The end of 2011 is in sight and it was a year we’ll never forget.

A couple of the highlights:

- Tinypay.me grew by 3750%
- We got funded (woohoo!)
- Moved from the Netherlands to San Francisco
- Added some of the best people to our team

All of these highlights and the heartwarming support certainly make up for the hard work and long hours At this moment we’re still working hard to ensure the upcoming features will be mind-blowing. Trust us, the best is most definitely still to come!

We’d like to take this moment to share our gratitude towards all the support we’ve had in the last year. Thank you!

We wish you all a very merry Christmass, a rocking NY’s eve and an inspiring 2012.

- The Tinypay.me Team

The amount of creative, great, funny, provocative, useful, expensive, cheap, weird items on Tinypay really surprises me every time I stumble upon them. We have had some great examples like the Men’s Humor Card or Red Hook Noodles’ Collection of hiphop beats. Also, somebody actually put their house up for sale! Or how about this limited edition Porsche GT3? Now that we’re on the subject, me and my co-founders had to leave our museum piece back home when we moved out to the US.

Anyway, my latest discovery was from a creative fellow called Matthew McCray – he has put up his own collection of comics here. It’s always great to see artists like Matthew using the Internet in a way that we can all benefit from his creative outbursts. In fact, our very dear friend Christian Mirra has been illustrating the Tinypay Robot (which you’ll occasionally see guiding you through our service) and created the very famous Tinypay comic, explaining our service in a humorous way. Like Christian’s, Matthew’s comics are a great laugh and the price to pay is really nothing compared to the fun you’ll have going through them. I respect the amount of work and dedication Matthew has put into his work and encourage everyone to support guys like him by using the “buy now” button in the right corner

E-mail remains an excellent method for communicating online and our platform sends out many of them on a daily basis. As you know we’re all about simple, clean and functional design. With that spirit in mind we designed a new look.

Here’s an example of the new purchase e-mail:

This is the e-mail buyers receive after purchasing a digital file.

In order to reflect the improvements we invite you to take a look at the previous e-mail format below. Continue Reading »

We’d like to take a moment to remember a hero of our industry and someone who has influenced our lives on a personal level. Thank you Steve for being the greatest source of inspiration for many (young and upcoming) entrepreneurs out there and that includes ourselves.

Rest in peace. Continue Reading »

We’d like to inform you about the improvements we’ve made in the last couple of weeks.

Easier download for digital purchases
We’ve made it easier for your customers to download digital items. After their purchase they will immediately be forwarded to a download page. 

In addition to that they can now always go back and download their digital purchases by logging in with their PayPal credentials.

From now on your customers can always get an overview of the files they bought and can easily download them again.

Continue Reading »

Getting good people to work for your company can be hard, especially if you’re a startup in Silicon Valley looking for developers. If you are not Google or Facebook, or even one of the well funded startups with 10 or so million in the bank it can be pretty challenging to compete on the job market. It’s the startup paradigm: you are on a tight budget but looking for the best possible people out there and then again, you are on a tight budget; you cannot just buy your way into getting the people you would like most to be on your team. Tinypay is just the 3rd company I’ve founded so I do not have the experience of recruiting and managing a great number of employees but there’s some things that I’ve learned over the past time that I would like to share here with the rest of you fellow entreprenerds.

1. Get people from elsewhere

This is especially true from what I’ve experienced after being 3 months in the Valley. It’s very hard to find good developers with experience here since most of them are either captured by Google or have a startup of their own. The industry here is growing like cabbage and every day people from all over the country, and even world, arrive here seeking for their fortune. This provides lots of opportunities since most of the newcomers are indeed looking for jobs. Also nowadays getting in touch with developers from all over the world through internet is a no brainer for tech entrepreneurs. Our #1 employee at one day just packed his bags and came to Silicon Valley out of the blue, just a week before we hired him.

2. Spread the word

I’ve seen developers looking for exciting new jobs, crawling from one hackathon to another to meet that one interesting company they would love to work for. Visiting, or sponsoring hackatons is a great way to get in touch with a lot of talented people. It may not get you your future employee right away but it will definitely allow you to leave your mark on the developer community and connect you with lots of developers at once.

3. Use (paid), quality, online jobboards

Which brings me to the next point: actively spreading job postings, also on paid websites, actually works. Utilizing the power of the internet has never been as rewarding as it is now, being able to get in touch with developers on their ‘home turf’. It really pays off to look for specialty websites and communities to post your job openings. Looking for the best developers, don’t bother to post on mainstream sites like Monster. Instead, try the thousands of speciality websites and developer communities like Stackoverflow, Github and Smashingmagazine. It will cost you around $200-300 per listing, but is definitely worth the buck. For just over $1,000 you can easily get 3-5 listings which are definitely worth the investment since you reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions of developers from all around the world. Needless to say, match the site you’re posting on with the actual job requirement, don’t look for Designers on a back-end development oriented community like Stackoverflow.

