choogi

Awesome to hear! Let me know if you have any feedback!

Thanks! And appreciate the feedback! You're right the location database is currently limited to larger cities. I'll take a look at closing this gap.

This is awesome. Definitely using this for my next project.

Does Checkr (https://checkr.com/) solve this problem? Or is it more complicated than that?

This is a really cool idea. I can't wait for more people to start using it :)

This is the latest project from the Minno labs--we're selling Groupon gift certificates for 50% off.

We put this together over the last day or so because we thought it'd be a fun way to show people another interesting use case for Minno.

We'd love to hear your thoughts, both about the project and about the payment experience :)

That's exactly the right analysis.

More generally, there seems to be an entire class of apps out there that could be really useful, but which are really hard to monetize with subscriptions and/or ads revenue alone. Think about an advanced file converter, or maybe a one-off fax service. There are also the more traditional use cases, such as purchasing a single article from an online journal, or streaming a single movie online.

Minno provides an effective alternative to monetize these services, and it does so with much more ease than with traditional payment systems.

We'll definitely let users with <$10 "cash out" their earnings eventually, but we're still working out the details. After all, we just built this over the weekend =P

But your right--we could make this more clear on the site. We'll also be sure to keep HN Posted as we add more features to the product!

I'm the co-founder of a startup called Minno (https://www.minno.co), which is a new take on micropayments. We were inspired by Sahil's work on Gumroad last weekend (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614), so this weekend, we decided to whip together a little link/file sharing service of our own.

You can check out the finished (alpha) version of the product here: http://hawtcakes.com/

My co-founder and I worked on it from 10am to 3am on Saturday, 1pm to 3am on Sunday, and a little more this morning. It doesn't look quite as nice as Gumroad, but we can pretty it up later :)

Here's an example of a file you can buy/download with Hawt Cakes: http://hawtcakes.com/rfPFsN4q9

What do you thinks think? We're particularly interested in your thoughts on the payment experience :)

"When I was your age, I managed my own web servers."

Nowadays, I can't imagine a startup not running on AWS/GAE/etc.

Kamme,

For now, we're restricting sign-up to Facebook because it 1) allows for really easy signup, 2) reduces password friction to simplify purchases, and 3) helps us reduce fraudulent signups. As the business grows, we will certainly open it to alternative signup options, but for now, Facebook is the only option.

During our beta period, we're offering completely free transactions to all of our partners. This means that if a user pays $0.25 for your digital good/service, you will receive $0.25 :)

If you have any other questions, feel free to email me directly at calvin@minno.co--I'd be glad to help!

Calvin

Yea, if it ever launches.

The payment provider, Minno, is our primary project--we put together TorrentTraveler mostly as a proof of concept for it. We built Minno with an emphasis on user experience and privacy.

Minno only receives information about the size of the download (1GB, 2GB, etc) so that it can charge accordingly. TorrentTraveler deletes all of of its records for each download after 24 hours.

If you have any other questions/comments about Minno, feel free to ping me at calvin [at] minno.co

We completely protect the anonymity of our users. We do not condone the downloading of illegal content. On the back-end, we run a separate sandboxed instance of transmission-daemon for each download request. Interestingly, although the backend is written in Python, more than half of the code is bash.

Yes, all records are destroyed after 24 hours in order to protect the anonymity of our users. You don't have to pay unless you actually download the file, and our downstream bandwidth should give you ample time to complete the download. If you don't receive the download then you can always re-download it at no extra charge.

Thanks for the feedback -- the health of the torrent ecosystem is very important to us. We seed to 1.2 or we kill the seed after 24 hours, whichever comes first. We delete all records associated with each download after 24 hours in order to protect the anonymity of our users.