It took 2 months, but I did it. Stripe is here.
by Alexander Isora 🦄I began connecting Stripe into my landing page builder in December 2019. And it took 2 months to finish the work.
Looking back to the update I can tell the work could be finished in under 20 working hours. Yes, that little.
But why it took 2 whole months then?
The first big reason is my inaccuracy.
Stripe offers 2 types of Checkout use:
- complex one
- simple one (client-only)
I missed the client-only Stripe integration option and started to build a more complex solution (which required products list management, session creation, private API key storing, currency managing, etc).
And I almost finished building the integration in this complex way. But suddenly I stumbled the client-only solution (https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/client) which is obviously much simpler to implement.
Lesson learned: when you begin working on a new 3rd party integration start with diligent docs research. Be extra careful. This may save you dozens of hours.
The second spoke in my wheel was my brain. I got burned out (again! 😭).
I kept refusing this frustrating though and continued to work. Day by day.
Instead of taking a few days of a digital detox or having a short traveling experience, stubborn me continued working.
This pushed me into an even more exhausting state.
Lessons learned:
- When you feel exhausted, it's time to get some rest. Some quality deep rest. To monitor your mind and body feeling, practice meditation.
- A good rest is an act of investment in your productivity.
The biggest anxiety was I could not work on other features until I finished the Stripe integration. I could not drop the thing I'm working on.
Now I feel like the released house-elf from the Harry Potter movie. "Dobby is free!". Yay!
I can finally pay attention to the endless suggestion my dear users gave me and the bugs they reported.
Anyway, the Stripe Checkout integration is ready now. It can be used to accept online payments (both recurring and one-time purchase) right from a Unicorn Platform landing page. Sweet!
I'm curious how do you keep your work-life balance? How do you avoid burning out? Please share your experience. I think I really need to learn about keeping a healthy mind 🙂
Update announces:
On Broadwise.org: https://broadwise.org/t/unicorn-platform-landing-page-builder-for-startups/126/3
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/unicornplatform/status/1225018581437632512
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Hi @alexanderisora! Congratulations on finishing the integration. About burning out and balance, life is short but also life is long :) There is an ever-present sense of urgency when you're a solo founder but taking a few days off is not going to change the outcome in the long run.
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Thanks dude ✊😅
Your words are golden and must be printed, put in a frame and hang on a wall in each founders' room.
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haha :) Also btw @alexanderisora your chat last month inspired me to write this up about habits, not sure if you've seen it - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-build-new-habits-4c8effc4d5. And also this https://www.indiehackers.com/post/habit-experiments-what-i-do-after-the-first-30-days-b95eeb0c1a.
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Thanks for sharing, Bhumi. I'm gonna read those. You definitely know something about habits.
Btw, I still haven't started building my writing habit as I promised you on our call ~2 weeks ago. I will write to you when there is some progress with this 🤓
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Based on personal experiments, lot of experiments :)
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Great news Alex, congratulations on your milestone! I'm anxious to see the rest of your roadmap implemented (mostly the Blog feature !!!!)
Regarding work-life balance: I work like a dog too. I have a full-time job at Deloitte and then my side hustle - cofounder and CEO at a Content growth-driven digital marketing agency - having to deal with a small number of real customers.
In order to have a life (while short for sure) I:
- workout at least 3 times a week, waking up at 6 am and going straight to the gym and,
- fully stop for one entire night once a week to go to the cinema, to be all alone and "avoid the world". I love cinema and any good movie can get me inspired to continue grinding!
This way I can work almost 14h to 16heach day - the rest goes to sleep time, weekly meal preparation, bath time, house cleaning, etc.
Making the math, I spend the equivalent to an entire workday resting (1h30 per gym training session + bath & 3,5h to dinner and go to the cinema). On the weekends I sleep 7h30 to 8h30 hours and eat Ice cream, hamburger or some other shitty (while delicious) meal.
The next step is to block 1h/day to read a book.
I hope I can help you with my thoughts! Congratulations once again on your achievement and resilience!
Don't give up, just keep going! BUT DON'T BURN OUT FIND BALANCE!!!!
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Oh hi Parzival! I'm glad to meet you here. Thanks for the insightful speech.
I'm anxious to see the rest of your roadmap implemented (mostly the Blog feature !!!!)
I'm myself actually super excited to get the blogging feature 😅
workout at least 3 times a week, waking up at 6 am and going straight to the gym and,
I understand you so much. Without physical activity, I become this guy (https://cdn10.bigcommerce.com/s-fw2plafw/products/8536/images/9883/PVZ2_B_Zombie__76214.1435613142.1280.1280.jpg?c=2) within a couple of weeks.
Sport is the top requirement in any office worker's life.
I wish to have more time to do more sports: try new ways of activity, take additional classes with my current sports hobbies etc.Action is life!
Cinema is a great adventure too. But I enjoy movies in a little different manner: I go out with my GF. It's so recharging to spend time together with the one you love 😉
When I want some 'alone-time' I stay at home and work from there. Or go to coworking in weekends.
But I want to try to go to the cinema alone as you do. I think it will be recharging and fun 🤔This way I can work almost 14h to 16heach day - the rest goes to sleep time, weekly meal preparation, bath time, house cleaning, etc.
Whoa, that is a lot. You are a great example of productivity and energy.
Do you keep this impressive tempo during the whole year?on the weekends I sleep 7h30 to 8h30 hours and eat Ice cream, hamburger or some other shitty (while delicious) meal.
High fived.I hope I can help you with my thoughts! Congratulations once again on your achievement and resilience!
