deals without exposing volume discounts.

What's working:
Documentation as closing surface — clarity and completeness compress evaluation time materially.|Single round percentage (2.9%) signals confidence and removes pricing-comparison friction.|Case studies feature recognizable companies, borrowing authority from category-credible brands.|Add-on products (Connect, Atlas, Tax, Radar, Billing) priced on their own pages prevent main pricing-page clutter.|Founder-credible (Patrick Collison's Twitter and writing) anchors the brand to humans who understand the developer audience.|International expansion published as documentation events, not marketing campaigns, matches the developer audience's preference for substance over splash.

What to adapt:
If your buyer evaluates by trying the product, treat documentation as part of the funnel. Bad docs are a leak; great docs compress evaluation.|Single-line round pricing signals confidence and removes the comparison-shopping friction that detailed tier pages create.|Case studies work when the logos are credible to your buyer's category. Match the logos to the audience.

What to avoid:
Do not adopt single-line pricing if your unit economics require negotiation at certain volume bands; you need at least a custom tier.|Do not over-invest in documentation polish if your product is not stable enough to warrant it; rapidly changing docs are worse than minimal ones.|Do not use case-study logos if you do not have the customers; aspirational logos signal absence.

Brunson lens:
Hook: Single-line value-proposition hook (Brunson 'one-sentence pitch') for an already-qualified audience.
Story: Documentation-as-story (rare in Brunson canon but legitimate) — the docs are the proof asset, more credible than any case study.
Offer: Single transparent rate plus custom enterprise — Brunson 'simplicity-as-anchor' move that removes comparison-shopping mental math.
Value ladder tier: Single transactional rung with custom enterprise back-end and add-on products as parallel ladders.