WEBVTT
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Back in February 2024,
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theCut-a fast-growing booking app for barbers-hit a wall.
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Their business needed to hire a team to market their platform,
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but they had a cash flow gap.
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Then theCut got an email from Stripe.
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They were prequalified for financing without having to lift a finger.
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Minutes later,
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they'd finished their application and within days they had the money in their
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bank account.
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It was exactly the practical lifeline they needed to scale.
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Fast forward to late 2025,
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and theCut has over 25,000 barbers actively using their platform.
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And they realized their barbers were hitting those same walls.
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So they turned on Stripe Capital to help their barbers get
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access to the financing they needed,
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and the results were immediate. Within 24 hours,
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167 barbers had accepted offers.
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And for the finance and product leads in the room, here's the real kicker:
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they went from idea to revenue without a single line of new
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code.
They didn't have to bump a single roadmap item or
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tie up a group of engineers for months. Later,
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you'll hear from Obi Omile, CEO of theCut,
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about exactly how Stripe Capital transformed his
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business-twice. But first,
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I want to walk you through the three-part playbook,
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successful CEOs like Obi used to launch financing programs.
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We'll cover how to decide whether financing fits your customers and your
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priorities,
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how to build a seamless program with the right integration path that protects
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your roadmap,
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and how to grow your program by pulling on the levers of eligibility and
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conversion. So let's start with step one, deciding.
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When we talk to platforms, they often say, "I know this works in theory,
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but is it right for my customers?" So think about your own users.
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Do you know how much operating cash they have?
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When we look at automotive businesses on Stripe, for example,
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we see a median runway of only six days.
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This isn't unique to this industry. In fact,
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across the vast majority of industries we track,
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we find median runways of less than one month.
Whether it's
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a retailer needing inventory for a busy season or a law firm waiting 90
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days for an insurance payout or a telehealth startup who wants to start
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marketing to grow their client base-cash flow gaps are universal.
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And when you're operating on a six-day runway,
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one surprise expense-a broken piece of equipment or a slow paying
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customer-can have significant impact on your bottom line.
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And yes,
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your customers could go down to a bank branch and apply for a loan or charge it
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to their personal credit card,
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or they could go apply for some business loan now somewhere online.
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But these either take time or impact their personal credit score
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or risk high fees with unknown lenders.
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But what if instead they could go to you:
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their trusted platform who deeply understands them and has a stake in their
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success?
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Tech-first organizations like yours are best positioned to solve this for your
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users. Because of your deep understanding of their business,
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you can tailor their experiences to fit their needs,
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and you already have a foundation of trust. Now,
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even if you're set on launching a capital program for your users,
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building a financing program from the ground up is a daunting task.
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There are compliance and regulatory implications,
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capital markets and treasury problems, credit risk exposure,
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new customer support flows, and so much more.
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And with all of this complexity, you may be wondering, where's the ROI?
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But with Stripe,
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you can launch a financing program for your users without navigating that
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complexity or taking any credit risk yourself.
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Stripe Capital for Platforms is an end-to-end financing program,
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specifically designed for SaaS platforms and marketplaces.
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You can get started in minutes, not months,
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by leveraging your existing Stripe integration.
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And for many of our most successful platforms,
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Capital is now their number one revenue-generating product on Stripe,
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even more than core payments.
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Payments is a high-volume, thin-margin business,
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but because Stripe manages the underlying complexity and shares the
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program revenue with you, you aren't just adding a feature.
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You're adding a new high-margin revenue stream. And my favorite part:
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Capital also boosts your payments revenue.
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Take the SaaS platform Shopmonkey.
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They started offering auto shops access to Capital to help them expand.
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And to date, they've issued nearly $54 million in financing,
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but they also saw payment volume grow 30%
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for accounts that take out a loan.
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Platforms using Stripe Capital also see a 20 to 40% increase
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in user retention. It's simple.
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When you're the one that funded a business's new location or their holiday
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inventory, you aren't just a software provider anymore.
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You are a partner in their survival and their success,
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and they don't leave. But
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the impact goes beyond retention.
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We ran a study that found a strong causal link between SMBs accepting
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financing and growing faster. On average,
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they grow 27 percentage points faster. And for some segments,
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that's as high as 200.