Thanks man.Don't give up, just keep going! BUT DON'T BURN OUT FIND BALANCE!!!!
AWW YEAH.
Actually, it's quite fun to find the balance and build an efficient life system. As I can see, all entrepreneurs tend to enjoy doing this 😏
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Stripe is actually surprisingly complicated...
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Payments are complicated, in general. Stripe does an amazing job of documenting everything so it makes a super complicated thing like implementing payments much simpler.
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A big YES! It was a surprise to me too.
I have solid experience working with Paddle and Gumroad. And I (for some reason) believed Stripe will be the same level simple too.But it is not. Now I know that Stripe is complicated. It is not bad, it is just a different product.
In terms of programming languages: think of Stripe as C, whereas Paddle is Python.
To be honest, Stripe documentation is remarkably great.
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I implemented PayPal and it was easy because I found a lot of tutorials on how to get it done. Still want to add stripe but it will be in another time. As you said better focus on product features than wasting more time on payment API
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Hey Debbeca. Stripe integration was a frequently requested feature in my case.
So sometimes one simply have to spend time on 3rd party APIs and docs to make his/her users satisfied 🤓
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I totally get it! I still have that problem.
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Yeah, I was upgrading Stripe for one of my clients, and it was so painful to do after all the SCA mess (EU regulations).
I assume you're not using Stripe Connect to deduct fees from the transactions made from your site? On my project - we were doing this, so things got even more complex.Some time ago Stripe docs/APIs were easy to use and straightforward. Now, without really digging into the details it's hard to follow.
Not to mention a lot of stuff didn't work when it should, but I guess whenever the money is involved the complexity rises.In any case - congrats on the progress! :)
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Dobry dien!
Yes, I did not touch the fees deduction (thanks goodness!).
I think when you are building a service for accepting money, it is OK to be a little too much complex, paranoid and demanding 🤓But it is actually sad that Stripe is becoming more and more complex. I never knew this.
This means their focus is huge companies, not indies and startups.
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In my course I did the stripe recurring payments the difficult way. It definitely has a lot of benefits over the client side only approach.
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Could you please specify what I missed so I know how I can become better in the future?
That would help a lot!-
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There are some drawbacks to client only integration - for example, you cannot save the card to the customer and reuse it. If this is not required for your flow then I guess it’s not a problem.
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Very good point! As I see you're based in Russia, how you started with Stripe. Is there anyway to start use them from there? And which service did you use to provide a custom domain + ssl solution to your customers?
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Hey! Yep, I and the people living in the Motherland can't use Stripe :)
As for the custom domains and SSL. I've been asked this question many times. I wrote a cool article on that: https://isora.me/building-a-website-builder-part-1/
Please enjoy! :)
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Congratulations! It looks great. I like how you have designed the ability to choose different sections when you build a website. On your pricing page, the sentence "Also, a higher plan gives a higher website amount you can own." is vague. Website amount being storage or number of websites? If number of websites, consider "The higher plans allow you to host more websites."
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This is such an important notice. Thanks a lot, IndieHacker fellow. I will make this more noticeable 🤓
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Thanks for sharing your experience @alexanderisora. We heard so much of the same that we built our product specifically to solve this problem. You can customize your subscription plans/offerings using our UI, then simply drop a pre-configured Javascript widget that we provide into any landing page for your checkout experience. We support one time, recurring, usage based, and unit based pricing and are a Stripe Verified Partner, too. I'd love to discuss being a widget/integration offering for Unicorn Platform users if you're interested in taking a closer look at what we offer to solve this challenge.
Does thing landing page resonate with you based on your experience? https://www.outseta.com/stripe
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Hey Geoff. Outseta looks promising!
Can you please reach me via email hi (ат) unicornplatform.com?
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Ahh well done! I am looking at recurring stripe now in WP - and doing my head in. I will look at the docs. Whats next?
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Hey. Here is the client-only option in the docs: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/client
It should work in WP too since it is a backend-agnostic solution.My next step will be complex forms. Users often ask me to add additional form functionality such as redirect after submission, star rating picker etc.
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How do you deal with all the different VATs when you use the simple integration? That's my main gripe with Stripe. Dealing with the VAT madness is left to the implementers.
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Btw, I have been using Paddle.com for my own SaaS (https://unicornplatform.com/) for ~2 years and could not be happier 😎
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Hi Torsten.
I decided to leave the VAT question to the users. Of course, if they plan to sell globally, Stripe is not a good choice.I plan to implement the Paddle.com integration next. Paddle automatically charges taxes according to a buyer's local laws.
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Checkout ServiceBot next time you need Stripe - https://servicebot.io It makes setting up Stripe with membership, upgrade/downgrade etc all easy. (not my project fyi, I just rather like it)
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You have to be very careful with stripe the close alot of business down with very little notice
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Unpopular opinion: Stripe is not that easy to integrate anymore. It used to be. Someone should build a better alternative.
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I take the Valve approach to build projects and features. "It's ready when I say it's ready..." so if I need to unwind, I just unwind. If I need to put 12 hours in I'll put 12 hours. But by the grace of Olympus, the project must be memorable otherwise I've failed myself.
So it's ready when it's ready. :D
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You are thinking like an artist. I like it! 😎
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
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Oh, I agree. When you're on a paid project for someone else stick to the deadlines. Personal projects just have to have a feel for what you want to accomplish. Paid work versus Non-paid work you prioritize your deadlines.
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Thanks for sharing!
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Awesome
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
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I would say the overall quality of the docs is good.
But the colossal amount of features and options made me lost.
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