> I was so afraid that PayPal would freeze my account that I called to let them know that I was going to sell a book and that I might have a few sales.
You know something's wrong when your customers are fearing you. Seriously, how did PayPal end up like this?
It ended up like these partly because of being the only really international online payment service -- thus having to abide and keep tabs on hundreds of different legislations and rules.
How do you tell a guy making $10,000 in 7 days from a small scale money laundering attempt?
How do you know he is not selling BS and that in a week or so you wont have a backslash of people demanding their money back from you (the payment service)?
I'm no fan of PayPal, but this customer was aware that a sudden onslaught of sales (where before there was none) might set off some sort of alarm with his payment processor. Seems like a legitimate concern for both the processor and a pro-active measure by the customer.
We all know the horror stories of frozen PayPal accounts but I can't say I can blame PP given the scope of what they have to deal with when transferring money and dealing with regulators/government.
Good question. I guess the only reason I didn't ditch PayPal before was that in the past Gumroad would deposit your money in your PayPal account (i.e. you'd need PayPal anyway). Now that Gumroad deposits directly to your bank account, I'm looking forward to move to a Gumroad-only solution,
To be fair, if you were going to suddenly deposit a ton of money to your bank, or make a ton more money this year than last, you might call up your bank or accountant beforehand. It's perfectly reasonable.
Great success! I suspect that it was A LOT more than 7 days of effort to put it all together. It was 7 days harvesting a lot of prior effort. (And I hope the harvesting turns into a lot more than $6K!)
just want to say that I've read this book and it's quite good. I've recommended it to people both in the context of an ebook I wrote on a similar topic (music hacks) and in person.
its introduction to reading music is especially good. it describes musical notation as a graph DSL with lots of legacy terminology. a very clear and sensible intro to that subject, and it made me think about it in a new way (as someone already familiar with the topic).
An interesting topic for a book turns into profit, I am wholly unsurprised. Congrats on your success :)
I've been curious about trying something similar, but I don't want to put my home address in emails to a mailing list. Did you end up using your address or doing something like a PO box?
Can anyone comment on the conversion rate of PayPal vs Gumroad? Are customers more comfortable with PayPal vs inputting their card directly on Gumroad, or vice versa?
I can't talk to gumroad specifically but I run a shopify store that offers both shopify's built in payment CC processor and paypal as payment options. 56% of people checkout with paypal vs pulling out their credit card.
My guess is if you have a paypal account with your credit card on file it's much easier to just checkout with paypal than manually type in your card info.
Honestly the posts with the format "How I made this much money in a ridiculously small time-frame with my low-price-product/service" CAN be a bit off-putting to the reader who is not familiar with this kind of posts. I have already read quite a lot of those and still whenever one of them pops up on my news feed I still get the feeling that the writer comes out as a cheater rather than a marketing genius.
A cheater? What, did he break the rules of the Capitalism Game?
Casting aspersions like this is in very poor taste. You can't even question his actual actions — instead, you just feel like the author is a cheater. This is not reasonable discussion; it's slander, and it is hostile to the purpose of Hacker News.
[+] [-] SanderMak|12 years ago|reply
> I was so afraid that PayPal would freeze my account that I called to let them know that I was going to sell a book and that I might have a few sales.
You know something's wrong when your customers are fearing you. Seriously, how did PayPal end up like this?
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
It ended up like these partly because of being the only really international online payment service -- thus having to abide and keep tabs on hundreds of different legislations and rules.
How do you tell a guy making $10,000 in 7 days from a small scale money laundering attempt?
How do you know he is not selling BS and that in a week or so you wont have a backslash of people demanding their money back from you (the payment service)?
[+] [-] josefresco|12 years ago|reply
We all know the horror stories of frozen PayPal accounts but I can't say I can blame PP given the scope of what they have to deal with when transferring money and dealing with regulators/government.
[+] [-] davidw|12 years ago|reply
> Seriously, how did PayPal end up like this?
By having lots of people out to rip them off.
[+] [-] kroger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wikwocket|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tessierashpool|12 years ago|reply
its introduction to reading music is especially good. it describes musical notation as a graph DSL with lots of legacy terminology. a very clear and sensible intro to that subject, and it made me think about it in a new way (as someone already familiar with the topic).
[+] [-] kroger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurjohn|12 years ago|reply
I've been curious about trying something similar, but I don't want to put my home address in emails to a mailing list. Did you end up using your address or doing something like a PO box?
[+] [-] doseofreality|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivansavz|12 years ago|reply
With my book stuff, I've had about a 50% success rate of "making the homepage." If you're offering something interesting, they will click ;)
[+] [-] qeorge|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meryl|12 years ago|reply
My guess is if you have a paypal account with your credit card on file it's much easier to just checkout with paypal than manually type in your card info.
[+] [-] sotirisk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graeme|12 years ago|reply
$6000/$15 = 400 customers. That's not a gigantic amount.
[+] [-] keiferski|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chc|12 years ago|reply
Casting aspersions like this is in very poor taste. You can't even question his actual actions — instead, you just feel like the author is a cheater. This is not reasonable discussion; it's slander, and it is hostile to the purpose of Hacker News.
[+] [-] Aloisius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zrail|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kroger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geolisto|12 years ago|reply