Your machine has jammed, doesn't work in Firefox (macos). The words dropdown doesn't populate, nor does the style dropdown. I see a JSON.parse uncaught SyntaxError.
Thanks for the link, I loved reading it. When you spend all day building software with sometimes unclear and questionable purpose, the straightforward approach of "just" selling a produce when in season seems deeply appealing. Greener grass, I suppose.
I love your website, and thank you for your writeups. I was sad to see that many of the domains in your "getting started" page are not up and running. www.kobebeef.com being dead hit me hard :'( I feel oddly inspired, and my wife will probably be sending you hate mail in the near future :p
Why is it contrarian? Entrepreneurial spirit is well appreciated in popular culture even if most people don't have the ability to lose 10k without worries. Risk aversion might separate most people from entrepreneurs but it's not really a contrarian attitude, right? Maybe I've been interpreting the word wrong forever.
This is my parents and my in-laws. They will gladly tip a bartender $5 for pouring a beer but God forbid you suggest they spend $2 on a productivity app on the app store.
I run a free website with a monthly active user count in the 100k range. When something breaks - even if it's a really niche feature or a compatibility issue with an outdated browser - I get an army of furious users contacting me however they can. I can't imagine what would happen to me if the site completely broke or went down for more than a few hours.
You should be able to pay for upgrades and not hve to ply russin roulette where there's any chance that updating removes features and puts them back behind an eternal subscriber paywall.
I guess the idea is to not provide contacts and to explicitly claim this position in the user agreement. How much pissed they are may really depend on how much of it is allowed. Some can kick the machine, but in this case it will be their pc.
Before the inevitable victim blaming of “don’t do business with that platform/jurisdiction/whatever”, please remember to be empathetic and that not everyone has the same choices you do. I’m in no way defending this, just pointing out the state of affairs.
I'm trying to make an analogous product (native app) for learning vocabulary after Memrise shut it simple, flashcard app down.
One thing about the vending machine model is that the transaction is done. You don't require any continued interaction from the vendor to enjoy what you bought.
For that reason I made it:
- a native app so it didn't require a server once downloaded
- offline first, using WatermelonDb to sync with a server if available
- all data bundled, so my server doesn't need to exist when downloading
The intention is to make it at some point a one-time purchase. I'm trying to conceive it more like writing/distributing a book than a subscription app.
The hardest elements have actually been complying with the various app store requirements. Google Play now requires developers to have 20 users test your app for 14 days. I've been stuck with 4x 14 day cycles for the Catalan version with no specific feedback as to how to satisfy their desire that it has been sufficiently tested.
Interestingly with Google Play, if you want to make an up-front paid app, your testers must pay for the app too. If you make the app free, such that your testers can download it, you can't make it paid again afterwards. You can add in app purchases later, though.
If anyone wants to check it out, it's available for Spanish and Catalan for now:
https://learnthewords.app/
Mm, please see previous comments on dealing with the respective app stores.
In this case Apple have de-listed me from the various EU app stores while they verify my 'trader information' - the requirement to publish my name and home address on the app store, next to my app.
OP is in for a nasty surprise when they discover that the customers who complain the loudest are those that pay the least, and that it is difficult to turn a profit on a low-priced service due to the cost of acquiring customers.
Edit: And credit card fraud. A $5 price combined with a Stripe payment process is very attractive to people who want to test stolen credit card numbers.
OP addresses this directly, if you bothered to read the whole thing:
"The stakes should be low. Whatever you’re selling, it’s gotta be cheap. And if things go awry? No one’s going to launch a chargeback crusade. Just like a reliable vending machine, if it jams, it’ll return your coins."
I was commenting on the reality of his current site. He has a purchase form, where you purchase for $5, connected to Stripe.
In more detail:
A bad actor with a large quantity of stolen credit card info who finds this site (and eventually, someone always does) will use it to test whether each card works. Small-dollar-amount payment forms accessible without going through a sign-up-and-verify process attract these bad actors.
The point I was trying to make is that this won’t be the low-hassle, easy-to-run product that OP wants it to be.
Which sucks. It really does. The bad actors ruin this stuff.
(I write from the experience of running a pay-once B2C desktop app for 10 years and a B2B SaaS for 8 years.)
The stakes don't matter if you're testing credit card number. Just that the service tells you if it works or not. And low amounts are good, since you're not wasting the card's limit.
In New York, vending and videogame machines tend to be … ”connected,” … but maybe not the way you think.
I know someone that has made quite a bit of money, from vending machines, and he’s … um … “connected.” I generally don’t really deal with him too much. We run in different social circles.
Wiseguys like cash-heavy businesses. Maybe if they become cashless systems, that could change. I encounter vending machines that accept Apple Pay, fairly frequently, in more upscale venues.
I looked up alien stickers, and you can get 300 of them for $52. Assuming you sell them at 50 cents each and sell out in one month, that's a $98 profit. However, that depends on the cost of placing/location the vending machine.
Generally speaking, kagi is not an internet vending machine. You have an account, you get billed monthly or whatever. Very much a normal SaaS in that regard. But the privacy system they've come up with fits quite well with the internet vending machine idea. You put a token in, you get a search result out.
I think it's got a lot of upside if you're trying to get paid to make software that isn't trying to manipulate its users. I hope to do something similar one day.
