Why Gumroad is the next billion dollar startup – The developer interview | Hacker News Reader

Why Gumroad is the next billion dollar startup – The developer interview

startupproject.org

25 pointskanebennett17 comments

April 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.

It 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).

Sending checks requires much more liability and overhead.

Dozens of ad networks pay publishers via PayPal. They have a MassPay feature specifically for these situations.

The author knows the Stripe people (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414177), who have specifically ok'ed this. That may not be enough, but it's something.

When 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.

When did everything become a billion dollar startup. It's as if anything between 0 and 1bn is unfashionable and not worth doing.

good 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?

I don't understand why this is such a big deal. What can people sell now they couldn't before?

I 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.

I could sell you a link to your own comment... I couldn't do that before, at least not easily ;-)

The 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.

This can disintermediate home made porn - this is not a small market.

The 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).

A bit premature maybe, but it is a novel implementation.

wouldn't content producers rather use kickstarter?

needs more bitcoins

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