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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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!