Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad

gumroad.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 215 posts

Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad

#61

Post by sahillavingia »

nyellin wrote: post #49

You can tell clients to check the http referrer for your domain. That would (mostly) stop people from posting now-useless destination URLs online. http referrers are easily spoofed, of course, but it'll be enough to prevent most people from sharing secret urls on twitter. You could also pivot and allow people to upload files to your own server, but that's a different story.

That would hurt the UX. For example if someone gets the link to a blog-post-in-the-making they shouldn't have to go through Gumroad to access it every time.

Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad

#63

Post by HardyLeung »

sahillavingia wrote: post #4
lux wrote: post #3

What are your fees? Didn't see that anywhere on the homepage.

Honestly, I'm not sure - hence them not being listed - but I think I'm going to go with 30%. And then for people making >$x a month dropping that in tiers. Thoughts?

great idea, but if your site is getting traction, you'll have to face tons of imitators -- after all, you already said that this is a weekend project. They are going to undercut you like crazy if you are doing 30%. So might as well make it as enticing as possible, maybe just 3% overhead (or even 1%).

Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad

#64

Post by orky56 »

jeffclark wrote: post #14
evoltix wrote: post #10

Seriously? I'm not sure I could take anyone seriously that tried to sell me a link of "value." Why not just share the link for free like people have been doing since the beginning of time? Don't get me wrong. You did a great job getting this rolled out over a weekend and it looks nice. I must need some enlightening because I really don't get it.

Imagine you have a Fireworks iPhone mockup template. Instead of setting up a store somewhere to list your ONE item, you put the template up on your website and link to it through gumroad. Then, you give out the Gumroad link on Twitter: "Need a sweet Fireworks iPhone UI template? Buy it for a buck: gumroad.url" Your twatting friends click it, give you a dollar, get redirected to your website. They download the templat…

It's like a freemium model but there's a single price point that starts off as a premium and slowly shifts toward free over time. :D

Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad

#65

Post by JangoSteve »

gavinballard wrote: post #45
JoshTriplett wrote: post #36

Interesting 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…

To address the first problem, you should offer a passive solution and not require the user to set up anything special in the way of single-use URLs. In fact, I assumed the issue of payers sharing the end-link was such an obvious problem that the service would have already addressed this and had it built-in by default (but of course, MVP/first-release, I understand).

The way I'd see it working is, I give Gumroad a link I want users to pay for, and Gumroad charges each user, serving up the content, but never sharing with them the link that I gave Gumroad. You could do this by fetching the content on the back end, and serving it up through Gumroad's own single-use URL.

Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad

#66

Post by phoboslab »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #52
phoboslab wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thinking about it, Gumroad is the perfect application for Bitcoins:

http://www.bitcoin.org/

Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad

#68

Post by JoachimSchipper »

phoboslab wrote: post #66
JoachimSchipper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paypal already takes $0.30 plus a small percentage. I think the service is a neat idea, but microtransactions are not a solved problem.

Thinking about it, Gumroad is the perfect application for Bitcoins: http://www.bitcoin.org/

No, it isn't. Bitcoins are clever and all, but how many people would be willing to set it up just to see a link?

Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad

#70

Post by stef25 »

retube wrote: post #32

How does this work for art though? I mean you want to see the icon/graphic/design/whatever before you pay for it. Also - once you've been redirected to the page, what's to stop you taking the link and sharing it yourself? Also also: if I've got something to sell, can't I just bung it on ebay?

Thought of this too, I guess you can watermark images.

Not sure how you would sell JS scripts since showing a working demo would require the file to be accessible to the user.

Post reply on HN