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You've removed their growth ceiling.
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It's what happens when a business finally has that cash to run that ad campaign
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or hire that second stylist or buy that extra pallet of stock.
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So how do you actually get this into their hands?
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Once you've decided that your customers have a real cash flow gap,
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the next logical question is how to launch a financing program.
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The good news: you don't need to build the infrastructure,
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as we already did.
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I'd like you to meet ZenFlow,
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a fictional yoga studio management platform.
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ZenFlow already monetizes payments.
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So when they log in to their Stripe Dashboard, this is what they see:
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over $20 million in financing offers available to 744 of
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their accounts today.
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And so we click "Get started," and we can see how the program works
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and we can choose our integration path.
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And we're going to go with the fast track here, the no-code option.
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We can preview the emails our users will receive
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and we can customize the branding so it matches the look and feel of
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ZenFlow and set our integration preferences.
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And then, all I have to do is agree to the terms,
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make sure to read them first, then agree to the terms,
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sign the contract.
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And just like that, I'm ready to launch my Capital program.
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And when I click "Start sending offers," those 744
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users will receive their Capital offer instantly.
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So how's that?
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It is cool. You're right. That was under two minutes,
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and you can go live with a full end-to-end financing program.
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And our no-code experience is exactly how theCut got their start.
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Think of this as your fast-forward button.
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You can start generating revenue and helping your users today without opening a
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single Jira ticket. And to be clear,
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no code doesn't mean small scale.
Since we stood on this
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stage at Sessions last year,
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platforms have sent over 400,000 financing offers to their businesses.
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And because there's no engineering work required,
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you can launch Capital whenever you're ready.
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Okay. So you're live.
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Offers are going out and revenue is coming in.
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But the platforms that get the most out of Capital, don't stop there.
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To walk you through exactly how the top platforms scale their Capital programs,
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I want to bring up KK,
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our engineering lead who works directly with platforms on exactly this:
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how to grow a Capital program once it's live.
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Thank you, Duncan. Platforms like Ignition,
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Clio, FreshBooks,
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all treat capital as a core part of how they grow.
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What are they doing differently?
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They are focused on two main drivers that grow adoption:
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increasing conversion and expanding their pool of eligible users.
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First, to drive conversion,
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you must optimize the user experience by meeting your users
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where they already are.
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While no code is the fastest way to start,
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the next step is putting the financing offers in the
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context of your platform.
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You want to show the offers at the exact moments your users are
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more likely to act and convert.
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You can integrate embedded components onto your platform experience.
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These are prebuilt,
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customizable UI elements like promotional banners that you can add
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to your dashboard.
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This is exactly how platforms like Squarespace have scaled their financing
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program. To their users,
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it looks and feels like their product.
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By putting the offers directly into the user's
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daily workflow,
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Squarespace can drive higher trust and significantly
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higher conversion. Conversion
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isn't just about where you show the offer. It's about what the offer is.
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The second growth lever is your product mix.
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For every gym owner that needs a $15,000 in a lump
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sum for equipment,
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there's a contractor who needs smaller and regular draw
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for materials. And to meet that need,
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we are expanding our financing products to include line of credit.
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Line of credit gives your users flexible and ongoing access to
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funds. Let's go back to ZenFlow.
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And this time, we're looking at the ZenFlow dashboard and my yoga studio,
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instead of seeing just a single loan, also sees a line of credit.
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This works better for my yoga studio's ongoing need.
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So I decide to view the offer and let's say start the
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line with a $10,000 drop. It's simple.
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I review my personal information, my business information,
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agree to the terms, and submit. Just like that,
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I have an active financing and an active line of
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credit.
Managing my line is just as easy.
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On my ZenFlow dashboard, I'm able to see the outstanding balance,
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the monthly payment, and actually the available credit I can draw from and say,
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"Next month,
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I need another $10,000." I don't need to start from scratch.
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I can access my funds similarly and
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once again, draw
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$10,000. With line of credit,
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your platform is now supporting your user's
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ongoing needs.
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The third lever:
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to expand your reach is solving the data gap.
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By increasing the number of users you can actually give an offer to.
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Historically,
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we could only underwrite based on the volume we directly saw on Stripe.
