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Why Gumroad is the next billion dollar startup – The developer interview
- timinman 16y agoA bit premature maybe, but it is a novel implementation.
- aymeric 16y agoI don't understand why this is such a big deal. What can people sell now they couldn't before?
- jambo 16y agoI understand where you're coming from because I didn't get Blogger. Around that time, I had my own example.net/~jambo homepage that I updated with stories, probably using Pagemill & FTP. What made Blogger a big deal is that they (eventually) made what I was doing easy for anyone to do. Simplifying something can be a big deal. Gumroad could do this for publishers, and it has an obvious revenue model & incentives built in.
- X-Istence 16y agoI could sell you a link to your own comment... I couldn't do that before, at least not easily ;-)
- ctide 16y agoThe big deal is that multiple articles on that site are focused on products created by the same guy. If he's not the one actually writing the posts, whomever is clearly has a boner for him.
- zby 16y agoThis can disintermediate home made porn - this is not a small market.
- ck2 16y agoApril fools was 5 days ago. This is way way way way too ahead of itself. PayPal shuts down all similar attempts at mass payouts like these, then you are stuck. Go talk to the tipjoy people. Any business model that relies on PayPal and can't tell them to go #$@^! themselves when they suspend your account is not a viable model. They best start researching and implementing Amazon and other solutions.
- jambo 16y agoIt looks like they're only using PayPal to pay money out to sellers. If PayPal shuts that down, they can probably find a way around it (in the worst case, send checks).
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoThe author knows the Stripe people (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414177 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414177), who have specifically ok'ed this. That may not be enough, but it's something.
- tomjen3 16y agoThe closest alternative is properly clickbank.com, but if you look at their site the signup process is horrible, the product you sell has to be approved and you have to set up a website. The only problem I have with Gumroad is that I can't pay with my paypal account (I am too lazy to dig out my credit card and actually enter the numbers).
- fookyong 16y agogood implementation but if it took 48 hours to launch, the barrier to entry isn't particularly high. how would Gumroad differentiate if a competitor (or paypal) started providing the exact same service?
- random42 16y agoWhen a weekend app is touted as "next billion dollor startup", you know you are in a bubble. Dont get me wrong, I like gumroad's idea and even the implementation, but extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence, and I see none yet.
- Hates_ 16y agoWhen did everything become a billion dollar startup. It's as if anything between 0 and 1bn is unfashionable and not worth doing.
- epscylonb 16y agoneeds more bitcoins
- epscylonb 16y agowouldn't content producers rather use kickstarter?