
Tell HN: I just made my first sale - ent101
For the past year, I&#x27;ve been working on a side project called Outpan. Basically it&#x27;s an app store for web apps (apps written in JS&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;CSS).<p>The whole project started out as a simple directory but a few days ago I finally finished the payment&#x2F;store functionality and released it without any fanfare. To my surprise, one of the developers found out about the new feature and added a paid app priced at $5 (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.outpan.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;d0b0885a8d&#x2F;voice-music), I genuinely thought the price was waaaaaay too high and there weren&#x27;t any proper screenshots (I think the developer was just testing the waters) but the very same day a user actually bought the app!!!!<p>Even though it&#x27;s only $5 and the user seems to not have liked the app (I reached out to them and offered to issue a refund but they refused!) this is still a crazy milestone for me as all this happened without a shred of marketing and totally organically! I&#x27;ve already put a ton of work into this project but now that I know that there seem to be people willing to transact on my platform I&#x27;m super focused on improving the entire buying and payment experience to perfection.<p>Anyways, a really small amount of money but a giant amount of excitement lol Please ask any question you might have about my experience, would be happy to answer.
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wheresmycraisin
Congrats! Hopefully single-sales days will soon be commonplace. However, be
prepared for droughts as well -- I sell at app that sells 2-3+ copies per day
on average, but sometimes I go 2 weeks without a sale and some times I get 20
in a day. There's little correlation between sales so what matters is long-
term trends.

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ent101
Thank you for sharing your experience. Someone on reddit brought this up too,
so I'm sure I need to prepare for the same :)

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Jugurtha
Hi. Maybe offer yearly or multi-year plans, possibly with a discount, to
mitigate seasonality and make your revenue more predictable, so you can
forecast and make decisions.

Maybe you can also have a feature that allows someone with purchase power to
buy an app for multiple users at once, so you increase the average amount of a
"buy decision".

Maybe a feature with a cart-like experience: I want to buy app A, app B, app C
for user a, user b, user c.

Maybe a feature with bundles and packs that are geared towards a particular
function. Similar to a LAMP/WAMP stack for web development, you can have (App
A + App Z + App D) for $n.

Maybe a feature to transfer access rights for an application to someone else.
I buy an app that I don't like anymore, can I barter? I give you that app, and
you give me something else, like access to another app.

Maybe a feature for "App of the day". I connect and I have ephemeral access to
an app for that day. It'll help discovery. If I don't like it, I just "stop"
the app, and it'll give me access to another app that I can use for the
remainder of the day. It exposes me to more applications and increases the
likelihood of a collision?

You could then get data on apps I like and recommend to me applications I
might like, with something completely different from time to time to pop the
bubble.

Also, congrats!

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deepaksurti
Awesome. Many of us underestimate but on HN also appreciate how much effort it
takes to take to ship something, so keep going at it. Respect!

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ent101
Thank you so much. That's very kind of you.

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laythea
Awesome and congrats! - Can I ask - How do you (intend to) deal with tax from
sales generated overseas? Would you outsource this, or manage it yourself? I
intend to release also, but I'm not quite at the release stage. My mind is
full of these non-software related questions...thanks in advance.

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ent101
Can you please send me an email at cdangelo@outpan.com? I'm interested to see
if I can solve this problem in a general way for developers :)

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imhoguy
With sale of my own apps I would go with Merchant of Record or reseller
solution. However in your case as you are reseller/marketplace not sure how
that would go. I would be happy to read about your solution. Do you own a
blog?

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quickthrower2
Well done, and incase you don’t know about it I recommend talking about this
on IndieHackers.com for more exposure and helpful advice.

Disclosure it isn’t my site, it’s well known / respected on HN though.

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ent101
Thank you for the tip! I'll post on indiehackers tonight :)

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ipi
“The 3 most harmful addictions are cocaine, carbohydrates and a monthly
salary” says Nassim Taleb in his book black swan. I guess the first sale from
the product you built also goes in the same line but in a positive way!

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jfrej
That's a cool idea. And congratulations!

However, I get an error in my console when I navigate to an app:

> Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from
> 'Window': Access is denied for this document.

Chrome on macOS

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atum47
Nice, I just published one of my games there, Qubes.

Let me know when you are able to make payments to Brazil.

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semicolonandson
Congrats and nice idea.

I noticed quite a few web-apps already listed. I'm curious what approach you
used to reach these developers?

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exolymph
Congrats! No other feeling like it :)

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ent101
Thank you so much!

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serjester
That's awesome!

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ent101
Thank you!

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bitxbitxbitcoin
Congratulations :).

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ent101
Thank you so much :)

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asfarley
Congratulations, it’s a good feeling.

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dhivya_ajai
Congratssss!!

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nickmajor
Congrats :)

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maps7
congrats!

