Utilizing my joblessness

I worked on Selar.co a lot more and the results are very encouraging

Me for the first two weeks
Paystack dashboard chart for the year, peep the growth in the past 2 months👀

USD and GBP payments(Powered by Stripe)

Integrated Stripe for USD and GBP payments which gives us a 100% success rate for international payments, although our USD and GBP payments are not reflected on this chart, this has really helped with the success rate of purchases from international buyers. We’ve passed over $200 in revenue in the past one month plus. Check it out

On-demand Content Streaming with AWS cloudfront

A major merchant we have is Mount Zion Films productions, and if I’m counting people we’ve helped this year, they’d be at the top of the list. With Selar, they have a digital download platform by default, but we noticed most of their customers wanted to stream their content. Streaming is actually a good model for customers — it’s really affordable(for those that have data), however, judging by numbers, except the subscribers are a lot, I don’t think streaming is profitable for any content producing company that is serving their customers privately(i.e not youtube). With that said, I had all the time in the world to do this, so we set it up, and the reception has been great thus far. Check it out

Merchant Customer Subscription

So a streaming model will not be complete without a subscription system, I also setup a system where merchants can serve a subscription fee for their customers to access all their content for a certain amount of time.Check it out.

Read-online only PDFs

While we cannot singlehandedly stop piracy, working with awesome content creators definitely amplifies our concern to this issue. Asides music, another product that gets bootlegged so easily is books, so we recently setup a special kind of product for book authors/magazine publishers that allows the buyer read the book online without downloading it. I think I’m very proud of this features *coughs in I hope it will be used a lot* Check it out

API and widgets

Ignore what I said above about being proud of that feature, I’m more proud of this. I also released a few apis and widgets. The apis allow developers build around Selar, the current api releases product, merchant, and event ticket attendees(Yeah, you can sell tickets on Selar). It’s still undocumented but you can preview it with the following endpoints

Website widget in action

Physical products delivery with Kobo360

This is actually in beta and we’re currently testing to see the traction, but the idea is simple: For physical product merchants that wish to outsource their delivery, we’ve setup a seamless process in which after a customer purchases their product, we automatically notify Kobo360 to go pick up the product from the merchant and deliver to the buyer. Physical sellers are literally the hardest set of customers to acquire, and I thought “Why not help them and see if they come on board”, we’re currently piloting with the Jenifa’s Diary Physical DVD that is delivered worldwide. Check it out

Listening to users

I saved the most important for the last. Building is fun, but building products/features that users really need is better. In the past two months, I’ve listened to over 200 customers, via our drift.co chat(Super indispensable feature) and phone call conversations, and I must say, it’s been very helpful. I’ve gotten so much insights and lessons from asking questions and listening to the answers.

Summary

I really don’t know what is next for me, but I’m excited to see what the next couple of months look like.

Credits

Ezra Olubi (MVP)—In the past two months, he has given me a lot of tips and pointers on how to fine-tune our tech, and they’ve been very priceless.

--

--

I write essays that I'd like to read // Currently building Selar.co // douglas@selar.co

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store