Feedback Wanted — The Paywall for your Files
A friend and I have developed a simple web app that enables users to easily monetize their content online. We have coded and launched the MVP already.
An angel investor showed some interest, but we haven’t really figured out the best initial use case for the app - this is where we’d love to get the feedback of the Indiehacker community ❤️
What are we solving:
If you are trying to sell digital content to any online community, you will either start a subscription business (Patreon, Substack) or open up your own “digital storefront” like a Shopify store.
While these things certainly make sense in a lot of cases, we feel like there should be an easier solution for people that simply want to sell individual pieces of content directly to their community on Twitter, Reddit, in their Newsletter, or via DMs.
What we have built so far:
We have built a MVP that lets creators monetize their content via the following steps:
- Creator uploads a file and sets a price. At the moment we only support pictures but we are working on zip and pdf files.
- Creator generates a payment link (incl. file preview) and shares it with their customers
- Customer can pay directly via the provided link — no subscription or account setup needed
- Creator gets paid every time a file is unlocked
What we need:
We essentially want to find out whether developing this product further makes sense. You can help us with this decision by doing the following two things:
- Let us know your thoughts on potential use cases for this solution
- Try it yourself (⇒ unlock.pics) ⇒ we really appreciate any feedback on bugs/feature ideas you may have!
Thanks a bunch 🙏
PS: If you do try it out, please be patient with the upload speed -- still working on that :)
As some others have said, how is this different from Gumroad?
Yes, it does allow mobile integration, but what's more important is: would mobile integration be useful for most people selling their services? Or will gumroad suffice? Gumroad is mobile friendly after all.
It might reduce customer friction, but by how much?
Only customer research can tell.
Good luck!
PS: once I launch, I would like to get some feedback as well for my product. It's a web API that allows developers to connect AI to their apps. I post about it a lot on my twitter: https://twitter.com/TheRealEtch
I also have a discord server as well: https://discord.gg/DsJXxcMmkC
These days even a few payment gateway companies do this at a basic level.
You need to figure out a to which sellers is this exactly aligned for. Otherwise, there is lot of competition out there for a generic solution for the problem.
Hi, how is this different than gumroad and the alternatives?
I think you need to provide more context regarding the problem/solution or target market
Good points! To be quite frank we only really discovered Gumroad after building the app and are now looking into use cases and options for differentiation.
One point is that by focussing on mobile-first users and making the uploading & purchase process way easier/quicker than with Gumroad the products sold through the platform are also different to the ones sold on alternatives (e.g. selling individual pictures instead of courses).
We also believe that we can differentiate ourself by specializing on a niche & building niche-specific features - but that's still tbd.
I really like the concept, especially the frictionless payment option - however, I think it is crucial to support other file formats as you might be heavily limited by only pictures.
Potential use cases could be: Sharing design elements, selling ebooks / reports, maybe even academic papers?
How do you intend to monetize this?
Thanks a bunch for the feedback - really appreciate it, especially haven't thought about academic papers as a potential use case.
We'll take a fee of the purchase price - still don't know how hight we should set that fee, though.