Email your Gumroad customers and get notifications via Discord

This repo contains two functions which extend Gumroad with a custom workflow

1. gumroad-pings - forwards messages to Discord to tell you about your sales
2. gumroad-upgrade - use this to email customers an upgrade to a secret unlisted YouTube video or Gist for additional value

Emails are sent via AWS SES and for low traffic, will stay within the free tier.

Deployment

First of all, set up OpenFaaS using the open-source faasd project.

My new eBook has step-by-step instructions on how to setup and configure faasd and may save you some time with configuration and setting up TLS: Serverless For Everyone Else.

Then create an incoming webhook URL via Discord's docs.

Then clone this repo, and create the two secrets.

faas-cli secret create seller-id --from-literal "GUMROAD_SELLER_ID"
faas-cli secret create discord-url --from-literal "https://hooks.slack.com/services/X/Y/Z"

You can get the discord-url by creating an "incoming webhook" and creating a new channel for the messages, or using an existing one.

Set an end-date for your offer in the promotion_end_date environment variable, if you don't know what date to set, make the date very far into the future.

  gumroad-pings:
...
    environment:
...
      promotion_end_date: '2021-02-13T00:00:00.000Z'

Deploy the function after creating the secrets:

faas-cli deploy --filter gumroad-pings

Now enter your function's URL on the Advanced tab in Gumroad's settings page, in the "Ping" field.

Your URL will be something like: https://faasd.domain.com/function/gumroad-pings

This is what you'll receive.

Feel free to customise the code in the handler.js file.

Why not?

• Send new customers an email using SES or Sendgrid
• Tweet a message to say thanks
• Customise the message into the Discord channel
• Send them an automated invite to your Discord community
• Flash an LED on your Raspberry Pi

See the code for the gumroad-pings function

Conditional emails

The gumroad-upgrade function will "upgrade" customers on the 50USD tier by emailing them a link to a video course.

You'll need to set up AWS Simple Email Service (SES) or use an alternative like Sendgrid if you want this functionality in your own workflow.

Create secrets for your AWS credentials:

export AWS_SES_TOKEN=""
export AWS_SES_SECRET=""

faas-cli secret create \
 ses-access-key-id \
 --from-literal "$AWS_SES_SECRET"

faas-cli secret create \
 ses-access-token \
 --from-literal "$AWS_SES_TOKEN"

Create a secret for the URL that you want your customers to go to:

export SECRET_URL="https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis/"

faas-cli secret create \
 secret-url \
 --from-literal "$SECRET_URL"

Customise the email templates in the gumroad-upgrade/emails/ folder - edit the message.html and message.txt so your users can receive both plaintext and HTML.

Update the environment variables for your emails and the AWS region if you're using SES

    environment:
      subject: "Your bonus upgrade to my video workshop"
      sender: sales@openfaas.com
      region: "eu-west-1"

Here's an example of the HTML message, which you can customise:

See the code for the gumroad-upgrade function

Emails are de-duplicated to prevent you spamming your customers. You can disable this if you wish.

Sending test emails

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/function/gumroad-upgrade \
 --data-binary '{"email": "alex@openfaas.com", "sellerID": "SECRET"}' \
 -H "Content-type: application/json"

Publish cross-platform images

faas-cli publish --platforms linux/arm/v7

faas-cli publish --platforms linux/amd64,linux/arm64,linux/arm/v7 \
  --filter gumroad-pings

Deploy:

export OPENFAAS_URL=http://192.168.0.15:8080
faas-cli deploy
faas-cli deploy --filter gumroad-pings

Copyright & License

MIT license, copyright OpenFaaS Ltd