Product Hunt Daily - The Stripe mafia

It’s good to be in the Stripe mafia.

That’s a term startuppy folks use for early employees who spin out their own startups, ICYDK. More than 40 new companies have been started by ex-Stripers to date. Some are still in stealth mode. Others have launched on Product Hunt, including Quill, Watershed, Clearbit, and of course, products from OpenAI.

Stripe sometimes invests in these startups, too. Yesterday, Stripe-backed, mafia-founded Accord made its Product Hunt debut. Accord is a “customer collaboration platform” for sales and onboarding teams. The founding team of three is made up of two brothers with seasoned sales backgrounds – Ross Rich who’s ex-Stripe, Ryan Rich who’s ex-Google – and Wayne Pan.

If you’ve ever been on either side of a B2B sale, your experience mostly likely was a standard mess of emails, chasing approvals, pitch decks, and contracts. Enterprise sales is the same, with more people on a bigger scale.

The goal of the Accord platform is to make that flow, and all the information around a sale, shared and accessible for sales teams and customers. Features include shared timelines and milestones, a resource center, and integrations with CRMs so sales teams aren’t working against their current process.

Accord fits within a growing trend called “buyer-first selling." Not long ago, we wrote about TestBox in this space too, which takes a “try it before you buy it” approach to enterprise sales.

Buyer-first approaches involve designing a sales process around the buyer. You can see how a sort of cross-company project management tool like Accord could make for a better buyer experience.

YC was convinced of that quickly (Accord was part of the W20 cohort). TechCrunch reported:

“[T]he founders applied to YC… and impressed the incubator with their insight and industry experience, even though they didn’t really have a product yet. In fact, they literally drew their original idea on a piece of paper.” 😮