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Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

tinyprojects.dev

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Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#91

Post by clairity »

andersource wrote: post #56

A little OT but for anyone with experience - is the negotiation depicted realistic / typical? The final selling price is over twice the buyer's initial offer and almost 150% of what they said at one point is their max. I know it's a textbook negotiation but (obviously not having too much experience negotiating) I never thought that's really how they work in real life.

think of negotiations as a price discovery mechanism (auctions as another example) with severe information asymmetries. the point of the process is to learn what each side values and what exactly is on offer (and can be potentially offered) and how much value each side places on those things. price is used as the primary signal of value, and you learn about value as prices and information is exchanged in an iterated fashion.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#92

Post by ericjang »

x4e wrote: post #68
JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a smart contract help avoid this kind of situation?

Yes, if you had an oracle [1] that was able to provide information on whether the transaction had completed. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain_oracle

How would oracles verify semi-private business deals?

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#93

Post by clairity »

eropple wrote: post #90
clairity wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

besides the technical implementation, duplicate usernames seems confusing to users, which is why i’ve never given it too much consideration. is there a reliable and obvious way you differentiate users in the ui? i assume the primary key of the user on the backend moves to something like email or phone number (or just a unique id key i suppose). i’ve seen some projects use a randomly generated image/sprite for this, w…

Discord, game platforms, etc. do this with a discriminator. You're not Bob, even though that's what everyone sees - you're Bob#1337 internal to the system, and people need your "full name" to locate you if you aren't already friends.

yah, have seen that too. not a fan since it really doesn’t reduce cognitive load or complexity.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#94

Post by runako »

bena wrote: post #79
sly010 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The buyer got his assets. You are out of money.

The buyer as well. But the buyer technically has "paid" so they may not be as concerned with closing out the transaction. If only the assets could be held in escrow as well, then when both elements are held by the escrow group, they can release to the appropriate parties.

Domain names can be held in escrow by escrow.com. So theoretically it's possible to at least get that part back if the transaction goes south.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#95

Post by edwinyzh »

admissionsguy wrote: post #8

> Giving your project to a stranger on the internet is risky, so we used escrow.com to make the transfer. I sold a website on Flippa once. The buyer put the money on Escrow.com, I transferred everything over, and they went AWOL. What I found out is that there is no straightforward way to obtain the funds when it happens. Apparently there is no way at all except via the court system. Which would mean the only real pro…

So this issue implies that there is a startup idea? I think there is a technical approach to solve the issue, by providing a system to let the escrow service provider to inspect and confirm the transferring of the source code, something like using a remote desktop (something like a temporary VPS) to where both the seller and the buyer have access, and during the delivering of the source code, the seller upload the code, compile it and run the result, and all the process is recorded. That way, if the buyer don't mark as 'received' in a given period, the platform staff can check and confirm the delivery and close the transaction.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#96

Post by Aken »

twobitshifter wrote: post #84
danvoell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never Split the Difference is another good book to read.

This negotiation as written was just moving down by the same amount offered by the buyer, is that what the book would recommend as a technique? It gave a gain of $750 over splitting the difference from the start.

> This negotiation as written was just moving down by the same amount offered by the buyer

Huh, didn't even notice. Thanks for pointing that out!

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#97

Post by adventured »

edwinyzh wrote: post #95
admissionsguy wrote: post #8

> Giving your project to a stranger on the internet is risky, so we used escrow.com to make the transfer. I sold a website on Flippa once. The buyer put the money on Escrow.com, I transferred everything over, and they went AWOL. What I found out is that there is no straightforward way to obtain the funds when it happens. Apparently there is no way at all except via the court system. Which would mean the only real pro…

So this issue implies that there is a startup idea? I think there is a technical approach to solve the issue, by providing a system to let the escrow service provider to inspect and confirm the transferring of the source code, something like using a remote desktop (something like a temporary VPS) to where both the seller and the buyer have access, and during the delivering of the source code, the seller upload the co…

> So this issue implies that there is a startup idea?

It's definitely a do things that don't scale idea. You need humans in the transaction confirming what's actually occurring. That tends to be expensive, because you also need them to know what they're doing, understand the broad details of the exchange and be trustworthy. That cost and difficulty of scaling is exactly why Escrow.com doesn't try to do it for every transaction across their system.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#98

Post by ratww »

stefandesu wrote: post #39
admissionsguy wrote: post #8

> Giving your project to a stranger on the internet is risky, so we used escrow.com to make the transfer. I sold a website on Flippa once. The buyer put the money on Escrow.com, I transferred everything over, and they went AWOL. What I found out is that there is no straightforward way to obtain the funds when it happens. Apparently there is no way at all except via the court system. Which would mean the only real pro…

Germany's biggest Craigslist-like service recently added a service like this for purchases that are shipped. I sold my previous MacBook using the system and found it really stressful to wait for the buyer to confirm the item. In my case, it was just someone who was a little bit slow and just forgot, but I can imagine abuse in the system. Same thing happens with PayPal buyer's protection. I can't think of a better sys…

Yeah, other than having someone manually inspecting the transfer, that's kind of the best way.

I've noticed that most sites end up implementing "automatic confirmation", but after a while they shorten the confirmation deadline because lots of buyers just "forget" to approve.

I've also seen others (MercadoLibre) who have a "reputation" for sellers where they can get the money even before confirmation.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#99

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

codeisawesome wrote: post #3

I appreciate how open the dev is being and I like the article! But I have a moral annoyance towards username squatting, especially by folks who don’t actually participate in the network…

I think twitter has nearly completely de-emphasized the actual "@Username" handle in favor of the display name. I recently went to create a twitter account for an app/service that I launched and when I inputted my desired username "@MyCoolApp" it gave me basically no indication that it was already in use, and just silently used "@AppMyCool" and set the account display name to the name that I chose.

It's kind of annoying since I would like to have chosen something different, but I'm not bothered that much about it.

Re: Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

#100

Post by bena »

runako wrote: post #94
bena wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The buyer as well. But the buyer technically has "paid" so they may not be as concerned with closing out the transaction. If only the assets could be held in escrow as well, then when both elements are held by the escrow group, they can release to the appropriate parties.

Domain names can be held in escrow by escrow.com. So theoretically it's possible to at least get that part back if the transaction goes south.

I should have been more clear.

It's not a matter of whether it's possible but whether the seller had the foresight to use the service in such a capacity.

Because at the end of the day, an escrow is a trusted third party used to facilitate a trade. We typically think of them in terms of money because that's typically what they hold, but there's no good reason they can't be trusted with any good.

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