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building an indie business in the center of venture capital i am alex edmonds also known as supremerumham on the internet and this is the building and indie business podcast okay so today i'm going to be talking about moving from gum road to stripe i'm going to talk about why i uh wanted to make the move how i'm going to make the move a little bit about the details um what else i need to add to a stripe and then the cons of moving the stripe um okay so let's get into it why um am i moving from gumroad to stripe because stripe is cheaper um the fees for gum road and i believe i've talked about this but um it costs er it's eight percent plus 30 percent on gum road and then on stripe it's three percent but the reason why gum road is more expensive it's because there are more features and uh the creator has to handle less right so i have to handle on stripe i have to handle the delivery of the um whatever i'm selling to the customer and that's something i don't have to handle with straight or with gumroad they just they buy it and then they go to their library and it's done right so that's one thing um and then um because i the the fees are now less i can offer a lower price and still make uh 15 so the only reason i priced the book at 17.50 was to account for all the fees for gum road um yeah so um now i i can not it's not too much of a discount or discount in quotes um but i was stripe i priced the book at 16.50 um yeah so i'd still be making 15 um because that was my goal i can even lower that price because my goal was to um make 15 because of all the open podcast fees and now i'm only spending five dollars a month right so that's something to think about and then the only reason i priced the book at 17 or 1949 and i never even actually got to that price was because of the fees and the affiliate fees which i would have to pay every time an affiliate made a sale but uh you know only one affiliate made only one sale so yeah they all sucked okay and then gum road has a ten dollar limit or like payout limit so you have to make ten dollars and then they give you your money right and that's for them to avoid fees of having to like pay out little amounts of money and they'd lose money if they paid out like one dollar maybe i'm not 100 sure but um stripe has immediate payouts because i was always worried about like having five dollars and um that being stuck right so now i don't have that concern so that's cool yeah and uh stripe is faster because when i i i embedded the gum road um page on my personal website or the podcast website i keep calling it my personal website but yeah i treat it like a personal website anyways so i so i embedded gumroad on my personal website and it just made it like the page was really slow right and then so what i did was i made it like a button where you see you see a picture you see the text and then you click the button and it's a buy now button and it takes you to the gumroad page and that made it faster but there's extra steps right you still have to go to the page you just have to click buy now again and then you have to fill out the page with gum road it's just click and you fill out the form right away so less steps means more conversions um yeah so that's another thing um i have more control over that better analytics uh gum road doesn't show the utm source of like where the click came from uh so i have that now with stripe because i'm on my own analytics system um right and then finally the reason why i did it the final reason why i made the switch is because i can do both i can do gum road and i can do stripe all at the same time okay so how did i do it um i used stripe checkout it's for the thing that they use to allow one-time payments because usually stripe is for um subscriptions uh they've had this feature for a while and it took me a while to figure it out so i actually when i started writing the book i tried to figure out how to use like the um developer edition of stripe checkout um i couldn't figure it out it was too complicated well it wasn't too complicated i was just like not too focused on it and i didn't put the effort into it so i just missed this thing um so how did i do it this time around well so i started out like just trying different things i tried copying pasting their stuff and that didn't work out because they added stuff that i didn't need and then so i tried to try out their legacy checkout so i took a video from traversing media that was like from 2017 so you know it had been a while and i copy and pasted his stuff and i went through his tutorial and then i try to um take the legacy checkout and migrate it into the current checkout because they had a guide on how to do that um i couldn't figure that one out my developer brain at this point is kind of weak um and so what i how i figured it out is i just i looked at someone else's code because i saw someone else on twitter um try to use stripe checkout and i know they they figured it out how to use stripe checkout so i i went into uh their code of their website and i just copy and pasted everything that they had um i realized that i didn't need the back end code all i needed was the front end code so yeah i just copied his stuff i changed everything to mine like uh because you need to do the um the public keys and all that um like the pricing so i changed that um and it worked right so then that was good but then i realized that i needed to work on the delivery that