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I'm an entrepreneur and web developer. Formerly started Lionite, a web development shop and incubator, now I'm CTO on Binpress, a discovery service and marketplace for source-code.
If you like the idea of being your own boss (I certainly do), chances are you get the itch sometimes to create your own product — a product whose direction you control, that you do not have to compromise on with someone else, and whose fruits you get to fully enjoy, instead of being paid by the hour or a flat rate. It could be a Web service, a WordPress plugin or a desktop application, but the core problem is the same: how do you pick an idea that will succeed?
Most of us take a very simple approach: we stumble on something that doesn’t work well for us or we identify a problem that we have a lot of experience with, and we think, “All right, I’ll just build x for y and make a mint.” The problem is that we don’t have any indicators of whether others feel the same pain and would be inclined to pay for a solution.
Pricing your own product is always a tricky proposition, and the more critical the price is to your product’s success, the more difficult it is to set. It’s easy to look at another product and say how much you would be willing to pay for it, but how can you know how much people would be willing to pay for yours?
There are no absolute truths or perfect formulas for finding the best price, assuming that the “best price” even exists. Instead, take a structured approach to finding a good starting point, and improve it through feedback and testing. But first, you need to understand what the best price actually is.
PayPal is the most popular platform for receiving online payments today. The ease of opening a PayPal account and receiving payments compared to opening a merchant account with a traditional payment gateway is probably the number one reason for its popularity, with a close second being the comprehensive API that PayPal provides for its payment services. In this post, I will break down some of the techniques and approaches to working with the PayPal API, in order to make integration and troubleshooting simpler and easier.
PayPal offers a variety of payment options, which might be confusing at first. Express Checkout is the premier PayPal service. Express Checkout allows you to receive payments without having a merchant account and without having to meet special requirements other than verifying your account (either via a bank account or a credit card).
