Why I Built Shopspace: Lessons Learned Along the Way
Why I built shopspace: one storefront, one flat price, 0% of every sale. The wrong turns, the lessons, and what creator feedback changed.
I built shopspace because creators were spending $100 or more every month on a patchwork of tools just to sell what they already made, and some of those tools took a cut of every sale on top. shopspace replaces that stack with one storefront, one flat subscription and a 0% platform fee on every sale.
You can set up your store on shopspace from $19 a month billed yearly, with a 7-day free trial and nothing taken from your sales apart from card processing.
That is the short answer. The longer one involves a lot of wrong turns, user interviews that changed everything, and a few technical decisions I wish I had made sooner. Here is the full story.
The Inspiration Behind Shopspace
Part of it was personal. I wanted to sell digital products myself, and the fees on the existing platforms were daunting.
The bigger problem was hiding in plain sight. Creators with real audiences, real content, and real demand were losing a significant share of their revenue before it ever reached them. Not to fraud or bad products. To platform fees, monthly subscriptions, and tool sprawl.
I kept seeing the same pattern: a fitness creator with 20,000 followers paying for Linktree, a separate course platform, a booking tool, and a DM automation service. Four monthly bills. Four logins. Four sets of analytics that never talked to each other. And on top of all that, a percentage of every sale going to whichever platform processed the transaction.
That percentage is not small. As of September 2026, Gumroad takes 10% + $0.50 on each direct sale, Beacons takes 9% on its Free plan, and Linktree takes 12% of digital product sales on its Free plan. Card processing (Stripe or PayPal) applies on every platform, so it is left out to keep the comparison fair. The shopspace column uses $19 a month billed yearly ($29 month to month).
| Monthly sales | Linktree Free (12%) | Beacons Free (9%) | shopspace (0%, $19/mo) |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500 | $60 taken, you keep $440 | $45 taken, you keep $455 | $19 taken, you keep $481 |
| $2,000 | $240 taken, you keep $1,760 | $180 taken, you keep $1,820 | $19 taken, you keep $1,981 |
To be fair to the free plans: below roughly $160 to $210 a month in sales, their cut costs less than a flat $19. Past that, the percentage costs more every month, and it grows as you grow.
At $2,000 a month in sales, a 9% cut is $180 you never see. Start a 7-day free trial of shopspace and keep it: 0% per sale, flat $19 a month billed yearly.
The insight on building a creator platform that actually worked for creators was simple: what if one link handled everything, and the platform never touched the creator's money? Payments flow directly through the creator's own Stripe account. shopspace never sits between the creator and the sale.
That was the founding idea. One link. Every product type. Zero platform fee.
Key Challenges Faced in Development
The challenges faced while building shopspace fell into two buckets: technical and psychological.
On the technical side, supporting ten-plus product types in a single storefront sounds straightforward until you try to build it. A digital download has completely different delivery logic from a coaching session, which has different logic from a membership with recurring billing. Getting all of those to feel consistent from the creator's setup side, and invisible to the buyer, took far longer than the initial estimates.
The automation layer was the hardest part. When someone comments on an Instagram post, a keyword triggers a DM, that DM contains a tracked product link, and the system follows up automatically depending on whether the person bought. That chain involves Instagram's API, real-time event handling, and purchase state that has to stay in sync across three different systems. We rebuilt that pipeline twice before it was reliable enough to ship.
The psychological challenge was simpler but more persistent: the instinct to add features before the core was solid. Every user conversation surfaced a new request. I had to learn to ask "does this make the core better, or does it make the core bigger?" Those are not the same question, and confusing them is how products become bloated.
If you are working out where to sell digital products, my advice is the same: choose the simplest tool that actually solves the problem. Simpler almost always wins.
Lessons Learned During the Journey
Ship before you are ready, but not before it works. The first version of shopspace was not polished. The store setup flow had rough edges. But it worked. Creators could set up a store, list products, and get paid. That was enough to start learning. Waiting for polish before shipping is how you spend six months building something nobody asked for.
