New to WIP?
We're a group of makers shipping together. We help each other stay accountable and reach our goals.
Apply for access
Other questions
Back
Question
What is the best way to sell access to text content?
Hey makers!
I plan to launch my first guide for my YouTube audience behind a paywall. What is the quickest way to put text content behind a paywall? If it matters, I use Lemon Squeezy for payments.
I have the guide ready in Notion, and I would prefer to have it delivered as PDF + Notion page access (because it's continuously updated). But I might consider moving it to the Next.js website if it's easier.
It turns out it's not as easy to automate inviting people to the Notion page. I couldn't find any simple automation, Zapier doesn't allow it for example.
I can technically just give it "Anyone with the link" access, but it's easily sharable, so I'd prefer to avoid this.
Maybe you know a good service or solution for that? Preferably free but not necessary.
I plan to launch my first guide for my YouTube audience behind a paywall. What is the quickest way to put text content behind a paywall? If it matters, I use Lemon Squeezy for payments.
I have the guide ready in Notion, and I would prefer to have it delivered as PDF + Notion page access (because it's continuously updated). But I might consider moving it to the Next.js website if it's easier.
It turns out it's not as easy to automate inviting people to the Notion page. I couldn't find any simple automation, Zapier doesn't allow it for example.
I can technically just give it "Anyone with the link" access, but it's easily sharable, so I'd prefer to avoid this.
Maybe you know a good service or solution for that? Preferably free but not necessary.
👋 Join WIP to participate
A friend has built this: www.helpkit.so/blog/create-a-…
I don't use Notion so I don't know much about it, but I know he loves Notion and his business is on Notion. IIRC he sold some stuff with Notion + Lemonsqueezy as well
Thanks for the suggestion!
Yeah, I found it, too, in the research. It looks fantastic and is a perfect fit for my case.
I'd probably use it if I were sure that I'd get consistent sales in the future (it's a one-time payment guide). Otherwise, $31 / month seems a bit steep for now.
Would Gumroad fit the bill?
Payments and you can upload the assets there too
I was about to suggest Gumroad as well. And also, Buy Me A Coffee has a shop feature.
The shop feature is not an issue; LemonSqueezy has it, too. I just wanted a place where the text content will be hosted as an always updated version.
PDFs, eBooks and such are hard to maintain and version in the future.
Oh, nice. Gumroad seems to be able to host text content online, which might be a solution.
I wanted to keep it in Notion for easy maintenance, but it might be indeed the easiest way.
Ah, yes, Gumroad is probably the popular option for Notion (templates, etc).
I have run my courses (text content) through my personal dev tooling. If you’re open to a little bit of coding I can share that with you.
But if you prefer no code solutions then perhaps Gumroad or any membership site can help.
I want!
Cool. Let's setup a Zoom call and I'll show you what I got. calendly.com/zell/chat. Lemme know if timings work. If not, we can schedule something privately too.
Sure, I'll DM you.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Currently, the goal is to ship it for sale as fast as possible. I plan to move it to a properly coded solution and host it myself later.
There’s no payment wrapper but have you thought of using once.com/writebook and putting it behind one?
Oh, nice! I forgot about this project. I will check it out next time.
In case someone needs this in the future.
I eventually moved everything from Notion to Google Docs, and it turned out to be the best way.
1. Easy to give access via Zappier automation.
2. PDF generation is much better compared to Notion.
That's good to know. Just keep it simple. We tend to overcomplicate things lol.
Speaking of Notion, have you tried exporting it as PDF?
Yeah, but it looked terrible, and there is no way to manually format it properly because Notion doesn't have pages per se.
In addition, if you use internal links (Tables of contents or others), it breaks as soon as you export it to PDF. With Google Docs, they work correctly in PDF.
Ah, OK! I just tested on both Notion and Gdocs, you're right!
I normally export my Notion pages as Markdown, so I can keep all the formatting, and easy for me to update as well. Then I convert them into EPUB.
Oh nice, that's a neat trick to know, too. Thanks for sharing.