there was no way for me to deliver or like with stripe to deliver the book to people so delivery how did i how am i working on that so i bought a book from derek sivers and i realized that he used stripe or no i noticed right away he used stripe because uh yeah i i was looking for it right um and so what happens with derek sivers is he sends you a link a login link so so you buy the book from him he sends you a link you click on the link you log in and then there's a page to download everything that you bought right so um yeah that led to my original idea of having the success page link to a a random page like a download page let's say and then them being able just to click the download button and they're able to download the book the problem with this is i didn't want people to randomly find the page and um yeah just downloading the book so yeah so right now my delivery source is i use zapier to um send them an email and the email has a link to a google drive um folder that has every asset of the book right my only problem with this is i'm using three different services i'm using zapier and i'm using stripe zapier and uh google and so uh i'm worried that one day like someone will buy the book and then it just won't show up which is an easy fix all i i can just manually email them it but then what's the point of having all this stuff if it breaks down right so yeah there's that i'm trying to figure out something else um my idea is to use a mail gun to send them the book directly and just have it like have it down stored somewhere and attach it to the email for gum or for mail gun and then yeah but uh i haven't started looking at that yet um yeah so that's delivery there's also some things that uh i still need to work on so i would really like to do the derek sivers solution and create a login and um just email like um the people that buy the book a password like a very unique password have them put it in and then that's uh yeah that's how they get the book and then my not another option is to like send them a magic link so there's that option too okay um then um so stripe doesn't have promo codes out of the box or no it does have it out of the box but um it's not in the code that i copy and pasted so i need to add that and that way i can do like promos like um my birthday or christmas or black friday or memorial day yeah holiday stuff right so yeah i need to figure out how to do that okay now the cons of using stripe okay so there's no discovery like gumroad has a ha gives buyers the ability to like search for things there's a little bar for buyers that you can type in things and people might find my book right so that doesn't happen with stripe there's no discovery section but it does help me with seo because i'm able to have the seo on my own page instead of having it on the gum road page so the better my seo gets the more likely that people will find my book when they search for podcasting book right so that's a benefit and then also it's uh it's difficult to set up it took me a couple weeks of like not a couple yeah let's say a couple weeks of like focusing on stripe um to figure out how to set it up and with gumroad it was just like set it up you're done okay um yeah so i was able to focus on writing instead of just uh you know the development of a store for the book which is why i chose gumroad in the first place i wanted to focus on the writing but now i'm uh i'm not focusing on writing too much i still am right for revenue research but um i'm able to take a break from that and focus on you know web development too so that's cool um yeah another con of stripe is that gum road gives you backlinks so when you have your product page and you put a link in there that'll give you a backlink so if you look at the backlinks of all of my stuff there's a link there's a backlink from gum road so that's cool right um i don't have that with stripe um the next thing is there's no affiliate program out of the box or not that i've seen right now so i would have to find a an app that works with stripe that'll help me have an affiliate program so yeah but that that's going to cost me extra and if the affiliates don't work out again then i'm just paying for something that i get no value out of okay there's no tiered pricing so with um with gum road you can have like additional like like a tiered pricing so if you look at the gum road page for the book you have the regular book then you have like the audiobook and then you have like the audiobook and the rss feed all on one page different pricing and that's i i find that really good because if you want to just have like a product and add-ons you can do that but i haven't figured out how to do that with stripe checkout so yeah and finally there's no buyer's library so when someone buys a book on gum road it's sent to le they're sent to like a library to download it and that library has every product i've ever bought so if they get a new computer and they lose the book it's right there right but with stripe um it's probably in their email because i have to email it to them but they have to search for it so they might have deleted the email or the email is just buried and so they have to ask me for the book again and i have to send them again even though i already did but that's it's not that big a deal it's just something i have to you know worry about not worry about but like something i have to deal with okay um thank you for listening i hope you got value out of this um have a nice day bye