Creators are practical. In the early months, while the core was being proven, shopspace cost creators nothing to use, and one of the early concerns was whether that would attract serious creators or just people kicking the tires. The answer was clear within the first few weeks: if the tool solves the problem, creators use it. shopspace is a paid subscription now. The part of the model that was never up for debate, and still is not, is the 0% platform cut. When the platform stops taking a percentage of every sale, you are not just saving creators money. You are removing the hesitation that stops a lot of people from starting at all.
Distribution beats product, until product beats distribution. Early on, the best thing I could do was get shopspace in front of the right creators and watch what happened. Not pitch it. Watch it. The gap between what I thought was hard and what was actually hard for real users was enormous. That gap is where the real product lives.
For anyone working through setting up a creator storefront for the first time, this is the most useful thing I can say: the first version of your setup will be wrong in ways you cannot predict. The goal is to be wrong fast, so you can be right sooner.
How Feedback Shaped Shopspace
The experience in creating shopspace taught me that the creators who gave the most useful feedback were not the ones who asked for the most features. They were the ones who described the friction they felt.
"I keep losing track of which followers bought and which ones didn't" led to the automated follow-up system. "I have to send buyers to three different links depending on what they want" led to the single-link storefront model. "I set up a course platform but it took me a whole weekend" led to the five-minute setup target we now hold ourselves to.
The automation feature, the one where a comment on an Instagram post triggers a DM with a product link and a follow-up sequence, came directly from creators describing the manual version of that process. They were doing it by hand. Copying and pasting DMs, tracking who responded in a spreadsheet, following up manually. The platform just made the thing they were already doing automatic (here is how comment-to-DM works).
Feedback also shaped what we did not build. Several creators asked for a full website builder. The answer was no, and it stayed no. shopspace is a storefront, not a site builder. Staying specific about that kept the product fast and simple. The same principle applies to your own store: scope is a feature.
Future Plans for Shopspace
The automation layer keeps getting deeper. It started with comment-triggered DMs and follow-up sequences. The first step beyond that has shipped on the Pro plan: AI automation steps (AI replies, classification, smart branching) and AI comment reading, so a comment can start a flow based on what the person means, without an exact keyword. The goal is more sales happening without the creator present.
Analytics will get more specific. Knowing which traffic source produced buyers, and which produced browsers, is what lets a creator decide where to spend time.
Community and membership features will get more capable, because a lot of creators are building ongoing relationships with their audience, not just selling one-off products.
The core of the pricing is not changing: a 0% platform fee, no cut of sales, ever. The platform costs a flat subscription, from $19 a month billed yearly, so its share of your revenue stays the same whether you make $100 or $10,000. For how that compares with the other ways to sell, the post on selling digital products without monthly fees covers the options in more detail.
FAQ
Q: How does shopspace pricing work?
Most creator tools charge a monthly subscription plus a percentage of every sale, which punishes creators for growing. shopspace charges a flat subscription and takes no platform cut. Creator is $19 a month billed yearly or $29 month to month. Pro is $39 a month billed yearly or $49 month to month, and adds AI automations and a custom domain. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, and payments go directly from the buyer to the creator's Stripe account.
Q: What kinds of products can I sell on shopspace?
Digital downloads, physical products, courses with progress tracking, bookings for calls and coaching, memberships (including community access), webinars and events, bundles, affiliate products, lead magnets, a tip jar and external links. The goal is to cover everything a creator sells from a single storefront link.
Q: How long does it take to set up a shopspace store?
The setup target is five minutes. That means listing your first product, connecting Stripe, and having a live storefront link ready to share.
Q: What makes shopspace different from a link-in-bio tool?
A link-in-bio tool gives you a list of links. shopspace gives you a full storefront with product pages, checkout, course delivery, booking management, email campaigns, and automated Instagram DM follow-up. It is one link, but with a complete selling system behind it.
Is shopspace the right fit for you?
If you are paying for three or four tools plus a cut of every sale, shopspace was built for you. If you need a marketplace that sends buyers to you, or a platform that handles EU VAT for you, it is not the right pick: Gumroad's Discover marketplace and Payhip's VAT handling do things shopspace does not. You bring the traffic, and shopspace makes sure every sale from it is yours.
Try shopspace free for 7 days. A card is required at signup and nothing is charged during the 7 days, so if you cancel inside the trial you pay nothing.