

Show HN: I was afraid to launch, so I did. Babolog. - sabalaba
http://babolog.com/

======
sabalaba
This semester I've been working on this with my co-founder (mekarpeles) and we
were adding features and just having fun with it. I think we went way past the
bare minimum in terms of features. I was really afraid to launch during the
semester, I didn't want it to interfere with school etc, but it was just one
of those things where my co-founder and I just started working on it whenever
we had time and it sort of took over from there.

Anyways, I actually saw Steve Blank give a talk at University of Michigan and
I went up to him afterwards and showed him a demo of this, he said, "Just
launch, what are you afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is that your
successful." So we decided, lets just launch it.

What do you guys think about it? Harsh criticism is expected and appreciated
:).

~~~
SupremumLimit
I sell digital goods so I'm in your target market. There's very little
information about the features on your web site. What payment gateways do you
support? How does the affiliate scheme work? Do you support discount coupons?
There's lots of other questions.

I tried the demo but didn't get far because I had to upload a file. I jumped
around the video but that seemed to dwell on very basic stuff.

To summarise, you may have a good product but there should be a lot more
information on your site because at the moment I just don't know if it's good
or bad.

~~~
mekarpeles
Thanks so much for your feedback SupremumLimit! We're honoured you took the
time to test out our platform. Currently, the system supports payment through
Paypal (including credit card payments). We're working to expand this to offer
more payment options.

Our main feature is being an all inclusive, free, one stop solution for
selling and buying digital goods. We have several features in development
which target several of your criticisms.

1\. Our affiliate system enables our registered users to generate unique
affiliate links for any product in our marketplace. If someone makes a
purchase through this link, they will receive a fraction of the purchase
price. Stephen and I have some elegant solutions in progress to make our
affiliate system easier and more powerful to use.

2\. I am glad that you shared your experience with our demo. Currently, the
file upload for our demo is intentionally fake and does not perform an actual
upload (to protect the privacy of our demo-ers). We'll change this immediately
to make it more apparent to the user.

3\. In the past few days we've done a lot to make Babolog more usable. We have
a 'help page' which addresses frequently asked questions, an updates page, and
we're redesigning our user interface.

I don't want to spoil our features-in progress but I will say we anticipate
releasing version 2.0 of our beta system in the next week. This release will
include a revamp of the marketplace and address much of the feedback we've
received in past 13 days since we launched into beta.

Thank you again for your wonderful criticisms. We can't wait to show you our
improvements!

------
josegonzalez
Might want to turn off the debug bar. I didn't poke around in it for too long,
but if it's anything like the others I've used, it can be a security risk.

~~~
sabalaba
haha nice catch -- forgot to edit that config file when pull/merging dev -->
production :) I hope you enjoyed the global variable dumps :)

~~~
encoderer
In Apache I set env variables for dev/staging/prod and pick-up on those in
config file.

Much better than having to work with a systems guy to say "svn up, then open
the config file and un-comment the production settings at the bottom" or
similar, some variant of which I used to do all the time.

~~~
mekarpeles
We're actually doing something similar. Accidentally swapped our config files
when the dev conf was added to our mercurial repository. All better now!

------
sahillavingia
You guys didn't let me you were launching when we talked on Skype earlier
today?! Congratulations, I hope Gumroad's "success" was part of the motivation
behind this.

~~~
sabalaba
It absolutely did :)

------
mekarpeles
Is this something you would use? We thought so, that's why we made it. We'd
love nothing more than to hear your thoughts and make it into the great tool
we know it can be.

Thank you so much in advance for your support, your suggestions, and your
constructive criticisms!

We hope to see you around the market place! A contest is coming up soon, there
will be prizes awarded to store owners with the most sales. Get a head start,
suggest features, but above all... have fun and happy hacking.

------
pero
What's the difference between this and gumroad? Which only launched several
days ago...

~~~
mekarpeles
That's a great question!

Stephen and I had the opportunity to speak with Sahil of Gumroads last night
and told him we were very impressed by his work. However, we've actually been
working on babolog for quite a while and even applied to YC to work on this
very project. You can check our updates-log on our site to track our
development back to Dec 2010.

While Gumroads offers a pretty nice solution to selling links, we believe we
do a better job at solving the problem of e-commerce for digital goods.

Our system is a complete e-commerce solution with a built in affiliate
program, storefronts, and an integrated marketplace intended for users who
wish to establish a store presence.

We have upmost respect for Sahil and his beautiful work, we've just been
working on this for a long time and continue to recognise a different market
of customers who want a complete solution for conducting online business.

We look forward to releasing a variety of unique features which are mid-
development, like our digital request system, in house digital content
creation tools, marketplace plugins, live chatting with store owners, and
more!

------
Grepsy
Instinctively I hovered the text with dashed underlines waiting for a tooltip
to come up. I'm not sure where I picked up this habit. Anyone else has the
same?

I tried the anonymous demo, entered a product. Then I'm not really sure what
to do next, I think it could use some more guidance.

~~~
mekarpeles
That's great news! Hopefully you found the demo fairly intuitive. We're
constantly working on making the interface easier to use.

Right now we're definitely in a demo / beta stage where we intend to develop
features on a request basis from our users. However, we agree with you
entirely that some core features and a redesign is required to really make the
steps more clear. I look forward to hearing more of your feedback in the
future! Please stay in touch Grepsy and thank you for your interest! :o)

------
JoshCole
This reminds me a bit of <http://www.tradebit.com/>. I'll have to bookmark
this, since when I last used tradebit I found myself wishing someone would
make a site which blew it out of the water.

~~~
pontifex
Josh, why would you wish that - is my site that bad? Cheers, Ralf

~~~
JoshCole
Yikes! I was so not expecting this. Your site isn't that bad, but every time I
log on I find it to be a little lacking in polish.