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But for many of your users, that's only a fraction of their business.
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Last year,
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we announced that we can take multiprocessor and offline data to
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underwrite your users.
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Take a look at GlossGenius,
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a platform for beauty professionals who handle a lot of cash,
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checks, and tips.
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By sharing these offline transactions and volume from other
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processor,
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we finally have a holistic view of their business. The result:
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GlossGenius saw loan eligibility increase by 30%.
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Simply by layering in additional data,
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we can offer more loans to more of your users.
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But what about your users who are not yet processing on Stripe?
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You can now offer financing to your users who haven't even processed a
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single dollar through Stripe.
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This opens up a brand new audience for your platform.
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In other words,
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you can now use Capital as a customer acquisition tool.
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By sharing data for your users, you can lead with the financing offer,
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get them into the door,
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and then watch them move their entire payments business
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over to you.
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This is especially powerful if you're trying to move offline transactions
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onto your platform. Finally,
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the fourth lever is to expand your Capital business into new markets.
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Capital for platforms is now live in UK, France,
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and Germany, with Australia and Canada launching later this year.
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So if you have an international footprint,
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you can expand into new markets by just turning it on.
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So with these four levers,
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your platform will not only grow your revenue,
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but also make it significantly more valuable to your users.
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So this brings us back to the playbook-the same framework we
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see the fastest-growing platforms on Stripe use to
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take idea to revenue, decide,
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validate the user need,
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build and go to market in minutes,
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and grow by increasing your conversion and expanding your reach.
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So we've spent the last 15 or so minutes looking at this from a Stripe lens,
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but the most important perspective is from someone who's actually
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lived the journey. So let's welcome the CEO of theCut,
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Obi Omile, to the stage.
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So Obi, thank you for taking the time. And like Duncan shared,
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theCut took financing through Stripe very early on.
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So how did that experience influence the way you
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designed your program for your barbers?
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A lot, actually. To your point,
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it was two years ago maybe at this point.
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We were looking to explore different financing options to
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scale our business.
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We'd gotten to the point where we were just about profitable and breaking even,
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and however,
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we still wanted to grow our team so that we can really think through our
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go-to-market strategy and start to build that out.
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And we'd gone through the process talking to banks,
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talking to other types of short-term lenders. However,
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one of the things that was really important to us was speed to financing as well
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as level of effort. And through Stripe, being one of our great partners,
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they were able to leverage all of our historical transaction data.
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And as Duncan mentioned,
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we received an in-platform notification that we were eligible for
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up to a million dollars. We were able to apply within two or three minutes,
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and within 48 hours we were funded.
So it was an incredible experience of
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how well technology can work to amplify kind of funding and access to capital.
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And so when we were thinking about how do we introduce this product to our
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barbers, that was the main thing that came to mind is like,
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"How do we reduce the amount of effort and the time it takes for them to go
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through the funding process?
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And how can we work with Stripe to make it as fair, as transparent,
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and as quick as they would like." And so yeah,
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that was the journey from start to finish.
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And we rolled out our no-code solution earlier this year, or I'm sorry,
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at the end of last year. And it's been gangbusters, honestly.
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Our barbers love it. And again,
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they're accepting transactions or financing offers almost immediately.
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Yeah. I mean,
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you basically saw over $700,000
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in financing accepted in the first 24 hours.
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How did that Slack room look like when this was happening live?
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Sure. I mean, we knew there was demand,
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but what we were really surprised with was the speed of acceptance.
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We rolled it out, I think it was mid-December. And within the first hour,
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we were seeing barbers accept their financing offer within
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three to four minutes after receiving the email.
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So that really told us one thing is, or told us two things actually. One,
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there was an immediate need,
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and this was a real product that they were clamoring for, and then two,
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that it actually worked.
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We could distribute the product via no-code solution and see incredible
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amount of uptick and participation by our audience.
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It's been about four to five months at this point,
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and we continue to hear kind of the same three things from our barbers.
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This helped them grow their business,
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it helped them build more resiliency in their business,
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and also helped them expand their business.
