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.

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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!