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Comment by throwkeep | Hacker News Reader

Gumroad?

https://twitter.com/shl/status/1397254513627705345

It always amazes me when things like this happen. If you look at the comments on this post you'll see people responding as if this a terrific new idea/frontier. Others respond with links to existing solutions as you did; Gumroad was my first thought, too.

And to me, this is one of the main benefits of hackernews. I don't know everything, I don't know everything available, so I take value from everyone adding the options they know about.

This IS terrific news if you are using Stripe and want to stick with them as your one payment solution.

Until adoption increases enough and they decide they can milk customers even more?

Really? What has stripe done in the past to make it feel like they’re being greedy? Besides, nobody is using stripe because it’s the cheapest option.

> What has stripe done in the past

Take VC funding.

I'm being glib, but honestly - it feels like every large vc funded company is actually some many-layered plan to take over existing markets, and then exploit their new monopoly

That’s exactly the point of VC largely - no really, that’s no secret at all.

VCs want unicorns. To get that big you often have to be the biggest in the space or big enough with enough moat to effectively be a monopoly. Monopoly status is the goal

So why is VC funding considered a Good Thing® and actively promoted as the way businesses should be created, when literally everybody agrees monopolies are a bad thing?

Because everybody wants to be a monopoly but nobody wants to be monopolized.

Not sure what you mean. It’s definitely glamorized, just like working a high paying finance job is (but I don’t think many would call Wall Street ethical or moral). Lots of people want to be VC backed because it’s great for you, but it’s more complicated whether it’s great for anyone else

They stopped refunding payment processing fees on refunds, for one.

Long after other comparable gateways had already stopped refunding those too.

Aren’t these quite different things with similar copy?

Gumroad seems to me to offer a way to eg sell copies of your pdf. This stripe service seems to be a way to make a link saying “that will be $79.82 please” and collect payment (and maybe some other details).

I.e. Gumroad provides some online store for a single digital product and stripe offer a way to collect money for anything but they don’t handle actually giving you the thing. Obviously there is some overlap but the pitch is different.

Edit: maybe I’m actually wrong and these are really similar. The thing I described above is more like an invoice for which this maybe isn’t suited (pay an invoice once/periodically but these links may be hit many times). So I’m not really sure now

Gumroad is in for a bit of direct competition by a behemoth. I'm sure they won't have good sleep in the coming months.

I don't think so. Gumroad has a product delivery platform, where stripe only handles payment. I recently evaluated stripe vs gumroad for a product, and went with gumroad because they make getting the digital product to your customer VERY easy, while stripe leaves it all up to you

Gumroad deposits to Paypal, Stripe deposits to bank account. Seems like a big difference, no?

more than that. Gumroad also acts as a merchant of record (much much cleaner for international and EU/US taxes), provides social proof (reviews) and a discovery marketplace, together with a no code frontend with fulfilment (aka it hosts your files)

Stripe has a ways to go but certainly can clone these if they wish)

Update: I've done a 3 minute demo of Payment Links in case anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLNFJNoL9e8

Great video - very well done. It's easy to follow and you explain things in simple terms!

ha, thanks very much! thats cause i dont have the curse of knowledge when it comes to payments haha

Gumroad deposits to bank accounts, but it might be regional. I have a section for ACH in my setup page. You can optionally also add a PayPal account to accept PayPal.

According to https://help.gumroad.com/article/260-your-payout-settings-pa..., it depends on Stripe's availability for ACH payouts.

I was just referring to the marketing copy by SHL in the tweet.

Gumroad also deposits to bank account.

I was simply referring to the marketing copy in the linked Tweet.

If the YC-adjacent scene stopped funding boring incremental startups maybe we'd dig our way out of the Great Stagnation.

Gumroad is something that should be a 0% fee opensource developer component, not an entire company.

The YC Facebook feed has been depressing lately: $6M funding for one of those links-on-a-page startups, $50M funding for a startup that wants to sell Pokemon cards on a livestream. The VCs are fuelling stagnation by funding these boring inconsequential projects.

Just look at the Show HN - YC batch companies, none of them are doing anything remotely groundbreaking or risky. A ton of them are solving minor workflow problems trying to skim shit off the top.

Alas the HN echo-chamber ensures these points are pushed out of the bubble.

Why is YC funding this sort of shit? https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/24/beacons-seed-round-creator...

Unfortunate that you're being downvoted for raising cogent points.

I do think companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Ginko Bioworks, etc. are doing pretty neat stuff. Even if these businesses don't seem groundbreaking, they clearly are, somehow. But the recent batches of YC startups seem disappointingly... competitive. As in the Thiel-ian sense of not doing much fundamentally different from other players in the market.

I wonder if this could be attributed to Paul Graham stepping back from the front lines.

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