I got my first payment on Stripe last night, and I fucked it up.
If you have been following along, you know that I'm migrating my daily content from Patreon over here to beehiiv. Beehiiv is a newsletter-centric platform that gives me the tools to grow my subscriber list faster, and while Patreon has been an incredible first platform for me to grow on, it's time to graduate. But you never forget your first, so thanks for the memories, Patreon.
To clarify, I will continue to publish content on Patreon, but I just won't trigger the emails. The emails will live on Beehiiv, and I'll invest in growing my subscriber base there.
Free Daily Newsletter
Enjoying this? Get more like it.
Scott publishes every day. Drop your email and it lands in your inbox.
No spam. One article per day. Unsubscribe any time.
Anyways, long story short, as part of this, I've created payment workflows through Stripe. Now, if you've never used Stripe before, then you don't know it's a rather simple yet incredibly complicated system for someone who is processing payments for the first time. I'm getting the hang of it, but there's a lot of setup, and when you're integrating payment links and API's into a website, it's a lot to figure out.
With that being said, all of my payments to date have been on Patreon, until someone decided to buy one of my products, and the payment failed through Stripe. Not because of them, or their card, or anything they did, but because I set up too many payment rules that ultimately stopped the payment from going through. You can also argue it's because I'm a rookie who didn't know what I was doing just yet!
So when I got the text that this individual purchased something, I opened that Stripe app with the pace and vigor like I checked my college grades. I was so excited to see that I finally had a transaction. Turns out, it was stuck in the "blocked" purgatory of payments hell.
And I felt like an idiot.
After three plus years of still learning how to do all of this on my own, I'm still learning, and I'm not afraid to admit it.
That's the part nobody really tells you when you start building something on your own. You don't graduate from learning. You just graduate to new problems. You think once you've been doing this for a few years, you're supposed to have it all wired, all figured out, all smooth. Then something simple like a payment breaks, and you're right back in the seat of "what the hell did I just do?" staring at your screen as it betrays you. It didn't. You're just in the next chapter of figuring it out.
The truth is, this never shuts off. New tools, new platforms, new systems, new mistakes. Every level comes with a fresh set of things you've never seen before, and the people who actually build something meaningful aren't the ones who avoid those moments; they're the ones who expect them. They don't spiral every time something breaks; they get curious. They slow it down, fix it, and keep moving. It's not glamorous, it's not clean, and it definitely doesn't feel like progress in the moment, but this is the work.
So yeah, I messed it up. Cool. Now I know exactly where it broke, how to fix it, and what not to do next time. If you want to do something meaningful in your career, then you'd better be willing to look dumb for a minute while you learn your way through it. Nobody is immune to it either. You either lean into it and keep going, or you pretend you should already know everything and you stall out. I'm choosing to keep going.