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