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Comment by youseff | Hacker News Reader

Hey there, I do indeed have an example storefront which you can view here: https://admin.sell.app/

You are right in saying that we are taking on Gumroad. IIRC, most of Gumroad's traction has been organic/word-of-mouth, with little/no money spent on paid advertising.

We're still figuring out the best way to acquire users at scale by experimenting with both conventional (Reddit/Twitter ads) and unconventional (Discord channel/niche forum advertising) methods.

PS: Great suggestion! I'll be setting up & linking an example storefront on the homepage shortly.

View on HN

The success of Gumroad is in part due to the stores-beget-stores snowball effect: if someone is successful selling online, those that want to emulate the success -- of which there are many -- will gravitate towards the platforms their eyeballs are on.

I suggest setting aside paid advertising, and instead invest in paying creators[1] to switch platforms. For example, pick some medium successful Gumroad creators (maybe they do $1k/sales per month) and offer them a 20% bonus on each sale they make through your platform. A single creator using your platform to make sales will deliver far more value than thousands in paid adverts -- and you can directly link spend to revenue, which is nice for attribution of spend.

[1] I'd pick creators who operate in the creator niche, e.g: people who make content about running an online business, because they're most likely to convert into platform users.

whats the purpose of showing "Free store" - why would a customer care about that, and why would a seller be okay with that?

That's a small experiment I'm carrying out.

People on the internet tend to love free 'badges' - if you've ever been active on a forum, they're full of them.

The "Free store" badge is what a seller gets when they create a store on SellApp. If they then decide to upgrade their store, the badge will be replaced by a more colorful "Premium store" or an even fancier "Advanced store" badge.

I want to check two things: 1. Whether the "Free store" badge bothers new sellers 2. Whether sellers are more incentivized to upgrade in order to get the fancier "Premium store" or "Advanced store" badge

hmmm, I feel like that is "user-hostile", might not be a great idea for a nascent service. I think that if you're starting a new service you would want to pump it up, make every user feel awesome so they keep using it. you can incentivize upgrade with a carrot without punishing free with a stick. i.e. maybe a "premium" badge only, not the "free" badge. I dont anticipate anyone will be happy that their cheapness is being advertised

I haven't thought about it like that. Will definitely go about it the way you suggested and remove the "free" badge.

Appreciate the suggestion and feedback!

props on what you've built, it looks great!

Many thanks! :D

Why you and not gumroad?

Great question! Gumroad seems to be focusing more and more on creators with a large following and is pivoting towards that segment of the market. This includes the decision to diversify into physical products, tipping, subscribing to a user (like Patreon), and so on.

Given their refocus/pivot, it's made their interface a little too complex/overwhelming for new sellers and/or sellers who just want to sell digital products without all the hassle. SellApp is built for this segment of the market.

For future reference, Hacker News shouldn't be used as an "unconventional advertising method"

Heh, that's definitely not the case here! I don't think there's very many digital good sellers active on Hacker News to begin with.

I would argue that most people on HN exclusively export digital goods.

My website has been successfully selling digital goods direct to consumers for the past 13 years. youseff, it could be fun chatting to you if you can see my email in my profile?

Hey there, I can't, but feel free to email me directly on yousef 'at' sell.app

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