4. Try to avoid recruiters

There is good ones out there, for example our experience with a company called Jobspring was very good. Nonetheless recruiters in general are pretty expensive, especially now that the market is all gone crazy they are very aware of their necessity and therefore charge you the full premium. If you do decide to go with a recruiter always negotiate about the terms and fees. That could easily save you 2-5% off the regular fee. In general, recruiters charge something from 15% to 25% of the annual salary of the employee. So definitely keep that in mind before talking to them. And I can assure you that, probably sooner than later, you will. Because as soon as you put the word out that you are looking for people, they will come for you like flies attracted to… well.. point made

5. Be yourself, stand out

Probably the most important thing: keep it real, be yourself and be proud of it. Don’t try to impress your future employees with stuff that’s not you, instead strike them with your uniqueness and explain in your own words why your startup is so special and why they should come work for you.

Heya! As you can see we have some exciting stuff today! And I’m not just talking about lovely Laura of Rocketspace (who’s been a huge fan of our schwag!),  but thanks to the wonderful designs of our talented comic artist Christian Mirra and the fashionable craftsmanship of Gemma Rose from Design Like Whoa, we have really, really cool t-shirts now! The designs are inspired by the beautiful Tinypay comic made earlier this year and it was quite challenging to get the lead character from the comic to pose. Yet after bribing him with some old scrap metal we’ve managed to get him to pose once more for us! … And, we think the end result is truly fantastic! We love our new T-shirts so much that we will be wearing them every day from now on

Since we ordered a whole bunch of tees we thought it would be a great idea to share them with all of you guys. Now listen carefully, there’s only two ways to obtain one. The first is to attend the TC Disrupt hackaton and use our API to create something cool (or attend any other hackatons we’ll be sponsoring in the future). The other is to just visit our merchandise store on Tinypay and get one there!

It’s hackathon time again, and this time you should join us at one of the biggest hackathons of this year: Disrupt SF Hackathon!

We’re sponsoring this event with our own simple E-commerce API which makes it easy for you to add e-commerce functionality to your website or application. You start within minutes by just downloading the client libraries for PHP, Obj-C (iOS!), Java (Android!), Ruby (Rails!) or Python (AppEngine!).

Just some cool ideas that you can create with our API: Facebook app (social marketplace), iPhone app (take a pic and sell it), sell digital stuff (ebooks, 3d models, music, Flickr photos) or connect our API with another API (hook up with some barcode database to prefill the items). We’re going to be there to help you with your ideas.

And like last time, we will participate in hacking ourselves as well and try to make something cool again within just 2 days. The last time we did this, we got covered on TechCrunch for Groupchat.tv, so yes, we’ve got a lot of pressure to perform even better this time.

Don’t forget to register here, to make sure you’re in!

This is what our homepage looked like, a year ago

Tinypay.me is something that started out a year ago as a tiny but exciting idea. The initial idea was just to make it very easy to sell something online. And so we’ve started working on it during the nights and weekends, while working on our regular daytime jobs. After 2 months of developing, we’ve just launched it – without preparing any business or marketing plans – and decided to see if people would like the service. And they did, within weeks, we were covered by media all over the world. After seeing all these positive responses, we’ve decided to move forward with this project and build it out to be something ever better and easier – while always keeping our initial goal of simplicity in mind.

Today, we’ve reached a major milestone in the history of our young company. We’re very excited to announce that we’ve just raised $ 1 million from Aksoy Internet Ventures (AIV) in order to achieve our dream of changing the world of e-commerce. AIV is the major driver behind the success story of Sahibinden.com, with 20 million users the second largest classifieds site in Europe. While we’ve been approached by several known American and European investors during last year the experience, enthusiasm and drive of this Turkish investor really stood out and we’re convinced that with their help, we can really put a dent in the e-commerce universe.

Taner Aksoy, the chairman of the investment group, also had some nice things to say about us:  “We are proud to support Tinypay.me with our vision and experience as well as funding and we are very excited being part of this game changing team in e-commerce. We are certain that Tinypay.me will be a big hit globally”. Aksoy Internet Ventures actively seeks out and makes early stage investment in promising Internet companies regionally and globally.

With already thousands of enthusiastic sellers on our platform, Tinypay.me has become a very cool place to put something up for sale but we’ve got more in store than just being the easiest way to sell. We’ve been working for the last months on a couple of exciting new features and we will announce them very soon. In fact, we’re working on such an amount of cool new stuff, that we’d really could use some help from good and excited developers who are willing to work with us. So, if you’re interested in changing the world, you should definitely check out our job listings.

Of course, we’re going to celebrate this big news by throwing a big party in San Francisco this Saturday with our friends from Rootmusic and Fighter. So if you want to come party with us, reach out and we’ll send you an invite. Or, if you’re more into drinking beer with a lot of cool friends, we’re also sponsoring some beer and pizza next Thursday at our cool new office at Rocketspace.

We thank all of our users for their support and look forward to a bright future!

Melvin, Richard and Valentin - The Tinypay Team

A lot of times you want to show more of your product than just a picture or YouTube video. Sometimes you want to add a preview of your e-book or MP3 file. Right now, we’ve just made it possible to do this by partnering up with Embed.ly, a service that’s specialised in these kinds of things.

The only thing you need to do now is just copy-paste the URL of something on your favorite service and include it in your item!

Here are some examples of what you could do:

Use SoundCloud to let people listen to a sample of your music before they buy the full version

Continue Reading »