Challenge

Dyn Media provides subscription viewers with deeper behind-the-scenes coverage of players’ and spectators’ emotions and values. Dyn Media resulted from a strategic partnership between the German-based European media company Axel Springer SE and former DFL (German Football League) CEO Christian Seifert, who shared a goal to ignite passion and interest in sports beyond football.

The partners wanted a secure and robust payments and billing solution to support the new subscription-based platform. As a new and growing organisation, Dyn Media’s resource-conscious mindset guided its search for a provider. The company looked for a solution that would be easy to implement and maintain, and that would support its anticipated customer volume. Launching on time was also important to Dyn Media and its new customers. Dyn Media wanted additional guidance and expertise to ensure a smooth platform launch and post-launch operations.

Solution

After reviewing several providers, Dyn Media selected Stripe to power payments and subscriptions for its new platform, due to its reputation as a global leader in payments and its reliability. “We were surprised by Stripe's technical stability,” said Fabian Dressen, technology lead at Dyn Media. “Stripe offered great stability even under high-load situations, allowing us to focus on our product rather than the overall Stripe performance.”

Dyn Media implemented Stripe Billing and Stripe Payments to power subscriptions for the soon-to-be-launched streaming platform. “The goal was to offer subscriptions on an annual and monthly basis with the intention to use coupons for pricing offers,” said Moritz Mücke, Dyn Media’s head of product and technology. “With Stripe Billing, these goals have been achieved.”

Dyn Media then partnered with Stripe professional services to review the implementation and oversee the launch and performance of volume immediately following launch. Stripe professional services provided Dyn Media with a dedicated implementation consultant and integration engineer to help the team with technical, operational, and commercial readiness.

Dyn Media partnered with Stripe professional services one month before launch for added assurance and to help keep the team unblocked. With the team’s guidance, Dyn Media could further improve the overall payment processing with some out-of-the-box features to provide more robust functionality and futureproof the implementation ahead of launch. “We really appreciate the product communication and the help we got,” said Dressen. “We received great reports, answers to the questions we sent, and really informative follow-ups.”

During the initial launch, Dyn Media’s volume quickly exceeded the initial SEPA processing limits, blocking most of these customers’ payments. The professional services team helped increase these limits within hours, pulling in teammates across different time zones to ensure full launch monitoring. The teams then designed a payment recovery strategy to ensure full revenue recovery for Dyn Media.

Following the launch, the teams engaged again in an eight-week integration review advisory. Dyn Media wanted a deep analysis of its Stripe implementation to further refine its subscriptions, billing, and payments. “The team provided insights into our future roadmap and identified opportunities for improvement, particularly across the Stripe product portfolio, to reduce the complexity of customised features required for our product offering,” said Dressen.

The analysis resulted in an integration guide with recommended optimisations to Dyn Media’s Stripe implementation. “The review gave us confidence in our implementation,” said Mücke. “It also provided best practices to set up the handling of edge cases in a robust way.”

Results

An on-time Stripe Billing integration to drive a successful platform launch

Dyn Media launched with Stripe in August 2023 to power the payments and subscriptions behind the launch of the sports streaming platform and, subsequently, the successful collection of all registration fees from early platform sign-ups from June and July. Stripe Billing’s coupon feature proved to be an integral part of Dyn Media’s customer growth, giving the platform the ability to set up partnerships built on offers tailored to its customer base.

Easy expansion of payment methods without burdening resources

In addition to providing subscribers with annual and monthly subscription packages with Stripe Billing, Dyn Media can offer its customers more payment options by using Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, which includes Stripe Elements – a set of embeddable UI components that improve the checkout flow and drive conversion. Dyn Media can provide its subscribers with the most popular payment methods, including credit cards and SEPA Direct Debit payments. Elements has made it easy for Dyn Media to expand to PayPal quickly, with few resources. “One of our key needs is to provide the most relevant payment methods in a highly performant and secure way,” said Mücke. Dyn Media also uses Link, a Stripe accelerated checkout solution that securely saves and auto-fills the buyer’s address and payment details for a simpler, faster transaction.

Building a collaborative partnership for future growth

Dyn Media continues working on recommendations provided by Stripe professional services to continue improving its payment offerings and provide a better subscription and payment experience for their customers. The Dyn Media team has already seen improvements in the purchase user flows.

Following the expertise of Stripe professional services to guide its platform launch and post-launch optimisations, Dyn Media expects to partner with the team again on future projects. “We could definitely see getting them involved after discovering so many improvements and optimisations,” said Dressen. “The communication was frequent, helping things move quickly. With other partners, you struggle to get them involved, so with Stripe, we were surprised.”