Day 18 of collecting rejections

I'm seeking rejections at the moment and today I closed a sale! I had a great chat with a coding course provider last week. We agreed to do a sponsored article featuring one of their students and we settled on a price for that. The person has a cool story and so it will be fun to have them on No CS Degree.

Using Stripe Checkout for the first time

I have had problems in the past with Paypal freezing my account when I suddenly get a reasonably big sum of money. So I needed to use Stripe. My carrd account just expired and I realised instead of renewing that I could use Stripe Checkout and use client side code to take a payment.

This means I don't have to do any server-based coding - I just have to add a product on the Stripe website, copy a chunk of code and add it to my site. I had to make two web pages for redirecting the customer in case the payment succeeded or failed but that was dead simple in Ghost. The nice thing about the blogging platform is you can easily add code to it and everything works.

How to close a sale

I sent the client a message at the end of last week saying that I had the payment form ready but to let me know if it didn't work as it was the first time I had done this. Maybe not the best thing to say in a sales email but I prefer to be honest.

I followed up with the client today over Twitter and they've just paid! So that's a nice chunk of revenue. The hardest part of sales is actually getting someone to pay - talking about your product's benefits, that's the easy part. So is convincing someone to say yes to you over a call (because most people won't say no to your face or they want to be nice).

No, the really hard part is to get a busy person to take time away from everything else they are doing and send you money. You have to follow up so you can get paid but you can't be too rude or annoying either. It's nice when a sale happens and I'm looking forward to sharing their coding courses's success story. 😀