I needed to solve a simple problem.
I work alone. I sell services and digital products to European clients, and I want to get paid upfront, the way it works when you buy anything in a webshop. I needed a checkout page connected to a European payment provider. Clean, fast, no platform wrapped around it.
What I found: all-in-one platforms. Every solution came bundled with features I did not need. A landing page builder. An AI writing assistant. A full e-commerce system. Each one solved the payment problem, but only as a side effect of solving ten other problems I did not have. And the price reflected that. I was not paying for a checkout page. I was paying for a platform I would use at 10% of its capacity.
Like buying a whole restaurant only to have one dish.
So I stopped looking for the right tool and started looking at the problem differently.
First principles thinking is not a productivity trick. It is a way of clearing the table. You define the problem as precisely as you can. You write down every assumption you are making. Then you ask, for each one: is this actually true, or is this just how things are done? You keep only what is undeniably real. You build from there.
So I wrote down my assumptions.
A checkout tool is only available as part of a platform. It needs a shopping cart. It needs to handle invoicing. It needs a landing page builder.
Then I checked them against what I actually knew to be true.
I need to get paid. Getting paid upfront is better for my cashflow. I can use Mollie as my payment provider. I already have a place where my audience finds me: social media, a website, a newsletter. I do not need a new platform. I need one clean payment page that lets a client pay before I start.
Everything else was an assumption layered on top of a real need by platforms that benefit from the complexity.
So I built it myself. First just for me. A checkout page with product info and a credentials form. Connected directly to Mollie. Usable as a payment link. No platform, no lock-in, no features that exist because a competitor has them.
It worked. And then other solopreneurs started asking how I got paid that way. So I turned it into something they could use too. That also meant taking security seriously: continuous penetration testing, regular audits, because other people's payments are not something you wing.
That became bookto checkout.
Not a radical new idea. Something simpler than what existed. And simple turned out to be the harder thing to build, because it looks unimpressive until you use it.
If you want to see what getting paid first looks like in practice, you can try bookto checkout free for 7 days, no card needed. One product, one page, one payment. checkout.bookto.eu