🍋 Lemon Drop #06: Product of the year, app improvements, and more

Buckle up for this Lemon Drop, it’s a sweet one.

If you’re new around here, be sure to check out our Lemon Drop series (#01, #02, #03, #04, #05). This particular issue will feature some new improvements but also drop some news around the future of Lemon Squeezy.

In short, our current laser focus is centered around launching new marketing capabilities (email & affiliates) and improving on our current features for software/saas companies.

A quick look at what will be covered in today’s Lemon Drop:

• Product of the Year from Product Hunt
• Listening to customers
• Checkout experience improvements
• Platform & application improvements
• What’s coming soon

With all that being said, here we go.

Ecommerce product of the year

Every year, Product Hunt celebrates their annual Golden Kitty awards. This year, close to 15,000 products went into multiple rounds of voting to claim the title.

Much to our surprise, we had no idea we were even in the running. It wasn’t until someone made us aware that we were a semi-finalist that it finally caught our eye. On a positive note, I guess you could say we’re a focused group that’s hard at work rather than paying attention to the noise.

After weeks of more voting, we ended up making it as a finalist. We were in the top 4 to claim the title of the “Ecommerce Product of the Year”.

I’ve always been a fan of Product Hunt. I’ve seen the awards in the past but I really didn’t understand the effort they put into it. Over the next few weeks, we had to join rehearsals going over the awards show. It really is like the “Grammys for startups”.

In the end, we fell short of winning the title. For us, the nomination, becoming a finalist, and all the compliments from everyone added to our conviction about what we’re building with Lemon Squeezy.

So not all is lost. 😉

Building Lemon Squeezy, together.

As we made it through the Holiday season and moved into the new year, we decided to take a hard look at where we were headed for 2022.

New stores were signing up, store payouts were climbing, and the requests for new features really started to pile up.

We decided it was time to send out a formal survey to our entire community to ask directly.

The most important question was “how can we make Lemon Squeezy better?”

Ultimately, we realized we needed to re-prioritize our roadmap. To our surprise, the majority of the votes were around marketing capabilities and expanding our platform to work cohesively with saas/software businesses.

We’ve been hard at work

since then and today we’ve already started to make great strides on everything.

Thank you to everyone that provided your feedback. 🙏

More control over the checkout experience

In addition to the new features centered around marketing capabilities and improving features for saas/software companies, we still need to make sure we’re improving on our existing platform. There have been some subtle improvements rolling out over the past few months. These improvements will continue to deploy with each of our sprints.

Passing customer data into the checkout

You can now pass custom data through the checkout. From simple use cases like attaching info to your orders to leveraging URL parameters for the redirect URL after purchase.

More info →

Prefill checkout fields

If you already know some of your customer data before sending them to the checkout, you can add a few extra parameters to prefill customer data to make the checkout process more straightforward.

More info →

Receipt email customization

Another addition we added was new settings to allow you to edit the receipt email button and content. You can easily customize this for each of your products within the product panel.

Here’s a preview of a customized button and thank you note in a receipt email.

New platform & application improvements

As the Lemon Squeezy platform evolves, it’s important for us to maintain the platform. Things like technical debt and having an application that is trusted by thousands of store owners, it’s critical for us to be on top of upgrades, server maintenance, and more.

Platform codebase upgrades

On top of our AWS serverless architecture, the backend and frontend code versions were upgraded to the latest versions of each respective framework.

Enable / Disable abandoned cart emails

Additionally, we quietly released the ability to toggle abandoned cart emails for your store. More control over your email communication soon. Very soon.

What’s coming next?

With the results from the survey, we have made some major adjustments to our roadmap. The biggest one is our decision to de-prioritize our website builder to make way for the new marketing features (email & affiliates). Expect the release of the new email marketing features to release in the coming weeks.

This wasn’t an easy decision but ultimately we’re choosing to listen to our customers and that feels right.

Currently, we are balancing simple improvements to existing features and new features. When it comes to new features up next on our roadmap here’s a quick sneak peek. 👀

• Email marketing
• Affiliates
• SaaS & software subscription management
• API additions
• Public roadmap

Lastly, keep your eyes open for our new public roadmap. In an effort to continue our transparency in what we’re building, we’re excited to continue to have our customers build the future of Lemon Squeezy, together.

Stay fresh. 🍋

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