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Stripe's massive iOS opportunity, Langchain's case study sprint, Datadog acquires Eppo, the simple homepage trend, and more
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- Hashim Warren
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Launch of the Week
The sudden, massive expansion of Stripe's TAM is the lead story for you this week.
A judge ruled that Apple has to allow iOS developers to offer payments via the web, without Apple taking a cut. The winner here is Stripe, the leader in payments infrastructure.
I expect the Stripe Sessions 2025 keynote to mention new efforts to win iOS developers. But for now we just have an early effort from Michael Luo, a Stripe PM on X evangelizing a guide to accepting web-based payments.
But Stripe is not the only payments player rushing to do business with the 2 million app store apps. Paddle released content helping app developers understand the payment models they can now offer to customers with their newfound payment freedom.
Enterprise Watch 🏆
Langchain gets the Enterprise Watch trophy this week. Linda Ye and the team are doing the hard work of answering prospect objections with customer proof.
First, Langchain is targeting the search term “Is Langchain used in production?”. An old Reddit thread ranks \#1 in Google, but Langchain’s blog post is already \#2.
The blog links to a new case studies page. And Langchain is filling it up quickly. They’ve published 6 case studies just last month alone\! For comparison, LLamaIndex has only 3 case studies this year, and newcomer Mastra AI hasn’t published a full customer story yet.
Acquisition
Alex Konrad had the scoop \- observability platform Datadog acquired experimentation tool Eppo.
But before Eppo could even announce it today, their blood rival Statsig beat them to the punch with a thoughtful article about their shared history shaping the experimentation tooling market.
This was a risky move by Statsig CEO Vijaye Raji, but I think he pulled it off. The article is genuinely helpful because it gives us behind-the-scenes insight into why Datadog was interested in Eppo, and where the industry is going. So stash Raji’s post as an example of newsjacking done well.
Talent
Congrats to Karl Rumelhart, Contentful’s new CMO. The press release explains that part of Rumelhart’s job will be positioning and explaining Contentful’s new AI capabilities to the company’s thousands of customers in engineering and marketing. Tough job, and good luck.
GTM Trends
Minimal website redesigns is this week’s GTM trend for devtools.
Planetscale unveiled a sparse, text-based website just months after its previous redesign. The new paint paid off. Holly Guevara, the VP of Marketing tweeted that the site saw a massive increase in KPI’s:
- Signups — 103% increase
- Qualified inbound — 57% increase
- Pageviews — 101% increase
Last week Bucket, a feature flagging tool debuted a markdown inspired new look.
I’m clicking around their site and it’s sickeningly fast. Great job over there\!
I predict we’ll see more dev tool websites go text heavy and lightweight, especially as AI Agents become the main consumer of marketing pages.
Devtool News
✨ Meilisearch, the API-first search product, now has “composite indexing” which lets you combine local and remote embedding services in your search config. Meilisearch then “automatically selects the appropriate embedder based on the current operation.”
✨ Sanity, the headless CMS, released a local MCP server. What’s great about this new capability is that an AI client can manage content in Sanity, and also analyze it. Sanity explains that your AI tools can identify patterns, gaps, and connections across all your product content.
✨ Knock, the notification orchestration tool, also released an MCP server. This enables developers (or hey, even marketers) to manage the creation of notification workflows and content using an AI client. Props to my former colleagues on a fantastic new feature\!
✨ Directus, the headless CMS, launched visual editing. Honestly, this is a catch- up feature. Here’s how their competitors handle visual editing: Storyblok, Sanity, Strapi, TinaCMS, and Contentful Studio.
✨ Neon, the serverless Postgres platform, released a local way to manage your database. Neon emphasizes that this is not a local Postgres instance which can drift from your production database. Instead it’s a “proxy service that provides a local interface to your Neon cloud database.”
✨ Courier, the notification orchestration tool, launched a new way to “embed a custom notification editor in your app”.