The Problem We Were Actually Solving
When I first started working with Bangladeshi creators, they would tell me about the impossible hurdles they faced when trying to sell their digital products on the major platforms. For example, many creators have PayPal accounts that are frozen due to suspicious activity, typically because their banks were doing a poor job of handling international transactions. Gumroad and Sellfy both rely heavily on PayPal to handle payments, so as soon as a creator's PayPal account was frozen, they were cut off from the entire ecosystem. Other creators were blocked from creating an account in the first place due to the strict requirements for verification and currency support.
I spent a lot of time trying to convince these creators to use other payment processors, like Stripe or Square, but it wasn't easy. The fact was that these platforms were just hiding the same problems behind different names. I was trying to solve the wrong problem.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
I decided to tackle the problem head-on by building a self-hosted store that would allow Bangladeshi creators to sell their digital products directly to customers without relying on the main platforms. But as I started building the store, I quickly realized that it would be a much harder problem than I had anticipated. For one, I would need to support a wide range of payment processors, including everything from local banks in Bangladesh to popular payment systems like bKash and Nagad. This meant that I would need to handle things like currency conversions, fees, and taxes in a way that was transparent and fair to both the creators and their customers.