I guess I'll share my experience with your service so as to not leave a wrong
impression.

A few months back my uncle came over from another state. While he was here, I
wrote a chat bot that could have games loaded into it. When I finished coding
up the bot I began making game files for it. The games are basically lists of
questions and answers that the bot uses to generate Q&A games. When my uncle
told me that people actually liked the games I decided I would start selling
them.

Selling bots or files for bots might sound a little silly to a tech audience,
but it isn't. The chat platform on which the bot ran was fairly niche. It
isn't like IRC where thousands of open source projects make proprietary bots a
little ridiculous. That said, I wasn't expecting to make much money so file
selling services which charged a monthly-fee were non-starters.

So I started searching for a site that offered the sort of service I was
looking for. At first I didn't find anything that met my need. However, most
of the sites I did find had gorgeous designs. I realize this is a bit unfair,
but those sites shaped my idea of what a quality file-selling service looked
like. When I finally found your site I was taken aback by its design (though
this seems to be improving). I think I also fell into a reverse halo effect in
which I assumed other bad traits because the site didn't meet my visual
expectations.

~~~
pontifex
hi josh, I understand and you are not the first to find our design bad! the
whole site is template based and we did some things in the very beginning, we
regret today. but the message reached us from different sites of the web and
we will try to solve that issue during the next weeks ... it is just a
question of skill, less of will :->

------
xhonk
I personally know the man who conceived of this app, and I can attest that he
does very solid work. From poking around Babo thus far, it seems that he has
yet again made a solid app.

Now I just have to figure out what to sell.

------
dcaccavo
Ah nice, a friend of a friend hinted at this launching soon. I didn't expect
to get to use it so soon. Looks good, lots of features. Thanks guys for
launching.

------
shrikant
Looks really slick, and the anonymous demo is awesome!

Btw, small typo on front page: Under "Open for Business" it says _No monthy
fees, ever!_ "

~~~
mekarpeles
Why is this a typo? No monthy fees. Ever.

There is no barrier for entrance. We do not require a credit card. Using the
system will never have a monthly fee or ridiculous setup charges for getting
started.

If it is economically feasible, we would like to take as little as between
10-15% commission on sales (compared to envato's - 50%
<http://wiki.envato.com/selling/getting-paid/payment-rates/>). In addition, we
will offer a tiered service plan.

And also remember, there are many ways for you to earn money! We have an
affiliate system where you can earn cash by advertising other merchants'
products, and you can help invite new users to our store. In the near future,
for every merchant you invite, we'll give you a fraction of the commissions we
earn on their sales. Fair for you, fair for the seller, and we're okay with
it. We'll put an announcement on the site when we're ready to launch these
features. Feel free to email us in advance at team@babolabs.com if you'd like
to be kept in the loop!

Thanks so much for the question!

~~~
quadhome
"monthLy."

~~~
mekarpeles
Ah! Thanks so much! Fixing it now. :o)

------
DanBlake
I built this product (and gumroads) a year+ ago.

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/34168609@N07/3236968053/>

<http://www.redferret.net/?p=12155>

If anyone wants the source, let me know. Im not sure why people are making you
wait to get paid- Just have the payments go direct to the seller in the first
place

~~~
mekarpeles
Neat! I think one of the advantages of babolog is that provide an entire
e-commerce framework, including a marketplace for browsing goods, a digital
request system (in progress), the ability to have live chat with store owners
and merchants (in progress), and the ability to affiliate products. We're open
source hackers ourselves and are working on both an API and plugin system for
our codebase.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by, "Making you wait to get paid", but I'm
very interested in continuing this conversation! We are indeed working quickly
to have direct credit card as a form of payment and our goal is (sooner rather
than later) accept as many forms of secure payment as possible!

Thanks so much for your criticisms! I'd love to hear your feedback once you've
tried our interface, especially if you have prior experiences.

------
limmeau
What's your anti-fraud strategy?

~~~
sabalaba
There's essentially two major types of fraud that could occur with this system
that we've thought of.

1) Seller fraud, bogus items, imprecise descriptions, etc. This is relatively
easily prevented with our reputation system as it stands. A user will less
likely to buy if a seller has a negative reputation, and hopefully that
provides enough of an economic incentive to prevent seller fraud.

2) Money laundering (Malicious Molly creates two dummy accounts and makes a
purchase on one and moves the money towards the other)

This is a big one. One of the things we were thinking about regarding this is
to analyze payments and see if there is suspicious activity (multiple recently
or nearly registered accounts all making purchases around the same time/date
range and then the money being pulled out would be a strong sign that the
behavior was money laundering. But that's more of a payment system problem.

3) Buyer chargeback fraud (Malicious Mark makes a purchase, receives the
download, and then calls his credit card company up to reverse the payment.
Mark has the good, the payment gets reversed (it's difficult to dispute
digital goods) and Mark has the money & the product.

There's not much that can be done with this one from a technological point of
view, however, we have considered creating a user reputation system that could
let sellers rate buyers' behavior. The reputation itself is vulnerable to a
sybil attack, but that vulnerability is a yet unsolved problem (if we are to
maintain the ease of use in creating an account).

------
dippingsauce
been following babo for awhile seems like a solid idea they have my vote
specially from an out of work programmer, i can sell my code make a little bit
to live on while i look for a job

~~~
mekarpeles
We're so glad you like the idea! Please tell us if you have any problems
getting your store set up!

------
ck2
Didn't gumroad just do this? Or is this something else?

