
Why Gumroad is the next billion dollar startup – The developer interview - kanebennett
http://www.startupproject.org/2011/04/gumroad/
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ck2
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.

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jambo
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).

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ck2
Sending checks requires much more liability and overhead.

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

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random42
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.

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

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fookyong
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?

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

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jambo
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.

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tomjen3
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).

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

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epscylonb
wouldn't content producers rather use kickstarter?

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epscylonb
needs more bitcoins

