Testing monetization in MVP - is Buy Me a Coffee a good idea?
Heey everyone,
I'm part of the team that's building Lifetoon, an AI-native platform for episodic visual storytelling in its MVP stage.
We wanted to validate the idea as quickly as possible, so we launched before finalizing the Stripe integration. That means users can access the product, but we can’t charge them yet.
As a temporary workaround, we added a Buy Me a Coffee link at the end of the user flow to test if there’s a willingness to pay.
And, I'm curious - has anyone here tried something similar during the MVP phase? If you've used this approach, what was your experience like? Did it work, did it not?
Replies
Tate-A-Tate
Hi Ruxandra! You can use our product Tate-A-Tate for building an episodic visual storytelling agent integrate your own capability. You can create a subscription agent or one-time pay agent in 5 minutes, that can quickly validate the idea as quickly as possible.
@rocsheh Heey, congrats on the product! It looks super interesting and helpful, I'll forward it to the team!
Tate-A-Tate
@ruxandra_mazilu Great！Any question just DM me！
I haven't tried something different, but can't you just have your buy button redirect to a simple stripe payment link with no integration? Then have the stripe page redirect back to your payment confirmation page when the payment is complete (this is a one-click set up in stripe)
You don't even need the Stripe account to be hooked up to your company bank account, it can be hooked up to your personal account just for the test phase. Takes no time to set up.
Buy me a coffee is good, but it doesn't test buying intent or incentivize a purchase, so the quality of your MVP testing results won't be as good.
You could also just email the user and ask to Venmo them? If your product is good I bet people would pay.
@emikes919 yep, I fully agree with you, but we have more things to sort out before the Stripe integration. We really wanted to put the product out there, and Buy Me a Coffee or something donation-based seemed like an interesting experiment for a couple of days. But after trying it for 1-2 days, I'm with you that it doesn't show relevant results for our MVP, that's why I was curious if others tested this approach and what outcomes they had.
Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts! We'll add the Buy Me a Coffee moment in the experiments corner :))) will know better next time.
@ruxandra_mazilu sorry just to clarify, by "stripe integration", what do you mean? Do you mean a literal software integrate that uses their API to process payments? If so, I agree, that's potentially too much.
If by "integration" you mean just having your buy button redirect to a stripe payment page, what's stopping you? The entire thing end-to-end can be live in under an hour. Sorry if I misunderstood!
@emikes919 heey, thankies for the reply! Our case is the first one + other things we have to figure out.
minimalist phone: creating folders
I am using @Passionfroot Discovery – Passionfroot by @jenpphan and @j_mannanal and so far, I am satisfied :) Using it for almost a year, and there was no problem. :-)
@jenpphan @j_mannanal @busmark_w_nika hey, this is so cool! I've just followed them, will check the product more in depth - thanks a lot for sharing, Nika!
minimalist phone: creating folders
@jenpphan @j_mannanal @ruxandra_mazilu All good, if you have any questions about it, feel free to ask :)
I'm very curious, what problems are you facing regarding the Stripe integration and how much effort do you think you would require to integrate it?
Asking because we are building a billing platform that helps you decide the correct billing strategy and then actually implement it with very low effort. Maybe we could help you?
@david_camacho_cateura1 heeey David! We're not encountering any problems with Stripe, it's just that we have other things to figure out beforehand, and we wanted to open the platform to see if there's traction. To do this, we wanted to run a little experiment with this donation thing as we decide on the rest, and I was just curious if others did it.
I'll keep in mind to DM you if needed, thank you lots!
Have you gotten any traction with that yet?
That's an interesting take on how to prompt users to donate.
I haven't tried anything different and I might put this on the list of things to try out :)
I say, if you're seeing traction and people are buying you a coffee then run with it!
@bryce_york_ag Hey Bryce! Interestingly, users are donating - It's a nice surprise to see that people are willing to donate to support the product.
We'll keep it just for 2-3 more days (so 5 days in total), as we'll have everything ready on the pricing side, but we're taking the result as a good and unexpected sign!
Raycast
Have you checked out @Schematic ? :)
Schematic
@chrismessina Thanks for the recommendation. @ruxandra_mazilu Schematic makes it super easy to stand up monetization on top of stripe. We provide plan, add on, and limit management as well as drop in components to power your in app experience.
You can start with simple plans and then mature into usage-based, seats, overages, whatever you need! You can implement in a day and then you manage monetization without changing a line of code from there.