Daily Note - January 18, 2022

Business

• As a solo entrepreneur, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. There’s so much to do! To avoid the trap of perfectionism and delaying launching, I break things down into bite-size chunks, just like when I’m coding.

• When tasks are small enough, it’s easier to feel the progress and maintain the momentum. I also try to keep things simple to start with, and then iterate later. The goal is to keep moving and not spend too much time overthinking or researching.

• If you’ve been following along, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to automate inviting customers to the private repos for my Ruby on Mac script. I’m planning on selling the script through a merchant of record called LemonSqueezy. Going through a merchant of record means I don’t have to deal with any sales tax headaches. I wrote a Twitter thread about this.

• LemonSqueezy doesn’t let you add custom fields on the checkout form, so I need to figure out how to capture the customer’s GitHub username so I can then invite them to the private repo. At first, I thought I’d try putting this together with serverless workflows. But when I mapped out the whole end to end process, it seemed complicated and error-prone.

• LemonSqueezy lets you specify a redirect URL with the license key as a parameter. So, what I was thinking was to redirect to a Tally form, which lets you pull in data from URL parameters as hidden fields. This form would prompt the customer to enter their GitHub username. When they submit the form, this would save the GitHub username and the license to a Notion DB, and at the same time, it would trigger a webhook that would run a serverless function. Tally makes it super easy to integrate with tools like Notion and webhooks.

• The serverless function would then use the Notion API to query my Notion DB to see if there’s a match for that GitHub username and license. If so, it would use the GitHub API to add them as a collaborator to my private repo.

• But what if something goes wrong during those API calls? I didn’t know if there was an easy way to display errors back on the Tally form. And when I looked at all the moving parts and dependencies, I thought there were too many.

• So I decided to spin up a small Rails app instead, where I have better control over error handling. I’m a big fan of TDD, not only for shaping the design of the code, but also for making me think better. I realized that a user can have multiple licenses. For example, they might buy the $7 Basic script, and upgrade to the $37 Prime script later on.

• In turn, that prompted me to see if LemonSqueezy supports coupon/discount codes, and they do, which was a relief. I decided to handle these manually for now, and only figure out how to automate this if I get too many upgrade requests.

• I also realized how naive my initial license validation was. If the only thing I was relying on was checking the Notion DB, then anyone could visit the Tally form directly and put in a bogus license in the URL parameter, and it would get saved to the Notion DB.

• Instead, I need to validate the license via the LemonSqueezy API. I would then need to grab the product ID from the response to know which repo to invite the customer to.

• Capture when someone tries to share their license? If a different username tries to use an existing license, capture the license key, who it belongs to, and who attempted to use it.

• I had an office hours session with one of my readers. They were looking through my Coaching services and wanted to learn more about security on a Mac. I asked them if they use a password manager, and they didn’t. So I recommended 1Password and explained the benefits. I also helped them with a freeCodeCamp Responsive Web Design project they were working on.

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