So one of the anecdotes is,
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we had a barber reach out and let us know that with the capital,
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he was able to buy new equipment, remodel his shop,
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and kind of offer more higher level services that he didn't necessarily have the
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equipment for previously. And with the capital, he made those purchases,
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and within a few months,
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he was able to increase his prices and drive 30% more revenue year to date than
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he was previously. And so that was one of the...
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This is the theme that we continue to hear from our barbers is that they were
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able to buy the product to grow their business. Secondly, it was resiliency.
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We have barbers basically all around the country.
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And so one of the archetypes we heard from a few times were those
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barbers who worked on or around college campuses.
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You can imagine the cyclical nature of their business when students go away for
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the holidays or the summer,
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then they see a detraction in volume and activity.
And in those downtimes,
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they were able to use this capital to help them kind of smooth all those
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periods. And so again, creating more resiliency in their business,
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which they really value. And then lastly was expansion.
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So we have several barbers who own barbershops who were able to remodel those
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shops and introduce suites for individual barbers to work in
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or professionals to work in.
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So they were able to expand their revenue potential and their earning potential
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simply by the virtue of new capital to work on their business.
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That as well as you could think just traditional running ads-now they have that
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capital to invest in their business, which has continued to pay dividends.
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Incredible. I mean, you guys started with no code, like you shared.
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So what's next for your platform?
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What's next is to really scale visibility,
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eligibility, and adoption across our platform.
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With the no code, it was incredible. We were able to launch again,
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like you just showed in just a few minutes,
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and we saw adoption from our audience. However,
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we still heard anecdotes that there were barbers who did not even know they were
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eligible because they didn't see their email. Typically,
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emails will get 30 to 40% open rates.
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So you can imagine the other 60% of your audience not actually having awareness
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that they have this Capital offer. And so,
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as she was previously showing,
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we have now that we've validated the actual demand and have a better
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understanding of how to use the product,
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we've spent the time building it in-app. So increasing that visibility,
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we're excited about because that'll drive overall adoption.
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With simply just the email,
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we were able to see one out of five people an offer was
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extended to actually accepted and were funded,
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which over email was incredible.
I think you guys told us something like
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mid-teens with numbers before.
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And so we're already outpacing that in just the first quarter and really excited
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to see how we can continue to scale that. Secondly is around eligibility.
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So the barber's total amount eligible for
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financing is dictated upon their historical transaction volume. One,
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also we're really excited about the ability to now share data because that'll
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bring in a lot of the barbers who don't currently process payments and also help
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drive more of that loan access and eligibility. So,
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excited about that later to roll out. But with eligibility,
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we should be able to drive more barbers
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awareness of the loan offer so that we can convert those nonmerchants,
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which we refer to as barbers who don't process payments today,
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to now become payment processing barbers.
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That along with showcasing two barbers in-app of how their
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transaction activity directly ties to their loan eligibility,
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we expect both of those flywheels to drive higher levels of platform adoption so
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that we can get them access to the capital that they really need.
And then
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lastly, confidence and trust is at the most paramount.
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Building it in app so that barbers have really clear insights into the cost of
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Capital,
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how their earnings and payouts will be impacted and the total payback
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time,
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we expect we'll build a lot of trust as well as a lot of confidence in our
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platform so that we will see set adoption.
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So that's kind of how we're thinking about scaling the program.
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Obi, this is exactly our vision. So, super excited to hear that.
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If there's a product leader in this room sitting here,
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what's your one thing you'd like them to take away?
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Get it out the door as fast as possible. With the no code, we were, again,
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able to launch in a few minutes. And with that,
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you can really validate if this is something that value, two,
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see how your customers actually engage with it, as well as three,
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determine what the best next steps are and how to build around it.
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And in doing so,
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you'll end up building a better product versus waiting for the perfect
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integration. And so, simple: crawl, walk, run.
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It's been working for years and it continues to work here.
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Yeah, it's a great way to validate the story. Well,
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this was a fantastic little chat, Obi. Thank you.
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Thank you for that.
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Hearing exactly how the capital has impacted the
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barbers on your platform is really exactly why we do what we do.
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And what Obi described here obviously isn't just for
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theCut; it's for every platform in this room.
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So if there's one thing I want all of y'all to take away is,
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you don't need a six-month roadmap.
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You don't need a dedicated squad of engineers.
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You just need the decision to start. Thank you.
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Thank you