Show HN: A Digital Marketplace I Built, with Git Integration

Cofounder &amp; CTO here - happy to answer any questions! My heart is filled with joy today to finally launch this product.<p>The project has been an entire year, full-time, in the making. It started when I tried selling software that I had written as a side project. I saw two very big problems with the digital marketplaces online:<p>1. One company owns most of the marketplaces. Fees start in a tier, at 50%. Others like Creative Market are better (30% flat), but still seems excessive. I did a whole lot of spreadsheet math and determined 18% is more than fair for both creators and the company.<p>2. Engineers: do you like downloading Zip archives to get updates? Me either. I made the platform with deep Git integration. Customers can type `git pull` to get updates, or add the CDN urls to their package managers. Creators can use branches and tags as they see fit to manager their products. And hey, if your customers aren&#x27;t technical, they can still download archives &amp; see all Git commits in their dashboard.<p>So here I am one year later, finally complete (unit tests and all!). I&#x27;m a classic ENFJ personality. Please send me any feedback, good, bad, or downright mean :-)<p>Cheers!

RE: Fees<p>Should be sliding scale. Our average price point is about $30,000 and what you built could work for us, but at 18% we&#x27;ll just build it internally.<p>RE: SquareBit Site<p>Not clear what this product does. Screenshots off UI should be foremost with brief explanation of what this does.<p>RE: App UI<p>You&#x27;ve got what looks like an MVP flow shown here. If there&#x27;s more depth to this product I&#x27;d want to know about it. For example, how am I handling payments? What if I want payments outside of credit cards? How much of git internals are exposed to users?<p>RE: Inventory vs. Marketplace<p>You&#x27;re demonstrating an inventory application here, not a marketplace. That&#x27;s good b&#x2F;c there is a shortage of good inventory applications for small business, and its a niche that needs to be filled.

By the landing page it seems to be a market for git ruled projects&#x2F;files? such as designs and code...?<p>Where do I see the products? everything seems to be more focused in the market itself but not on the products being sold&#x2F;purchase. Perhaps I didn&#x27;t get it and you are selling the market place itself and not any product within the market?<p>I won&#x27;t register in such place, unless I see how it is solving my problem (e.g. there is a piece of software, plugin or theme layout for my CRM, which I would like to buy idk).

I read the whole site but I have no idea what this is supposed to be used for. Could you give some example use cases?

It says buyers will be using git to download updates to products they&#x27;ve purchased, does this mean this is strictly for a programmer &#x2F; very technical crowd?<p>It seems to oversell on the technical implementation instead of the features that set it apart from a conceptual standpoint.<p>I also had to read the homepage, about page, and blog post to get a basic understanding of what it is, and that&#x27;s only because I recognised Theme Forest when you mentioned it in your blog post. I would definitely suggest more copy on the homepage and a demo of some kind that doesn&#x27;t involve joining.

Hey, I really like the concept here. But think you&#x27;ve made a number of missteps, so this is my (hopefully) constructive criticism.<p>ONE<p>I think you&#x27;re making a grave category error with your pricing comparison. Because while it&#x27;s true that you charge much less than Themeforest etc. you are not doing what they are doing.<p>They&#x27;re true marketplaces and the % price you pay to them is for the payment processing, delivery management and _most crucially_ implicit marketing.<p>If I&#x27;ve made a Wordpress theme I&#x27;m much more likely to make more selling it on Themeforest (even with their 50-70% take) than I am with you and your 18% because they have literally millions and millions of people coursing through their ecosystem and searching directly within their site.<p>I think a more apt comparison is to something like Gumroad (which is more of a digital goods payments+fulfillment system and not a &quot;marketplace&quot;). Lots of people sell things like their eBooks and courses on Gumroad for $10&#x2F;mo and 3.5%.<p>TWO<p>You need some example, case study, _something_ that shows how this actually works. Ideally you&#x27;d have this for all of the different ways you see this being used. There are a bunch of questions I had as a potential seller looking at this: do they accept Paypal? What&#x27;s the checkout process look like? Do buyers end up with a library of stuff they&#x27;ve bought on SquareBit?<p>THREE<p>I think you&#x27;ve fallen into the &quot;everything&quot; tool trap where (since you&#x27;re deep in the weeds with the service) you&#x27;re finding stuff every day where you think: &quot;SquareBit would be perfect for these people selling this thing&quot; but to an outsider it&#x27;s really hard to connect the dots.<p>Is SquareBit a good fit for ebooks? Video Courses? Private package repos? I have my thoughts, but your site and marketing needs to very cleanly say how and what this is for and how people would use it.<p>FOUR<p>I&#x27;d be concerned using your service on the basis of you&#x27;re doing online payments of a sort and call yourself Square. This isn&#x27;t great and I hope you don&#x27;t get into legal trouble, but ouch (IANAL, but any way you cut it, this isn&#x27;t a positive to you).

MARKETING<p>1. Not a marketplace. It&#x27;s just a Git management software with payment. Please don&#x27;t create another Github.<p>2. No demo and no screenshots. You need to make a decision on your marketing focus: on sellers or on buyers.<p>FINANCIALS<p>Did not explain why the fees are 18%. What are the hidden costs that come with, since you offer X, Y, and Z services.

Is it just me? But I don&#x27;t believe git is really meant for delivering software or digital assets. 90% of buyers of books, software or digital media don&#x27;t need all versions from the beginning of time.<p>Isn&#x27;t this what &#x27;zsync&#x27; was made for?