Gumroad example links to storefront homepage, not the auth-gated RoR Pro dashboard comparison it advertises

[justin808]

Summary

The Gumroad example card (added in #120) links to and screenshots the Gumroad storefront homepage, but the demo's actual value — and what its tagline advertises — is the Inertia vs React on Rails Pro + RSC creator-dashboard comparison, which is auth-gated and not publicly reachable.

A visitor who clicks "View live demo" expecting to see the React on Rails Pro dashboard comparison lands on a generic Gumroad clone marketing page instead.

Current state

• Card tagline: "A Gumroad-style creator dashboard comparing Inertia and React on Rails Pro with React 19 and RSC." (accurate — matches the demo repo's own description)
• demoUrl: https://gumroad.reactonrails.com/ → the Gumroad storefront marketing homepage
• Screenshot: the storefront hero ("Go from 0 to $1"), not the dashboard

The actual comparison surface lives at these routes in shakacode/react-on-rails-demo-gumroad-rsc:

• /dashboard/rsc_demo — React on Rails Pro + React 19 + RSC
• /dashboard/inertia_demo — matched Inertia control

All of them redirect to login on the live deployment:

/dashboard/rsc_demo     → /login?next=%2Fdashboard%2Frsc_demo
/dashboard/inertia_demo → /login?next=%2Fdashboard%2Finertia_demo
/dashboard              → /login?next=%2Fdashboard

So the storefront homepage is the only publicly reachable page today, which is why the card points there.

Why it matters

The Gumroad demo is the only one in the examples set whose "View live demo" link does not show what the card describes. Marketplace, Hacker News, Octochangelog, etc. all land the visitor on the thing the tagline promises. Gumroad lands them on a stock storefront, so the React on Rails Pro story (the whole point of the experiment) is invisible to anyone browsing /examples.

Options

1. Expose a public, seeded demo of the dashboard comparison (preferred). In the demo repo, auto-login a read-only demo creator account (or add a public, seeded route) so /dashboard/rsc_demo and /dashboard/inertia_demo are reachable without credentials. Then point this card's demoUrl at /dashboard/rsc_demo and reshoot the screenshot. Cross-repo dependency: requires work in shakacode/react-on-rails-demo-gumroad-rsc.
2. Swap in a dashboard screenshot so the card at least shows the comparison surface (with a one-line note that the live link opens the storefront because the dashboard needs login). Cheap, keeps the link honest, no demo-repo change.
3. Reword the tagline to describe the storefront. Least desirable — the dashboard comparison is the actual story and the repo is explicitly a benchmark/positioning experiment.

References

• Examples PR: Make Octochangelog and Gumroad live demos (custom domains + screenshots) #120
• Demo repo: https://github.com/shakacode/react-on-rails-demo-gumroad-rsc
• Card data: prototypes/docusaurus/src/constants/demos.ts (id: 'gumroad')

[justin808]

Update: this is now downstream of shakacode/react-on-rails-demo-gumroad-rsc#24, which changes the resolution here.

That issue demotes the auth-gated dashboard comparison to "a technical proof, not the primary adoption argument" and redirects the RSC work to a public, logged-out, SEO/conversion-sensitive surface (a product page) deployed on gumroad.reactonrails.com. An explicit acceptance criterion there is "make the demo value visible without requiring login."

That collapses the three options above into one:

• Seed a public dashboard demo — superseded; the new direction builds a public product-page comparison instead of exposing the gated dashboard.
• Swap in a dashboard screenshot — unnecessary once a public surface exists.
• Wait for the public product-page RSC-vs-control comparison from Focus RSC proof on public SEO and conversion pages react-on-rails-demo-gumroad-rsc#24, then repoint this card — set demoUrl to that public comparison surface and reshoot the screenshot there.

So treat this as blocked on / informed by shakacode/react-on-rails-demo-gumroad-rsc#24. Card data lives in prototypes/docusaurus/src/constants/demos.ts (id: 'gumroad'). Until then, the card correctly points at the storefront homepage because it's the only publicly reachable page.

[justin808]

Opened draft follow-up PR #124 to repoint the Gumroad card to the public product-page RSC route introduced by shakacode/react-on-rails-demo-gumroad-rsc#25. Keeping it draft until https://gumroad.reactonrails.com/public_product/rsc_demo returns 200 on staging, so the examples page does not link to a 404.