Interesting concept -- how do you deal with the legalities?
If I buy something am I buying it from you or from the original owner?
How long do you hold onto the funds to deal with any potential chargebacks?
Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
51–60 of 215 posts
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#52Over this past weekend I had the idea to build a sort of link shortener but with a payment system built-in. There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link - on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends - but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store. So I built Gumroad. I coded/designed from 12PM -> 11PM on Saturday and 8AM -> 11PM on Sunday. There are still tons o…
I love the idea! This makes it really easy to sell scripts (e.g. your own jQuery plugins or whatever) for $5 where it would normally be too much work to set up some payment processing. The 30% cut is way too high though. Especially for higher priced links - I wouldn't want to sell my $99 game engine[1] through your service. I think something like "5%, but at least $0.30" would make more sense. But maybe having such "…
Paypal already takes $0.30 plus a small percentage. I think the service is a neat idea, but microtransactions are not a solved problem.
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#53Over this past weekend I had the idea to build a sort of link shortener but with a payment system built-in. There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link - on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends - but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store. So I built Gumroad. I coded/designed from 12PM -> 11PM on Saturday and 8AM -> 11PM on Sunday. There are still tons o…
I love the idea! This makes it really easy to sell scripts (e.g. your own jQuery plugins or whatever) for $5 where it would normally be too much work to set up some payment processing. The 30% cut is way too high though. Especially for higher priced links - I wouldn't want to sell my $99 game engine[1] through your service. I think something like "5%, but at least $0.30" would make more sense. But maybe having such "…
No, that's definitely a good point. I'm going to switch to a .30c + x% (tiered) model - aim to make at least $70-80 of that $99 if you use Gumroad.
I'm also thinking hard about "Preferred" accounts. Basically, you send an email to sahil@slavingia.com in the next 24 hours, whenever I do your balance at the end of the month you get as much as I can give without losing money on the transaction. ;)
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#54What do you plan on doing about fraud? Seems like it would be way too easy to move money around with stolen credit cards.
This.
Some friends of mine ran a payment startup. However as soon as there is a money->thing->money option, you get a LOT of fraud, as they found out.
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#55Over this past weekend I had the idea to build a sort of link shortener but with a payment system built-in. There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link - on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends - but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store. So I built Gumroad. I coded/designed from 12PM -> 11PM on Saturday and 8AM -> 11PM on Sunday. There are still tons o…
how are you using stripe already?
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#56Over this past weekend I had the idea to build a sort of link shortener but with a payment system built-in. There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link - on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends - but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store. So I built Gumroad. I coded/designed from 12PM -> 11PM on Saturday and 8AM -> 11PM on Sunday. There are still tons o…
how are you using stripe already?
I'm friends with one of the founders + I asked repeatedly.
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#57Interesting idea, but I see two main issues with this. First, anyone who pays and gets to the resulting link can trivially share that link; of course, you can always ask them nicely not to do so, and in some contexts that will work, but in general the security model just doesn't work unless you authenticate each paid user at the destination. You need to come up with an answer to this. Second, if you market this as a…
That second formulation is how I thought of it in the first place. You could get around the link-sharing problem for those that wanted to avoid it by offering single-use URLs, and provide Gumroad either with a way of generating a new single-use URL for your resource, or a way to pull a new URL from your site. Both of these methods would require some degree of control over the resource, however (you wouldn't be able t…
We used something like this for our content at Naughty America.
For each page request we'd generate a link to the file on BitGravity with a timestamp, expiration, and filename, and a hash generated from those concatenated with the requesting IP and a secret key. On BitGravity's end, they'd re-hash everything, and if it matched up they'd serve out the file.
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#58Interesting idea, but I see two main issues with this. First, anyone who pays and gets to the resulting link can trivially share that link; of course, you can always ask them nicely not to do so, and in some contexts that will work, but in general the security model just doesn't work unless you authenticate each paid user at the destination. You need to come up with an answer to this. Second, if you market this as a…
That second formulation is how I thought of it in the first place. You could get around the link-sharing problem for those that wanted to avoid it by offering single-use URLs, and provide Gumroad either with a way of generating a new single-use URL for your resource, or a way to pull a new URL from your site. Both of these methods would require some degree of control over the resource, however (you wouldn't be able t…
Interesting, I didn't think about the implications of "donate."
Kind of tangentially, I wonder if there's value in letting a user select a charity to donate all of their sales to (no pressure on the user, just an option)?
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#59Interesting idea, but I see two main issues with this. First, anyone who pays and gets to the resulting link can trivially share that link; of course, you can always ask them nicely not to do so, and in some contexts that will work, but in general the security model just doesn't work unless you authenticate each paid user at the destination. You need to come up with an answer to this. Second, if you market this as a…
Another interesting variant might be: payment unlocks the destination link for X minutes. (After that, the true destination URL is changed somehow. Yes, that adds complication on the true hosting site or the necessity for Gumroad to proxy.)
So in a sense you don't care if people share the link for that period... maybe you even want them to, like a time-limited offer, so that they post to all their friends, "get it while it's hot!"
(The price could also rise or fall after each purchased open-period... perhaps even, depending on the number of downloads during the last open period.)
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#60Is the redirect-link unique in any way? I mean. If anyone buys the access to a a non-unique-link (ie: http://mybook.com/book.pdf ), and then shares the redirected URL to a third person, this third person could load the link without paying, right?
If you potentially host the files/keep track of static/unique URLs on your site, you could keep track of who is the first owner to ensure that no future users also claim to be the owner and resend the file/link as their own.
This doesn't take into account all cases but a good chunk to start with.