Clarity as a (micro) Service

( This page was created and edited by Claude.ai )

Timeframe: Backend built during an earlier site rebrand; reconnected and launched later
Roles: Product, Backend Development, Copywriting
Deliverables: One paid question (€29), answered directly by me, money back if you're not happy with the answer
Clients/Users: Anyone stuck on one specific decision who wants an outside opinion, not an ongoing coaching relationship
Status: Live at robhutters.com/clarity. No paying customers yet.

Introduction

Not every problem needs a coach, a course, or a call. Sometimes you just need one person to look at your situation and tell you what they'd actually do. Clarity as a (micro) Service is built around that: pay a small fee, ask one focused question, get one considered answer back.

Problem + main research question

• Problem: People get stuck on a single concrete decision (a purchase, a hard message to send, a job offer) and don't want a whole coaching engagement for it, they want one outside opinion.
• Research Question: Can a single-question, pay-first, answer-once format work as an actual product, without turning into either free advice or an open-ended chat?

Target market

Anyone who can articulate one decision they're stuck on in a sentence or two, plus context, and would rather pay a small amount for a fast, low-commitment second opinion than book a full session.

Deliverable

1. You pay €29 through Stripe.
2. A form appears on the same page asking for your question and as much context as you want to give.
3. I get notified and reply directly to the email you provided.
4. If you're not happy with the answer, you get your money back.

Build

• Stripe Checkout session created server-side by a Cloudflare Worker.
• On success, Stripe hits a webhook that mints a short-lived signed token in Workers KV, keyed to the checkout session.
• The browser is redirected back with that session ID, exchanged for the token, and only then is the question form revealed, so the form can't just be reached by guessing the URL, it requires an actual completed payment.
• Submissions are stored in KV and emailed to me via Resend.

Timeline

Built in one pass during an earlier rebrand of this site → the page it was meant to live on got replaced before launch → the backend kept working in total isolation, with nothing linking to it → rediscovered months later while auditing the site for exposed API secrets → reconnected to a dedicated page and added here.

Testing

• No paying customers yet — the feature was never actually reachable from anywhere on the live site until this was reconnected.
• The email notification path had also quietly died at some point: the Resend account behind it was gone, and every notification had been failing silently since. Nothing alerted me to it because nothing was pointing at the feature to trigger it.

Reflection

The interesting lesson here isn't the code, the checkout-session-to-token flow, the webhook, the KV storage, all of it worked exactly as designed the whole time. It's that "built" and "shipped" aren't the same thing. A product with no link pointing at it isn't quietly waiting, it's already failed, you just haven't found out yet. Reconnecting this was as much about building the habit of periodically checking that the whole path (link → payment → notification) still works, not just trusting that code written once keeps working forever.