Challenge

Motion, an automated scheduling and project management platform, is in the business of productivity, helping users plan their work efficiently without having to maintain complex processes. The first-of-its-kind tool takes care of the most tedious aspects of planning—from optimizing calendars and automating to-do lists to organizing schedules in real time—so team members can focus on getting more done.

As a startup looking to go to market quickly, Motion needed simple, quick-to-deploy solutions that empowered its lean team to efficiently manage subscriptions, payments, and billing. As a member of the tech accelerator Y Combinator’s winter 2020 class, Motion had direct access to Stripe’s banking-as-a-service product and chose to build its platform with integrated Stripe solutions.

Solution

Stripe’s robust and easy-to-implement infrastructure was a natural choice for a brand with an ethos of simplicity. In just two days, the Motion team fully integrated its platform with Stripe Billing, Payments, and Radar, facilitating a faster product launch without compromising quality.

To streamline the customer experience, Motion uses Stripe’s API to build custom billing pages and connect customer profiles to their subscriptions, which Motion’s support team can manage and edit on the backend.

“We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how intentional and well designed the APIs, documentation, and interfaces are,” said Ethan Yu, cofounder and COO of Motion. “Stripe’s products are designed with the customer in mind and every interaction we’ve had with the team has been positive.”

Internally, Motion uses the Stripe Dashboard to gain deep insights into key performance metrics, such as annual recurring revenue. The team doesn’t have to do any manual analysis of its financial performance—Stripe organizes all of the company’s financial data in one place, providing transparency for everyone.

Results

Agile systems for quick growth

With Stripe as its financial infrastructure, Motion can stay agile and adapt its product quickly to keep up with exponential growth. Even engineers with no context or experience using Stripe can tweak the setup, thanks to Stripe’s user-friendly documentation and interface, allowing for a seamless transition from early startup to hyper-growth stage. To date, every change the Motion team has made to its Stripe stack has taken less than a week.

“With all our other systems, we’ve had to re-architect as we grow, but with Stripe, we never have to look back,” said Yu.

Enhanced time and cost savings

Without Stripe, Motion would have needed additional staff to handle core business functions. Harry Qi, CEO of Motion, said, "Across product, operations, and engineering, Stripe allowed us to free up several full-time employees in our headcount that we would have otherwise had to hire, letting us execute faster and saving us money in all areas of our business.”

New features for improved efficiency

As the company continues to grow, earning more revenue and expanding to new geographies, Motion plans to implement additional Stripe products, such as Tax and Revenue Recognition, to simplify tax compliance and configure compliant revenue reports.

“We need to make sure we’re compliant in all the countries we operate in internationally,” said Yu. “Stripe automatically adapts to regulations in different locations, taking the burden of compliance off our team.”

With Stripe improving and automating its financial systems, the Motion team can truly embody its mission to revolutionize productivity and focus on its next stage of growth.