From Arm Pain to Payment Links: Why DictationDaddy Choose Dodo Payments as their Merchant of Record
Rahul Bansal
Founder of Dictation Daddy
Sep 22, 2025
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5
min
Table of Contents
Last year, I couldn't type anymore.
Two years of building products had finally caught up with me. Every keystroke sent sharp pain through my arm. So like any developer would, I decided to build my way out of it.
I tried Mac's built-in dictation first. Honestly, it was pretty bad. But when I hooked up OpenAI's Whisper model, the transcription accuracy became incredible. I showed it to a few developer friends who were also typing all day. They loved it. That's how Dictation Daddy started. Not from some big market opportunity, but from actual physical pain.
The Problem: Building Was Easy. Getting Paid Was a Nightmare
Here's something I learned the hard way: coding the product is actually the easy part.
I had a working app. People were asking how to pay for it. Should have been simple to just add a payment link and see if they'd actually pull out their credit cards, right?
But it wasn't that simple.
Stripe needed me to incorporate first. I'd been using Lemon Squeezy for other projects, and honestly, their support was frustrating. You'd raise a ticket and wait weeks for a basic response. The approval process took forever. Meanwhile, I had interested users who just wanted to give me money.
This is such a common trap for indie developers. You start with excitement about your idea, but then you're stuck googling incorporation services and tax requirements instead of actually talking to users or improving your product. It feels productive, but it's really not.
A Conversation That Changed My Approach
During an Antler cohort last year, I was chatting with Rishabh and Ayush about payment processing headaches. They explained how a merchant of record works. Basically, it's a company that becomes the legal seller of your product, handling all the compliance stuff while you focus on building.
The idea stuck with me because it solved exactly what I was struggling with.
When I finally tried Dodo Payments, my account got approved in about two days. Not two weeks. Two days.
The Actual Integration
I want to share how simple the technical setup was, because I think other developers will appreciate this:
First, I created a payment page on Dodo Payments. Then I set it up to auto-populate the customer's email, so there's no complex authentication flow. Finally, I added one webhook. When someone pays, it flips their subscription status to true in my database.
The whole thing took maybe 10 minutes. No joke.
I didn't need to figure out tax rates for different countries. Didn't need to worry about PCI compliance. Just one webhook that tells my app "this person paid, give them access."
Why This Matters for Indie Developers
We've all been there. You tell yourself you're being responsible by setting everything up "properly" from the start. So you spend your first week researching business structures. Another week opening a business bank account. Then diving into tax implications for international sales.
But here's the thing: none of that actually validates whether people want what you're building.
Real validation is getting someone to pay for your product. Today. Not after you've built the perfect business infrastructure.
When you use a Merchant of Record, they handle the boring stuff like tax calculation, compliance, fraud prevention, and currency conversion. You just focus on making something people actually want to buy.
My Simple Philosophy
After building products for a couple years, here's how I think about it:
First, figure out if you're solving a real problem. For me, the arm pain made that pretty clear.
Then see if people will pay for your solution. Don't guess, don't survey, just put up a payment link.
Only after you have paying customers should you worry about optimization, scaling, proper incorporation, all that stuff.
Too many developers, including myself in the past, do this completely backwards. We optimize before we validate. We scale before we have users. We incorporate before we have revenue.
What a Merchant of Record Does
Within a few days of setting up payments, I started selling lifetime deals for Dictation Daddy. Not months of preparation. Just days from decision to first sale.
Each purchase proved that other people shared my problem. And more importantly, they were willing to pay to solve it. All without me spending a second thinking about sales tax or payment compliance.
Lemon Squeezy Vs Stripe Vs Dodo Payments
Since I'd used Lemon Squeezy before, I can share the real difference. With Lemon Squeezy, I remember waiting and waiting for support responses. Even simple questions took forever. When you're trying to move fast and capture interest from early users, that kind of delay is killer.
Stripe is obviously a great product, but for a solo developer, the incorporation requirement is a real blocker. It could take weeks to set up a proper company structure when all you really need is to test if people will pay for your thing.
With Dodo Payments, I got approved quickly and could start selling immediately. That speed made all the difference.
A Note for Other Developers
If you're building something and getting stuck on the business setup, just remember that perfect is the enemy of done.
You can validate your idea without a company. You can test willingness to pay without understanding international tax law. You can start making money without a business bank account.
What you actually need is simple: something that solves a problem and a way to accept payment. Everything else can wait.
Looking Back
It's kind of funny how this all started. My arm hurt from typing too much, so I built a dictation app. Then I needed a way to charge for it without drowning in paperwork. Both problems had the same theme: removing unnecessary friction.
Dictation Daddy removes the friction of typing. Dodo Payments removed the friction of accepting payments. Sometimes the best solutions are the ones that just get out of your way.
Building products should be about solving problems, not filing paperwork. That's the whole reason I went with a merchant of record, and honestly, it's one of the better decisions I've made as an indie developer.
These days, when friends ask me about payment processing for their projects, I tell them to stop overthinking it. Pick something that lets you start selling quickly. Worry about optimization when you have enough revenue to make it matter.
For me, that meant going from arm pain to accepting payments in less than a week. Not bad for something that started as a personal problem.
