Really neat way to sell vulnerabilities.
Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
191–200 of 215 posts
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#192Interesting 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…
I think #1 is a bit of a red herring. The security problem is not what this is solving. It's the ease of getting paid for some content, with less hassle overall. Keep in mind that this is digital content so anyone could just rehost/resell/redistribute anything they bought or downloaded. But for something low-payment enough or the average silly download, why would they bother? It's important to tell sellers that it's…
The difference: sharing the file violates the original author's copyright, but sharing the URL to it on the original author's site doesn't.
I actually wouldn't recommend adding DRM or sharing prevention. Instead, I'd just add a lightweight system to make it trivial to know who shared the URL. That will likely do wonders for getting people to play nice.
Optionally, you could add proxying through the gumroad site as an extra feature (perhaps at the cost of a higher margin on the sale), for people particularly concerned about the issue.
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#193You 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.
Not bad to have the option, though.
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#194Why wouldn't stripe just implement this themselves? Since their payment processing service (and API?) is 99% of the project, seems like they'd make their own and cut you off if this gained any traction.
It's not 99% of the project, it's one line of code (among over 2,000).
One? That sounds like a rather awesome API, unless you just redirect to a payment processing system over on their site. Mind sharing the one line of code? :)
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow - that's fast feedback! On a separate side-note would you be interested in early access to apps for similar sort of reviews / blog postings, or is that inappropriate to ask?
That's not inappropriate to ask at all. It's a fun hobby. Look through my site and you'll see I've done this a long time and have some big wins that launched first with me. (TweetDeck, Beluga two examples)
Gumroad will be another. :)
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#196As with many ideas I see floated and mvp'd on HN, I'm jealous. Great idea, good execution. I'd agree with others that the 30% is too high. 5-10% would be acceptable.
Why be jealous? He has no traction. Copy it and do it slightly better.
I have 50,000 page-views worth of traction and over 1,000 users - many of them making real money. :)
Kidding aside, I dare you (not sarcastically, I would love to see another approach to the same problem).
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#197Earlier 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.
PayPal has a lower tier for sales under $12: https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render... Still, you need to take fees into consideration. Also, the seller has to pay another PayPal fee when transferring the money every month.
You definitely don't want to use PayPal for a service like this, unless you want to lose all your un-swept earnings when they catch on.
PayPal's TOS specifically prohibit running a payment gateway or aggregation service, ie collecting payments on behalf of many sellers and then re-distributing the proceeds.
A service like this would almost certainly draw their attention, since one could be selling warez, pr0n, stolen credit card numbers, or any number of other naughty files through this service...
Someone else posted a tale of woe within the last month about their "experience marketplace" getting impounded by PayPal, ostensibly for the same reason.
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#198Great idea. Your email address matching is case sensitive, you might want to fix that.
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#199i love the idea, i hate the new "We have a tiered system for pricing:" basically it says: if you earn less, we will take even more. so basically if - lets say - earn 2 dollars (casual user who sold a psd template for 1$) this service now takes 2$ - 230c = 1.40$ - (1.40$ 0.3) = 98c
this tool should encourage casual use and it makes a perfectly simple product complicated.
please overthink your pricing-strategy. make it as simple as possible, iterate from there.
Re: Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad
#200This is my daily fail: http://potomak.tumblr.com/post/4361901296/developer-business...
Developer ≠ Businessman