10 days til launch! Paytable.io — a side project turned labour of love.
I’m launching paytable.io, a purpose built platform to help monetize your Airtable databases and provide secure access to your audience.
Read about the journey so far, and an overview of features to expect for launch.
The Start
The last 4 months have been a crazy ride. I had an idea late last year to create a simple tool that would enable people to sell their Airtable content; curated galleries, resource stacks and checklists etc. I managed to get the first version of Paytable (originally named Curateable) out in 4 weeks back in early Jan with the following features included.
- A landing page builder to promote your curated content.
- A login portal for customer access
- A secure I-frame based reader embedded into your paytable.io url
It went down pretty well, I got around 100 users try it out, but I realised I was missing a trick...
After some honest, and very helpful feedback from early users, it became clear that most users, needed more. Much more:
- Ability to embed the checkout and database viewing experience into your own site
- Ability to sell subscriptions and single-purchase access to your databases
- Ability to sell via various payment gateways (not just Stripe)
So, around 7 weeks ago I began to rebuild the whole tool from scratch to be able to better accommodate for what my potential users actually needed.
Nobody wants to have to rebuild an app from the ground up, but it made sense for me because I now had initial users actively trying the app out and providing feedback. I set out to build a new, slicker version focusing on just the features people actually wanted.
Introducing Paytable.io
Now, Paytable.io has become an all-in-one, purpose built platform to build a simple membership space and login portal that connects your Airtable bases to your audience. Here’s an overview of the good stuff:
The single page site builder
Create a one-page membership site in under a minute with the following features
- Add your own branding
- Add your own colours and fonts
- Embed sample databases to entice customers
- Include testimonials
- Custom themes and layouts
- Or.. scrap it all and embed in your own site (more below)
Embed into your own site
You can embed each, or all stages of the purchasing and viewing experience into your own site with our handy embed snippets. Essentially a user would never have to leave your site, and even the secure reader and login portal get embedded into a page on your domain with one line of code.
Customer insights & analytics
Your Paytable dashboard gives you a top level easy-to-understand overview of your customers activity, portal log-ins and will show how much revenue you have earned. You’ll also be able to login directly to your own Stripe dashboard for even deeper insights, manage any refunds and check your upcoming payouts.
Additional security to fight ‘iframe pirates’
The way our product works is by embedding your shared view urls of any base you want to sell. If your concerned about any of your paying customers hacking in and grabbing this url to share around, fear not! You can add us a collaborator to your base and we will auto update your shared view urls for you on the fly meaning only logged-in paying customers can see the latest shared view urls.
Auto update users on new rows added
With a simple zapier integration, you’ll be able to automatically notify your audience when new rows (content) is added to your awesome base. You’ll be able to set this for every single update, or send a bulk update as and when you want to update your customers of the new stuff added.
A customizable iframe reader
Viewing Airtable databases can be a little overwhelming, but more importantly you can’t brand or customise the viewing experience. With Paytable your base is embedded into a customisable secure reader and you’ll be able to change the display size, add your own in-app messages, logo and brand colours easily.
Use Gumroad instead of Stripe
Many of our users already sell databases via Gumroad, want to keep using their checkout? Thats fine, we automatically sync with with Gumroad — you just need to add a special redirect link you will be provided after setting up your first product.
Pricing & early adopter discounts
When we launch in public beta in 10 days all our early stage users will be able to take advantage of our current discounted cost of only $12 per month with 0% transaction fee on all your sales.
This will go up when we come out of beta testing and we’ll also include a small transaction fee. If you want to take advantage of the current discounted pricing — make sure you’ve signed to our waitlist asap!
Questions, help & support
Grab a virtual coffee and demo with our founder — yours truly! If you want to discuss your current setup and learn more about how Paytable.io can integrate with it just let me know at usepaytable@gmail.com. I’m always happy to jump a call and show your around. I’ve already met with many people who are interested in using Paytable and I plan to keep this product as a bootstrapped, personally managed service for at least the first year.
I won’t be looking to expand or grow this product rapidly, I aim to have have around 50 users max within year one so I can build better relationships with my customers, taking things slowly to make sure the product is working perfectly.
As an Airtable curator myself, I’m super excited to see what you can do with Paytable.io!
Give me a shout at usepaytable@gmail.com and lets go from there!
