Beautifully written and illustrated.
Also informative, and funny.
Top marks.
139 karma · joined June 24, 2017
Currently working on Trolley - https://trolley.link - a payments app that lets you pay with Stripe from any website (including static sites with no server back end).
Warning: shameless plug.
It's a no-code shopping cart that works with Stripe. We offer Donations that work as you describe.
You could check it out - https://trolley.link
(you can email me direct at rg@trolley.link if you want to know anything more)
Warning: shameless plug.
It's a no-code shopping cart that works with Stripe. We offer digital downloads that work as you describe.
You could check it out - https://trolley.link
(you can email me direct at rg@trolley.link if you want to know anything more)
Lots of people right now seem to be looking for new ways to get paid / make money / start little businesses from home, and being able to send quick payment links over social / SMS seems a common requirement. (a 2nd / 3rd-order COVID effect I guess!)
Things are taking off for Trolley - acquiring 1-2 new customers a day right now :) Trolley is still just me, so I'm plenty busy!
[1] - https://trolley.link
It's pretty easy to make a simple facility for accepting subscription payments.
You can do this with any website, plus a tool like Trolley [1] - of which I'm the creator, btw - with no technical knowledge. The fee structure (2% for Trolley, plus your Stripe fee of ~2%) comes out less than Patreon, and you're not inside a walled garden.
Use the webhooks to link to it a CRM of your choice - probably on a free plan - and you're golden (yeah ok, maybe this bit isn't entirely non technical)
I should probably write a blog post about this, tbh :)
[1] - https://trolley.link
^^ I built this more or less on a bet about a year ago. Give it a dollar and it will give you a startup business idea.
(No Markov chains here, it's a couple of arrays of industries and keywords and a JS function that uses Math.random()... )
It's Clojure in the back end, on Postegres, on Heroku. Everything in the product front-end is ClojureScript, with reagent, hosted in S3 behind CloudFront.
All deployments through CircleCI, GitHub for VCS. Emacs for development, on a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu :)
Marketing website is a static site, built with Middleman; again, CloudFront + S3.
I wrote a short blog a few months ago about how to get most of the benefits it offers with way less cost (and without being tied to a single platform) - plugging together Mailchimp and Trolley with a static website and a l'il bit of Zapier.
https://trolley.link/2019/03/03/paid-email-newsletter.html
(Disclosure: https://trolley.link , which I've used for the payment elements in this example, is my product)
I'm working with a successful ecommerce company who have hugely improved conversions on their (high touch, bespoke but sold online) product by introducing a chatbot.
For some use cases, customers like them very much indeed.
It lets you put a payment button on any website and pop up a cart; single products, donations, deposits, subscription / recurring payments.
Customers are using it to power charity donations, self published book sales, physical product sales & shipping, membership fees for clubs and so on.
You can integrate it to Mailchimp and use it to put together a paid subscription email newsletter... or use it to make your own Patreon at much much lower cost to you.
It uses Stripe as the gateway in the back end. (To use Stripe Checkout you still need a back end to handle token exchange. Trolley handles that for you.)
I've been playing with the typography on the site recently. Not massively happy with it but there you go; I'm sure I'll get round to changing it in a few weeks^H^H^H^H^Hyears
I'm mostly an interim CTO these days (though I run Trolley [1] as a side project) but have been a consultant, agile person, Clojure dev, Java dev, Ruby dev...
About 18 years in to my career and trying to maintain that balance of "can talk like a business person" and "can still code")
1. https://trolley.link - a JAMstack shopping cart system
2) Complex webapps with snappy functionality that need to feel "native" - whatever that means: think about an SPA. Then realise that mostly what you need is (1).
3) Corporate homepages / brochure sites / product sites / blogs: use a static site generator like Hugo, Jekyll etc. It's amazing what you can do with a staticgen site now
[Insert shameless plug for Trolley, my product, https://trolley.link ]
It made me $25 - but gave me the next idea. It had turned out to be more annoying than I imagined to put a payment button on a website (unless I wanted to use PayPal. I didn't - I use Stripe).
Without running a back-end, like an ecommerce app or a home-rolled Heroku app or something - for token exchange, you can't use Stripe. I don't mind building that kind of thing, but I figured other people must.
So I built Trolley [1] - it's a popup payments widget / cart, using Stripe, that works just by pasting in a snippet of HTML.
4 months later and I've got a few hundred users, I've started marketing it specifically to JAMstack and static site people, and I'm enjoying making it, very much.
[1] - https://trolley.link
Price accordingly, then over successive engagements, raise prices. As long as you can demonstrate the value, good clients are happy to pay. You don't want the not-good clients.
Also running i3 (actually i3-gaps, + terminator, dmenu, emacs)
I also bought a 34" curved ultrawide Samsung, which powers the XPS over USB-C. Single cable, and my mechanical keyboard is plugged into the monitor as a hub.
Everything just works. It's ace.
PCOL dates from 2006 (I should know, I helped work on it, mostly performance testing using CompuWare to locate & iron out horrible Hibernate-on-Oracle issues...)
All of this was delivered by EDS, completely pre-dates the GDS stuff and shouldn't be considered anything to do with it. :)
(And code with 50 nested levels of parens is Bad Code, just like too much nesting in a C-like language)
[1] - https://trolley.link
I haven't put much active thought into the licensing of the Trolley widget JavaScript code... I'm keen to understand what you're looking for, and why the tag being Free Software is important in this case. Happy to chat - maybe drop me a line at rg@trolley.link ?
FYI though - yes, you can choose whether to collect billing & shipping info at a per-product level.
The buyer and seller both get notified by email (and if you have the Stripe app as a seller, you'll get a push notif). The charge gets fully logged in the seller's Stripe account, with all metadata (so if you ever disconnect Trolley you don't lose anything about your customers)
Right now, Trolley seems to appeal to people who want to do business with Stripe instead of PayPal.
In the future we may well add PayPal as a payment backend in between rolling out our added value like digital downloads, subscriptions and the other cool stuff we're planning :)
Drop me a line on rg@trolley.link if you'd like to talk further, I'm interested to see what your project is, and how I can help.
I'm iterating rapidly on the idea - and in particular I'm happy to talk to customers about pricing plans that aren't currently listed on the landing page (if that means fixed fee and no transaction cost then that's doable)
tbh I'm not sure that Stripe appeals to the most cost-conscious entrepreneurs, and right now I am targeting those who want to test ideas rapidly, and who are likely to then find time / money to build out their own integration (which will mean I have a high degree of churn if I don't adapt. That's fine, it's all learning!
Again - thanks for all the time you've spent replying. Good luck with your project(s) too :)
Right now I've "launched" on HN and IndieHackers only, and I'm focussing on software, lean-startup folks to gather feedback.
Next up will be questions around digital downloads ("information products" and other things), so I'll need to engage more with those communities. I don't believe they're well served by Etsy, though they do have alternatives.
Right now it's all about learning where our product and markets best align - and the feedback I'm getting here today is enormously valuable. Thanks!
From a quick dig around, looking at the Closure changelog, they introduced a polyfill of their own; I'm guessing this went in after CLJS built one, so now there are 2 in the compile / transpile chain.
One of the consequences of nothing in life being simple any more!