Author Topic: My OpenVBX Theme  (Read 6779 times)

micah

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My OpenVBX Theme
« on: March 26, 2017, 11:46:26 PM »
Not sure if I posted about this before but I recently made a new theme for OpenVBX which is an online phone system (PBX) software used with Twilio.  Its kinda a niche app but its widely used.  It's open source but the only problem is that it hasn't been updated in years.  The UI  out of the box is just horribly dated.  It allows for theming and again, the few available themes are just gross.  So I made my own!  I spent several dozen hours working on it earlier this year and posted a demo video overview on youtube.  Between youtube and my facebook page, I've gotten 3 unsolicited requests from strangers on the Internet to download or buy my theme!

So this weekend, I just spent another dozen hours building out a page on my site that lets you do just that.  It integrates the stripe.com payment gateway and only allows authorized (read paid) users to download the files.  It also uses mailgun to send the confirmation e-mail which includes a registration number that can be used like a password to log back into the page at any time in the future to download the files again.

I'm pretty happy with the results.  Not sure if I will ever actually make a sale, but it was a fun experience building it all out.

Here's the page if you're interested Material design theme for OpenVBX.
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ober

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Re: My OpenVBX Theme
« Reply #1 on: March 27, 2017, 10:11:34 AM »
Looks good man.  And I hope it takes off for you.  I always wonder the benefit of setting something like this up instead of just dealing directly with people for payment.  Also, how was the stripe integration?  I've wanted to use them in the past but never went for it.

One of my goals is to produce something that can be resold with no effort on my part.  All of my freelance work up to this point is pretty much one-off except for the hosting part of it, which still requires some level of support.  My wife on the other hand, who works with POD services, wakes up most mornings to new sales.  Literally, she's making money while she sleeps. 

micah

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Re: My OpenVBX Theme
« Reply #2 on: March 27, 2017, 09:35:11 PM »
Residual income is where its at.  Someday I hope to come up with something that can really make money. Not sure if it will be a SaaS or maybe just a successful site that gives me a cut of the sales. Who knows.

As for Stipe, I used their javascript library that just takes a couple lines of HTML on the front end.  That pulls in their JS and generates the entire front-end which the user fills out. It does all the validation and then pre-auths the transactions and POSTS back a token.

On the back end, I included their PHP SDK and just submit that token back to their API to make the actual charge.  The extent of the code basically looks like this:

Code: [Select]
if(isset($_POST['stripeToken']))
         {
            require_once(_app_server_path.'core/libs/stripe/init.php');
           
            \Stripe\Stripe::setApiKey("sk_live_somerandomcodetheygameme");
           
            $token = $_POST['stripeToken'];
           
            // Charge the user's card:
            $charge = \Stripe\Charge::create(array(
              "amount" => 1900,
              "currency" => "usd",
              "description" => "Material theme for OpenVBX",
              "source" => $token,
            ));
           
            if($charge->status = "succeeded")
            {
                // my code to e-mail the use and save the transaction to the database etc.
             }

Super easy!
"I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man.  I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers."

ober

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Re: My OpenVBX Theme
« Reply #3 on: March 28, 2017, 09:06:51 AM »
Nice!  And yeah, personally, I want to come up with a SaaS solution (or several) that I know will make money.  To me, that's where it is at.  Depending on sales of individual items when taste/trends/whatever comes into play is too unpredictable.

micah

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Re: My OpenVBX Theme
« Reply #4 on: March 28, 2017, 12:10:19 PM »
I just made a sale!  This is so exciting.  :D
"I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man.  I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers."

ober

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Re: My OpenVBX Theme
« Reply #5 on: March 28, 2017, 02:31:38 PM »
I just made a sale!  This is so exciting.  :D
Congrats!  :)

KnuckleBuckett

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Re: My OpenVBX Theme
« Reply #6 on: March 29, 2017, 06:16:18 AM »

micah

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Re: My OpenVBX Theme
« Reply #7 on: March 31, 2017, 12:21:06 AM »
Kicking myself for this one...

I've been messing around trying to do better analytics and stuff so 2 nights ago I added some google conversion tracking to my "pay now" button.  Over the past 48 hours, google shows I had 4 clicks on my "pay now" button but I didn't get any sales. I assumed they were just people who clicked the button to see what it does but didn't actually finish the transactions.  Tonight, I clicked the button and to my horror, it forwarded me away from my site because I screwed up the tagging code that I added to the button!  For the last 2 days no one has been able to successfully make a payment, and as best I can tell, 4 people might have actually tried! 

 :suicide:
"I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man.  I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers."

ober

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Re: My OpenVBX Theme
« Reply #8 on: March 31, 2017, 08:56:53 AM »
That blows!  Do you have any information on them or any way to contact them?

On a similar note, I made some changes for one of my clients over the past few weeks and the client wanted to rush them out based on some basic testing.  I had completely changed the URL rewrite rules to be more dynamic and thought I had tested most areas.  Unfortunately, I didn't go all the way through his custom checkout process and we realized after he had no sales for 3 days that the redirect back to his site from the 3rd party payment system was failing.  Oops.

As a side note, I used Slim (routing framework) on a recent project and if I had been using Slim on this project instead of my own combo of routing and URL rewrites, I probably could have avoided that problem.

:suicide:

micah

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Re: My OpenVBX Theme
« Reply #9 on: May 01, 2017, 12:11:45 AM »
So in the little over a month that I've had this thing up for sale on my site I've sold it 4 times.

The first two were early on, one was from someone who had previously expressed interest when I first posted that I had made the theme on my business facebook page and the second was from a paid search campaign I ran.   Overall, ad words and facebook boosted posts didn't garner me much and cost too much for the ROI so I gave up on that.  Then this weekend I got 2 unsolicited more sales!  interestingly enough, both came from youtube.   

If you search for "openvbx themes" my website doesn't show up (at least not in the first several pages of results) but the youtube screencast I made is at the bottom of the first page.  Its only been viewed 127 times but that has resulted in the two sales this weekend.  Not bad!

I figure if I can just sell it 76 more times I'll recoup the time I put into it creating it.
"I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man.  I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers."