Challenge

Saxo Merrild’s father used to put on his tool belt and ride around town on his bike, offering to help neighbors with plumbing, construction, and other household jobs. This simple business model was a win-win for an entrepreneur and his community—and the inspiration behind the digital platform Handyhand.

In 2018, Merrild teamed up with a fellow computer science student from college to build a basic digital platform based in Copenhagen, Denmark, that connected handy people with individuals who needed help with tasks such as fixing a leaky faucet or assembling IKEA furniture. Payment processing was another matter. Handyhand’s founders knew they needed to partner with a trusted payment processor to manage financial transactions between service providers and their customers.

As a startup with limited development resources, Handyhand sought a payment processor that offered developer-friendly tools for meeting immediate needs and for facilitating its long-term vision. If the founders’ initial business model worked, they wanted to be able to quickly and easily refine onboarding experiences, add payment methods, expedite payouts, and offer other value-added features like earning reports for providers.

Solution

After extensive evaluations, Handyhand chose Stripe as its payment processor. Stripe Payments offered a unified global payments platform that made it quick and easy to facilitate credit and debit card transactions between parties.

“Stripe stood out because of its robust feature set, global reach, and unparalleled developer-friendly tools,” said Saxo Merrild, chief executive officer of Handyhand. “Capabilities like Stripe Connect and support for multiple payment methods were pivotal for us. These features would allow us to scale quickly while maintaining a simple and intuitive experience for both customers and service providers.”

Handyhand launched using Stripe Payments and manual onboarding processes. After the Handyhand platform was established and growing, the company integrated it with Stripe using Connect. By doing so, developers could reduce the amount of code they would have to write and manage to add new features and refine user experiences. Straightaway, they used white-label onboarding tools in Connect to automate providers’ identity verifications and banking connections to facilitate their payouts.

Developers added other features with Connect and the Stripe API to improve user experience and drive growth. Capabilities include an instant payout option for providers and more payment methods for service buyers, including MobilePay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Developers also used Connect to give providers on-demand access to detailed earnings reports needed for business insights, planning, and tax management.

“Stripe is more than just a payment processor; it’s a growth enabler,” said Merrild. “The platform’s modular ecosystem gives us the flexibility to scale and adapt to market needs quickly. Global support for various payment methods and currencies also opens doors to new markets.”

Results

Handyhand accelerates its launch with Payments

The startup added secure, reliable payment processing to its platform in just a few weeks with Payments, accelerating time to market and minimizing up-front investments. “The developer experience working with Stripe API has been a game-changer,” said Krisztian Szabo, chief technology officer of Handyhand. “The documentation and support is unparalleled. And compared to a local provider, the process of adding Stripe Payments was far more efficient, saving us significant time and effort.”

Providers onboard in minutes, and developers more than halve coding time

By integrating its platform with Stripe using Connect, Handyhand now adds new service providers in minutes rather than days. The faster onboarding improves provider satisfaction, trust, and retention. Within 10 months of its Stripe platform integration, Handyhand increased the number of service providers on its platform by 400%, from 2,000 to more than 10,000.

The platform continues to scale with demand. Today, there are close to 23,000 registered providers on Handyhand. They include small businesses as well as individuals who are skilled at completing tasks across 70 categories, from tiling, kitchen remodeling, and tree felling to dog sitting and car engine repairs.

Now that developers no longer have to write code to onboard providers or update payment details, they’ve reduced payment-related code maintenance by over 50%. As a result, they now spend the bulk of their time building features that add value.

Conversion rates are up by 15%, and revenue increases by 500%

Handyhand has driven growth for itself and its service providers by expanding its platform’s capabilities with Connect. Adding instant payouts and payment methods including MobilePay, which 60% of customers now use, resulted in a 500% boost in revenue from service bookings over a 12-month period.

“Booking and paying for a service is as easy as buying groceries,” said Merrild. “The MobilePay solution on Stripe makes it so seamless to onboard new customers; we’ve seen conversion rates improve by 15%.”

Expediting payouts and providing sellers with detailed insights about their earnings also equip entrepreneurs with capabilities for meeting their liquidity requirements and advancing their goals. “Recently, we had a guy share that he went from barely being able to take his family to the movies to now having a company car,” said Merrild. “He was able to do this by building his business on Handyhand.”

Partner for the future

Following their success with Handyhand, Merrild and his team are now looking in to migrating HappyHelper–a cleaning marketplace platform acquired in April 2024–onto Stripe as well.