I want to talk about the part of building a digital product business that nobody puts in their “how I made $10k in my first month” thread.
The part where the payment processor asks if you’re real.
For context: I’ve been selling on Etsy for a while. Etsy handles the payment infrastructure for me. Buyer pays Etsy, Etsy takes their cut, money lands in my account a few days later. Clean, simple, but it means every sale lives on someone else’s platform with someone else’s rules.
I want a direct checkout. Not to leave Etsy — Etsy stays primary — but to add a second channel that lives on my own site. So when someone lands on builtbyjoshstudio.com and wants to buy, they don’t have to leave to do it.
Lemon Squeezy is the obvious pick. Stripe under the hood, handles VAT and sales tax automatically, embeddable checkout, reasonable fees. Sign up, add products, launch. Should take a weekend.
It did not take a weekend.
I created the account, filled in the personal info, submitted tax documents, uploaded ID. That part was fine. Standard “we need to know you’re not laundering money” compliance. Took about an hour.
Then I started adding products. All eight full versions. Names, descriptions, pricing, confirmation modals, email receipts — the whole package. Felt good. Felt like progress.
Then I got the email.
“We need some additional information before we can approve your account.”
Not a rejection. A request for more context. They wanted to see actual sample products. Personal social profiles. A clearer description of what I sell and how. Confirmation that my website would have Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Refund Policy pages.
I’ll be straight: my first reaction was annoyance. I have an Etsy shop. I have a real website. I have public products people can see. What more do you need?
Then I thought about it for ten minutes and realized — they’re not being difficult. They’re being responsible. The number of fraudsters and gray-market operators trying to use payment processors to launder money or sell garbage products is enormous. Lemon Squeezy gets a million applications. The friction is the filter.
Two PDF samples — one Quick Start Guide from a workbook, one from a Creator OS lite. Real artifacts from real products. Anyone reviewing them can see the level of care that went into them.
Personal social profiles — Facebook and Instagram. Not branded accounts. Not the polished public face. The actual personal accounts where I’m a person with friends and a face and a history. I get why they want this. Anyone running a serious fraud operation isn’t linking their actual personal Facebook.
A full product description covering both lines — the Notion side and the spreadsheet side. Audience. Pricing. Channels. Pretty much a one-page brief on the whole business.
A commitment to add the three legal pages to my site before launch. Which led to me spending an evening writing a Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Refund Policy. They’re now live at builtbyjoshstudio.com/terms, /privacy, and /refunds.
That email went out. Now I’m waiting.
The waiting is the part nobody talks about. You spend weeks building infrastructure, writing copy, prepping listings. You hit submit. And then nothing happens for some indeterminate amount of time while a human somewhere reviews your application against criteria you can’t see.
In the meantime: Etsy is still running. Sales are still happening. The site is still live. The lite versions are still rolling out. The business doesn’t stop just because one piece of the stack is in queue.
But there’s a specific kind of mental tax that comes with “we’ll get back to you.” You can’t fully plan the next move because you don’t know when the green light is coming. So you build the next thing in parallel and try not to refresh the inbox every fifteen minutes.
The clean tutorials lie. Or rather, they leave out the parts that don’t make for good content.
“How I set up direct checkout in a weekend” assumes the application got approved. It doesn’t talk about the email asking for more info, the legal pages you have to write, the wait that follows. Those steps happen to most people. They just don’t show up in the success stories.
I’d rather show the whole thing — including the parts that aren’t tidy. So that’s what this is.
When the approval comes through, I’ll write the next post. Until then, we wait.
— Josh
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