Show HN: I was afraid to launch, so I did. Babolog.

by sabalaba • 15 years ago

33 36 15 years ago

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

mekarpeles11• 15 years ago

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

xhonk• 15 years ago

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.

sabalaba4• 15 years ago

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 :).

Huppie• 15 years ago

I think it's a good idea to add a 'payments provided by PayPal' link or something. I had to find out what I could use to pay by just ordering something.

And what's with the 'profit-to-date' field? Can anybody see that?

Edit: Oh, and before I forget, there's no FAQ link on the front page, only on the stores.

mekarpeles11• 15 years ago

Thanks for the excellent feedback Huppie!

We're sorry for the inconvenience! We'll work right away on getting a list of frequently asked questions compiled together. If there are any other questions which you think deserve special attention, please let me know at mek@babolabs.com.

In the -near- future, you will be able to plug in merchant accounts and use credit card. Our goal is to accept as many forms of payment as possible. Our next step is to enable you to purchase babolog products and receive payments from your and others' internal system balances.

SupremumLimit• 15 years ago

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.

mekarpeles11• 15 years ago

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!

sahillavingia• 15 years ago

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.

sabalaba4• 15 years ago

It absolutely did :)

pero• 15 years ago

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

mekarpeles11• 15 years ago

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!

mekarpeles11• 15 years ago

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.

dcaccavo• 15 years ago

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.

josegonzalez• 15 years ago

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.

sabalaba4• 15 years ago

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

encoderer• 15 years ago

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.

shrikant• 15 years ago

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!"

mekarpeles11• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

"monthLy."

autoreverse• 15 years ago

<i>"monthy"</i> should be monthLy

limmeau• 15 years ago

What's your anti-fraud strategy?

sabalaba4• 15 years ago

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).

JoshCole2• 15 years ago

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.

mekarpeles11• 15 years ago

Great! Sabalaba and I have lived the chaos of managing six different services to get a simple store up and running. We created it because it was something we needed four ourselves. We are honoured to have the opportunity to make digital e-commerce as easy as it should be -- and as effective too...

But to do that we need your help. We eagerly wait your criticisms and feedback. If you feel this product is for you, you're the one I want to hear from! There's no point designing tons of flashy features they don't make the experience better.

Thanks you for your interest and we hope to receive your feedback soon!

pontifex3• 15 years ago

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

JoshCole2• 15 years ago

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.

Grepsy• 15 years ago

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.

mekarpeles11• 15 years ago

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)

DanBlake• 15 years ago

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

mekarpeles11• 15 years ago

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.

ck2• 15 years ago

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

Show HN: I was afraid to launch, so I did. Babolog.

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