I'm the co-founder of a startup called Minno (https://www.minno.co), which is a new take on micropayments. We were inspired by Sahil's work on Gumroad last weekend (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614), so this weekend, we decided to whip together a little link/file sharing service of our own.
You can check out the finished (alpha) version of the product here: http://hawtcakes.com/
My co-founder and I worked on it from 10am to 3am on Saturday, 1pm to 3am on Sunday, and a little more this morning. It doesn't look quite as nice as Gumroad, but we can pretty it up later :)
The nice thing about this, from what I understand, is that unlike Gumroad, it lets you sell things for < 99 cents. Obviously, that's a huge potential market.
I would guess the $10 minimum is a way to "hide" or "bundle" these tiny transactions that you can't efficiently handle through the existing credit card/banking system.
More generally, I guess the whole Minno business model/insight is to aggregate these kinds of small transactions that can't efficiently be handled by the existing financial system. (Minno is the payment service underlying Hawt Cakes.) This is literally speculation; I imagine the founders will correct me if I'm wrong.
More generally, there seems to be an entire class of apps out there that could be really useful, but which are really hard to monetize with subscriptions and/or ads revenue alone. Think about an advanced file converter, or maybe a one-off fax service. There are also the more traditional use cases, such as purchasing a single article from an online journal, or streaming a single movie online.
Minno provides an effective alternative to monetize these services, and it does so with much more ease than with traditional payment systems.
I like the idea but I do have one immediate question:
We give you a unique link for each item you want to sell. You then can tweet, post, or share your link however you want. And as soon as your sales reach $10, we'll send over your earnings.
So if a user sells something and never reaches $10, is that essentially held in escrow forever? Is there any way for users to "cash out", so to speak, after a certain period of time?
We'll definitely let users with <$10 "cash out" their earnings eventually, but we're still working out the details. After all, we just built this over the weekend =P
But your right--we could make this more clear on the site. We'll also be sure to keep HN Posted as we add more features to the product!
Super landing page. Maybe you could compile a little badge/icon for each listing, so that if the person does some promotion on their own, in a blog say, they can drop the icon in at the end and it will link them to the hawtcakes page. Basically instead of just a plain link, a nice button.
You can check out the finished (alpha) version of the product here: http://hawtcakes.com/
My co-founder and I worked on it from 10am to 3am on Saturday, 1pm to 3am on Sunday, and a little more this morning. It doesn't look quite as nice as Gumroad, but we can pretty it up later :)
Here's an example of a file you can buy/download with Hawt Cakes: http://hawtcakes.com/rfPFsN4q9
What do you thinks think? We're particularly interested in your thoughts on the payment experience :)