youseff

Sell.app | Contract - Full-Time - Co-founder | REMOTE

Hey everyone, founder of sell.app here. SellApp is a simple way to sell digital products online. A digital goods seller can spin up a storefront in less than a minute and start selling instantly, while we automatically take care of all the difficult parts — delivery, checkout, security, and so on.

We're a distributed team of three (all technical) who are looking for a motivated back-end developer to help continue building out SellApp. You'll be working with the TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine, Laravel, Livewire), with a TDD approach.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, send an email to hello'at'sell.app and we'll take it from there.

PS: No agencies or dev shops, pretty please!

We've launched just last week, so there aren't any sizeable businesses who've joined SellApp (yet).

However, the few dozen sellers I did have a chance to talk to, primarily cite three reasons why they switch to us instead of staying at a competitor:

1. Our freemium pricing. When a seller wants to spin up a storefront and sell a digital product, most competitors charge upfront (i.e. Shopify, Sellfy, Podia) whereas we have a completely free plan a seller can make use of immediately.

2. The way payouts work. Alternatives tend to hold/custody funds for a specific timeframe for various reasons. SellApp makes it possible for a seller to directly link their PayPal and Stripe accounts with their storefronts, resulting in them receiving payments instantaneously.

3. The interface/UI. As also mentioned in a few other replies, competitors tend to start off as a digital product storefront, but then completely neglect it in favor of physical products, tipping, email/affiliate marketing, and so on. That, for the average digital goods seller, becomes overwhelming and unnecessary. SellApp's intuitive and minimal design is a 'breathe of fresh air' in that sense.

They are indeed part of what's difficult, which is why we'll be bringing out a number of tools & features to help simplify things.

Thanks Krishna!

We are not a MoR, and aren't planning on becoming one either. There's already fairly decent MoR solutions out there which take payments on the seller's behalf and distribute funds after a given timeframe (usually 1-2 weeks).

You could indeed spin up something that somewhat does the job with Stripe and some coding, but not everyone can code, and doing so also requires you to worry about hosting, domains/DNS, file distribution, security, fraud, and so on.

What we offer is a simple, straightforward way for someone to spin up a store in minutes, sell a digital good, and have the funds in their account right when the sale is completed. I think that's a bigger value-add than being yet another MoR

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, subscribing to a user (like Patreon), email marketing, affiliate marketing, blogging, 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.

Just checked, you should have received a verification mail sent to the email you entered during sign-up. Once you click on that, you'll be able to sign in.

Great question! For now, the seller has to deal with taxes themselves, but we plan on introducing a number of nifty ways to streamline & automate this process.

This is a tough one, since it'd be difficult to verify whether the Netflix account does indeed belong to you (versus of it being hacked).

I'd say if it's a one-off sale, you're good to go. But if it's more than one account being sold, we'd have to remove your store.

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

I'm off for a couple hours, it's 2AM here, but will get back to this as soon as I wake up.

Thanks a lot for the candid feedback HN, learned a lot from talking to you all!

I've already gone ahead and implemented most suggested changes in the thread, and will be implementing the others soon.

Hey, we do indeed use Maxmind for our VPN/proxy detection. So far the experience has been pretty good.

Many thanks! :D

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!

You can indeed spin up a store at absolutely no cost.

There's no tracking or A/B testing yet, but you'll definitely be able to see which product performs better in terms of sales.

Ah, good suggestion! Will add that in to prevent confusion

Hey there, I just created an example listing costing 10 cents: https://admin.sell.app/listing/ycombinator-news-test-purchas...

- The listing has a volume discount, so if you make the quantity 10 or more, it'll automatically apply a 10% discount

- You can also opt to pay more by clicking on "or more" just below the product's price

- If you wish to apply a coupon code to see how that works, you can enter "coupon" into the "Coupon code" input field to get 5% off the product's price

Yeah, you're right with their respective histories, though I do think a freemium model with a relatively low fee/tx can definitely work (look at e.g. Gumroad/Shoppy)

We do also indeed have plans for a fraud detection system to help combat fraud.

Btw since you're a former team member, I think we might have crossed paths on HF a couple years ago :)

One of the things I did, was draft a complete design of the project structure in advance of actually writing any code. This included only the essential features with no additional bells/whistles in order to prevent feature creep.

By the time my two team members formally joined, the above design was already split up in manageable chunks of tasks which could be worked on in parallel.

In addition to the above, we decided not to decouple the frontend and backend, but instead used Livewire in conjunction with Laravel & Alpine. This, coupled with Tailwind's UI components (tailwindui.com), helped us spend very little time on the frontend aside from a few specific aspects.

Both Sellfy and Selly charge a monthly fee starting at $20 to even create a store. Rocketr has stalled/been abandoned since early 2019 if I'm not mistaken.

However, I do agree with you in that we need to differentiate ourselves a little more, which is what we'll be doing as we progress with our roadmap. Sponsoring does indeed look like a good way to get traction going and we'll definitely be looking into that as a viable way to grow our userbase.

Many thanks for the feedback!

Thank you! And yes, we post regular product updates on both our Discord as well as Twitter (https://twitter.com/AppSell)

Agreed on the first point, however the common thing of storefronts like ours is that they start with digital goods, then tack in physical products, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and so on. All on the same interface.

Stripe and SellApp go hand in hand. Where Stripe is a payment processor, SellApp is the storefront that takes care of the pre-sales and after-sales process including product delivery, security, order replacement, etc.

That said, Stripe does seem to have recently launched a new product known as "Payment Links" which may eventually grow out to something similar to SellApp.

Not a worry. We don't have eBook watermarking/stamping yet, so every customer will get the same exact eBook.

That said, it's relatively easy to implement this specific feature (pretty sure I've got the relevant code from our old codebase somewhere) if/when a seller requests it.

It's mostly either downloadable goods, or serial-based products, but we launched just last week so I anticipate the type of popular product types will change as we grow.

With SellApp you can sell both your programming services as well as IP, that's the interesting thing about our platform.

We don't limit you on what kind of product you sell, as long as it's digital (and not illegal)

Hey there, thank you!

The restriction in our AUP is indeed because payment processors (unfortunately) still frown upon platforms which help facilitate the sale of 'adult content'. Without it, it's unlikely we'll be accepted to e.g. Stripe Connect and/or PayPal for Marketplaces further down the line.

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.

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

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.

Hey, I am indeed! I actually obtained the toffee.com domain on a lease from a company (venture.com) back when funds were very limited and the lease made sense.

When I raised funding earlier this year and inquired about a potential outright purchase of toffee.com, the answer was that they didn't want to sell.

So instead of staying on the lease plan (which'd increase by a sizable amount y/o/y), I started looking for a suitable domain we could purchase outright, and luckily found sell.app for sale.

Delivery happens when the customer successfully completes a payment. The value add is this:

If you sell e.g. a downloadable product, it's relatively easy to manually email out a link to it every time you make a sale.

But when you start to grow and/or see an increase in sales, you'll be wasting a lot of time on delivering that eBook to all those customers. This, x10, for other digital content like license keys.

And if you look at it from the customer's perspective: you don't want to wait for the seller to come online and send a link to the product you paid for hours ago. You want it instantly.

That is where the simplicity of SellApp comes in. We handle the payment, automatically send out the product to the customer, and help the customer get in touch with you in case anything is wrong with their purchase.

Great to hear, wishing you the best of luck with your product! And yeah, Tailwind is really mind-blowing in how good it is.

By the way, the Tailwind team will soon release an eCommerce package, so you might want to look out for that (I sure will!)