Build an SMS Subscription Service
Have you seen SendCatFacts.com
I wanted to experiment with the plugin I wrote about in my last post and see if I could make something similar.
What did I build:
A subscription based service to send daily motivational or de-motivational text messages to the number of your choosing.
The steps below is a rough highlight of each piece needed to be done. I’ll assume you have a Stripe account or know how to setup one up and you own the Gravity Form developer license as it is needed for the add-ons. You will also need a paid Twilio account with an active phone number.
Setup Site
Setup a simple WordPress site. Install a theme, I used Altitude Pro from Genesis. Yes, I put it on WPEngine.
Setup Gravity Forms
Install Gravity Forms along with User Registration and Stripe Payments add-ons.
Create a form. I made a simple form that asks for the purchaser’s email address and then credit card info. The radio buttons decide use conditional logic to set the product price. After you click a plan then the price is shown and you can enter credit card payment details
Put form in widget area on home page.
Setup Texting Plugin
Install and configuration Joy of Text Pro plugin with Scheduling add-on. This step took an extended bit of time because I had to create 60 different text messages. 30 texts for 2 groups sent out daily. I’m not going to go through the detailed process I used to setup the plugin. But it was pretty basic and the instructions provided by the plugin author were enough to make it work.
Setup customization for Gravity Forms and Restricted Content
Keep the signup forms hidden from public for the Joy of Text plugin.
What I wanted to happen is when somebody submitted payment to send out the texts I needed them to go to a second form where they could enter the name and phone number. I didn’t want these pages to be public so I had to research some code to make gravity forms auto login a user upon payment of front page form.
-Process flow:
Customer fills in form on home page and submits payment then >
Gravity forms custom function automatically creates user and auto logs in user and then forwards to correct customer page depending on option chosen.
-What I needed for this:
Restrict Content (free) by Pippin Williamson and this bit of code added to functions.php
Step 5:
Test website with Stripe set to testing mode.
Step 6:
Turn it live and profit
Time involved:
2-4 hours of configuration of plugins/site/payments/etc
2-4 hours to find and craft each motivational message and set into the scheduler of the plugin.
Questions or Help?