Stripe

Before Stripe, accepting a payment online required weeks of paperwork, a merchant account application, a payment gateway integration, and hundreds of lines of code. Patrick and John Collison, two brothers from rural Ireland, reduced all of it to seven lines of code. A developer could copy and paste Stripe's integration into a website and start accepting payments in minutes. The product was not a better payment system. It was a better developer experience. And that distinction built one of the most valuable private companies in history. The distribution model is what made Stripe unstoppable. The Collison brothers did not hire enterprise sales teams to pitch CFOs. They went directly to developers, the people who actually build the checkout page. They wrote beautiful documentation, published open source libraries, and made the API so clean that developers chose Stripe because it was a pleasure to implement. Once a developer integrates Stripe into a startup, it stays there as the company grows.