Building a Binpress challenger in 48 hours

http://blog.gitiosk.com/post/33708734308/building-a-binpress-challenger-in-48-hours

by plehoux • 14 years ago

17 4 14 years ago

blog.gitiosk.com

48 hours from start to finish? You guys did an incredibly impressive job with this. Your landing page is more refined than many "Show HN" stories that pop up and the product itself is really cool.

I'm uncertain about the business model - is $0.15 per transaction really going to add up? - but according the Steve Blank, that is the point of a startup anyways. (http://steveblank.com/2012/03/05/search-versus-execute/)

Very nice work!

plehoux• 14 years ago

We had the idea prior to the rumble. The rumble gave us the opportunity to finally execute the vision, since we all work on different projects on day-to-day basis, time was a big constraint.

Being from Canada, the road to success, is probably very different then the one in the valley.

The landing page was rush at the end of the rumble. I think we could have done better job explaining the advantages of the application vs the incumbents (CodeCanyon, Binpress, etc).

Animus7• 14 years ago

Since you asked, here are the problems I see. Most of these I've learned the hard way working on a similar problem for over 2 years, so hopefully that counts for something.

1- The main cost of third-party software is never the cost of the code; it's the cost of using, integrating, customizing, and gettng support for it. The utility of the raw code itself is often zero. This is why binpress - selling code - never (really) took off, but github - a code community - did.

2- Given no restrictions, the prices people slap onto source code get very ridiculous, very fast. Non-technical people expect well-polished software for $1.99 (see: App Store). Hobbyists and developers often have a case of NIH, and a lot of them think that code should be communal and free (as in beer). The reasons are varied but the end result is that source code (by itself) is not considered a valuable commodity by the market anymore, which means nobody cares about selling theirs - or they try and quickly learn it's not worth it.

3- Licensing. You have a minefield of legal issues of ownership resolve. If you haven't looked into it, you probably don't even realize the extent of the BS that will be thrown at you.

4- I won't sugar coat this. You'll never make any money on a 3% comission of a commodity that's already priced dangerously close to zero by the market (see #2). The costs of dealing with people whining when things go wrong - alone - will exceed your comission.

5- I'm a developer, and I just don't see the value-add here. I have to do my own marketing, I have to do my own sales, I have to write the software, and I have to support it. If I'm going to go through that trouble, why don't I just blast up my own template Stripe page w/download link and cut out the middleman?

I guess what I'm saying is: please don't make my mistakes. Do something different and make different mistakes.

Also, I'm from Waterloo so I understand what it's like to be a tech entrepreneur in Canada. And sadly this means I should underline point #3, which Canada has much worse than the states.

rafBM• 14 years ago

These are all valid concerns.

It’s interesting that you’re not seeing the value in not having to code your own packaging/payment/update solution from scratch. From our point of view, this is the main value proposition in Gitiosk. We are not a marketplace, just a tool to make it dead easy to sell code.

We might be wrong about this. Let’s keep discussing! :)

— rafBM, one of the Gitiosk team member

Building a Binpress challenger in 48 hours

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