4 min read
What would traditionally require months of product-development coordination and building across multiple teams was achieved by one person in a single flight.
Stripe encourages experimentation and curiosity, and v0 helped us accelerate from idea to innovation in no time.
Link to headingInside Stripe’s push to make value tooling faster, smarter, and fully self-serve for their GTM teams
Mario Braz boarded an international flight with a problem. He deplaned with a working production application.
With a finance background and zero formal engineering training, Mario Braz, Stripe GTM Business Value Consulting, used v0 to prototype a full application during a long-haul flight. By the time he landed, the first version was working, fully web-based, mobile-friendly, and ready to deploy.
The result was a customer-facing value calculator that allows GTM teams to quickly generate tailored financial hypotheses for a range of customer profiles, without needing support from the Business Value team.
What would traditionally require months of product-development coordination and building across multiple teams had been collapsed into a single flight.
Link to headingThe adoption challenge
Stripe’s Business Value Consulting team helps quantify the user financial impact of using Stripe, from revenue growth, to enabling scale and efficiency and mitigation of risks. Their financial models are trusted across the business, but they were locked in spreadsheets, which were hard to use, and even standardized use cases required manual support from a small team.
"We invested heavily in training, but the field kept giving us the same message: the models were powerful, but the spreadsheet format created too much friction and was too complex for AEs to use consistently," Mario recalls
Even a simplified version couldn’t solve the problem. “Spreadsheets introduce cognitive overload,” Mario explains. “The moment an AE opens one, it signals complexity, regardless of how much you try to streamline it.”
The result: Stripe's value quantification remained bottlenecked on a small team, limiting scalability and the adoption of value based selling across the GTM organization.
Link to headingWhy v0 at Stripe
The team considered other low-code options, but v0 stood out for its ability to synthesize intent beyond the prompt, generating cleaner, more intuitive code and one-click deployment to a secure, public-facing site. Additionally, mobile accessibility made it easy to implement fixes on the go.
v0 has an excellent ability to synthesize the intention of its user beyond simply what's on the AI prompt, leading to optimal results.
The application transformed Stripe's complex financial models into a focused, guided interface. Instead of overwhelming users with dozens of variables, it presented clean inputs with detailed documentation.
“When AEs see the application, the path becomes immediately clear,” Braz explains. “It focuses them on the inputs that matter and creates the structure they need to drive a confident, consistent value conversation.” Mario explains.
Link to headingHow it's being used today
The numbers tell a clear story.
Excluding the launch week spike, the v0 app now sees an average of 92 unique weekly internal users versus 23 in the old Google Sheets model. That's a 288% increase in adoption.
But engagement goes deeper than visits: the team tracks how many users complete the full workflow. The final step is exporting the calculations performed in the tool to an automatically created customer-facing presentation, which is the the bottom of the funnel. Each week, approximately 10 unique value presentations are produced, with 126 created since launch. At an estimated 3-4 hours saved per slide deck, that's 30-40 hours of FTE time saved every week.
Three weeks after launch, the broader results were clear:
Time to generate initial value hypotheses decreased by ~80%
Multiple CxOs granted executive sponsorship after experiencing the app in real sales conversations
"The tool has made me excited all over again about Stripe's opportunity to sell into Enterprise by talking directly to CFOs," one rep shared. Another wrote: "Just finished a call with a CFO and earned their sponsorship—and this calculator was pivotal." A third called it a "life changing tool!"
The impact extended beyond the application itself. It has inspired Solution Architects to start building their own demos, and Product Managers to create prototypes to guide engineering. Sales teams now mock up what Stripe's checkout experience would look like with a prospect's actual branding and products.
“Instead of telling, our sales teams are now able to show users what their end-customer experience will be like,” Braz says.
Link to headingThe bigger picture
What started as one person's experiment has become a force multiplier for Stripe's entire go-to-market organization.
"Given our small team size, this tool now allows us to have significantly broader reach," Braz notes. "From SMBs to Enterprise customers, we now have the opportunity to influence how our GTM teams engage with users."
Janette Lee, Head of Global Business Value Consulting at Stripe, sees it as validation: "Stripe encourages experimentation and curiosity, and v0 helped us accelerate from idea to innovation in no time."
The tool didn't come from a product brief. It emerged because the cost of experimentation had dropped low enough that the person closest to the problem—a finance professional with no coding background—could simply build it himself.
"Don't underestimate how Vercel can bridge the gap between business expertise and technical implementation," Braz advises. "Subject matter experts without traditional engineering backgrounds can create sophisticated, high-impact applications when given the tools and incentives."
For teams with insights locked in spreadsheets or business cases requiring too much manual work, the barrier between having an idea and shipping a solution has never been lower.
Sometimes all it takes is a single flight.