

Building a Binpress challenger in 48 hours - plehoux
http://blog.gitiosk.com/post/33708734308/building-a-binpress-challenger-in-48-hours

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Animus7
Since you asked, here are the problems I see. Most of these I've learned the
hard way working on a similar problem for over 2 years, so hopefully that
counts for something.

1- The main cost of third-party software is _never_ the cost of the code; it's
the cost of using, integrating, customizing, and gettng support for it. The
utility of the raw code itself is often zero. This is why binpress - selling
code - never (really) took off, but github - a code _community_ \- did.

2- Given no restrictions, the prices people slap onto source code get very
ridiculous, very fast. Non-technical people expect well-polished software for
$1.99 (see: App Store). Hobbyists and developers often have a case of NIH, and
a lot of them think that code should be communal and free (as in beer). The
reasons are varied but the end result is that source code (by itself) is not
considered a valuable commodity by the market anymore, which means nobody
cares about selling theirs - or they try and quickly learn it's not worth it.

3- Licensing. You have a minefield of legal issues of ownership resolve. If
you haven't looked into it, you probably don't even realize the extent of the
BS that will be thrown at you.

4- I won't sugar coat this. You'll never make any money on a 3% comission of a
commodity that's already priced dangerously close to zero by the market (see
#2). The costs of dealing with people whining when things go wrong - alone -
will exceed your comission.

5- I'm a developer, and I just don't see the value-add here. I have to do my
own marketing, I have to do my own sales, I have to write the software, and I
have to support it. If I'm going to go through that trouble, why don't I just
blast up my own template Stripe page w/download link and cut out the
middleman?

I guess what I'm saying is: please don't make my mistakes. Do something
different and make different mistakes.

Also, I'm from Waterloo so I understand what it's like to be a tech
entrepreneur in Canada. And sadly this means I should underline point #3,
which Canada has much worse than the states.

~~~
rafBM
These are all valid concerns.

It’s interesting that you’re not seeing the value in not having to code your
own packaging/payment/update solution from scratch. From our point of view,
this is the main value proposition in Gitiosk. We are not a marketplace, just
a tool to make it dead easy to sell code.

We might be wrong about this. Let’s keep discussing! :)

— rafBM, one of the Gitiosk team member

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seanlinehan
48 hours from start to finish? You guys did an incredibly impressive job with
this. Your landing page is more refined than many "Show HN" stories that pop
up and the product itself is really cool.

I'm uncertain about the business model - is $0.15 per transaction really going
to add up? - but according the Steve Blank, that is the point of a startup
anyways. (<http://steveblank.com/2012/03/05/search-versus-execute/>)

Very nice work!

~~~
plehoux
We had the idea prior to the rumble. The rumble gave us the opportunity to
finally execute the vision, since we all work on different projects on day-to-
day basis, time was a big constraint.

Being from Canada, the road to success, is probably very different then the
one in the valley.

The landing page was rush at the end of the rumble. I think we could have done
better job explaining the advantages of the application vs the incumbents
(CodeCanyon, Binpress, etc).

