How to connect the platform
Back when we build our first marketplace, I remember looking at the payments problem and feeling genuinely stumped.
You have buyers on one side and sellers on the other. Money needs to flow between them, split correctly, land in the right accounts, handle refunds, comply with rules in different countries, and do all of this without a human touching a spreadsheet.
You then include taxes, refunds and before you know it, you've spent months building a mess.
Which is why Stripe Connect matters more than most people building communities realise.
Seven years ago we built our first marketplace, and without Stripe Connect it would have been entirely impossible.
The regulated money-transmission requirements alone would have stopped us cold.
If you run a membership organisation or a community with any kind of transaction inside it (member-to-member sales, event ticketing, revenue share with contributors, a marketplace of any shape), Connect is the plumbing that makes it possible. It lets you onboard sellers, hold funds, split payments and handle payouts, all without becoming a regulated money-transmission business yourself.
Payments are rarely the reason people join a community. They are the reason people stay.
When a member can sell their work, pay for an event, or earn a share of revenue without friction, the platform stops feeling like a website and starts feeling like a place where real economic relationships happen.
Value moves, trust builds, people invest more of themselves.
We have seen this first-hand building Stripe Connect integrations for marketplaces and community platforms.
Stripe have just launched their own community, and Ashley Williams is leading it.
If you have followed Platforming for a while, you will know I had a brilliant conversation with Ashley about proving the business value of community. She thinks about this stuff more carefully than almost anyone I have spoken to, so watching Stripe put community at the centre of how they support builders feels like a signal worth paying attention to.
And I get to be part of it.
I am running the Stripe Connect sector inside the new community, which is a lovely full-circle moment given how much of my working life has been spent wrangling exactly this problem.
We are hosting a session called Why Connect on Monday 14 July, 4:00 to 5:00 PM BST. It is a chance to understand where Connect fits, what it unlocks for platforms, and to ask the questions you have probably been quietly Googling for months.
You can join us here: Why Connect