The article is not about vending machines even if it seems so.
It's about low friction (you don't have to sign up, sign it and the process of buying is very simple) and selling cheap stuff so the customer is tempted to buy without having safeguards (an account, customer support).
The title gave me PTSD flashback to the snack machine at my library, which requires you to scan a QR code, interact with a React app, and do internet banking to access the snacks.
The problem is with our payments infrastructure there isn't a practical way to make a "machine" on the internet that accepts two quarters. OP's machine charges $5. The Stripe minimum charge is $0.50, and their fees on that charge would be almost $0.21.
My understanding is that you can do it on layer 2 networks like Lightning, though it suffers from the same limitations shared by all decentralized systems (e.g., depends on gaining widespread adoption and weakness from internetwork blockades).
Not to mention, even intelligent adults in Silicon Valley don't own cryptocurrency. Quite the opposite of a vending machine; Analogous to a vending machine in the US that only accepts Turkish Lira.
I get the point that this is trying to make but what a terrible analogy. Vending machines suck! There are few things in life more frustrating than a printer that is jammed or a vending machine that is stuck. I don't want a vending machine on the internet. I don't want to buy junk food from Costco marked up by 5x on the internet. I want the finest goods available to humanity at rock bottom prices.
How does the postcard logistics work? I.e. is there a platform that offers sub $5 drop shipping with three different templates and on demand print? Or is the author sending the postcards themselves?
Vending machine suggests automation, so the former; but I looked at some drop shipping options and couldn’t find anything like this.
Thank you! I tried listing all blog articles earlier and it didn’t work on mobile. I now see them on desktop but I checked only after I read your comment.
The platform for printing postcards looks cool but I’m from the EU and it sadly doesn’t work for EU addresses. I’ll search again I guess, maybe there’s something similar here too.
Exactly! A website that takes people's money and doesn't deliver a product or provide customer service is basically just committing fraud. Some vending machines do get away with fraud for a time. The place hosting someone else's machine (like a shop or a restaurant) will often get complaints from people who run into problems and those shops will often refund customers without notifying the vendor every time.
After enough complaints they might remove the machine from their property or compel the owner of the vending machine to maintain it, but the fact that some amount of fraud happens via vending machines isn't an ideal that we should try to replicate on the internet, especially not because it's easier for the people who make webpages.
"I didn't know I was ripping people off because I decided it would be easier if I never checked and also decided not to give any of the people I stole from a channel to tell me about it." won't hold up very well.
I also got some bad vibes from :
> The stakes should be low. Whatever you’re selling, it’s gotta be cheap. And if things go awry? No one’s going to launch a chargeback crusade
"I hoped that because I was taking such a small amount of money that nobody would bother to do anything about it" isn't a good look either.
The most pessimistic reading of this post is "why shouldn't I provide a service as shitty and fraudulent as lazy vending machine owners do only on a far more massive scale"
That said, I really do agree that people can over complicate things and there's a lot to be gained by not allowing account creation, not asking for more data than you absolutely need, and not keeping data around any longer than absolutely necessary. Just please don't think you can get away with not providing any customer service or not keeping an eye on things to make sure customers are getting what they pay for.
This is probably all just marketing/seo for the service used to send the post cards. I’ve never seen a vending machine that tells you the price they pay for the product by linking out to their providers. $0.82 per card and charging $5 for 3.
With a cute gimmick to hook customers and so cheap / low stakes that people will toss a few bucks into it for fun and not think too hard about it. It's like the chocolate bars and other items at the cashier of a supermarket, works entirely off of impulse purchases. The problem for OP is that they aren't physically in front of hundreds of potential customers wandering by. They're on the internet so they need to go viral like the bag of dicks guy or do stuff like blog about it and get posted places like hn.
I thought this was gonna be a story about that collegiate Coke machine from the 90s people could telnet into to see which rows were filled with what, the temperature, etc.
Matt Webb's Machine Supply (2015-2018) comes to mind, albeit a bit higher brow. A vending machine selling books & notebooks, that also tweeted it's activity. https://www.actsnotfacts.com/made/machine-supply
I’ve been buying piano sheet music and I’ve seen the two extremes:
1. You look at a preview, buy it, get a PDF emailed to you. No account needed.
2. You look at a preview, you make an account, you buy, you get told your browser isn’t supported. You get told a PDF costs extra. You get told you can only try to print it once so be careful. You get told you have 24 hours to complete this.
As a developer the second one was incredibly offensive. As if business types who do not comprehend technology beyond smacking rocks together thought they actually could lock down and police consumption of the sheet music. I printed to PDF and then never came back.
I appreciate the article but if what the writer linked would not send one of the cards or even multiple I would chargeback, not on a crusade type thing but if you don’t deliver the service you promised it’s not a weird thing to do.
Also I’ve seen some people go mad over a vending machine taking their money and not spitting anything out, over the principle of it.
Just depends on the person and how they see vending machines.
This is the entire idea behind the iPhone. It is a vending machine in your pocket, that you paid for.
Your machine has jammed, doesn't work in Firefox (macos). The words dropdown doesn't populate, nor does the style dropdown. I see a JSON.parse uncaught SyntaxError.
Hey man he's out drinking free beer with his buddies, not losing sleep when the machine jams.
(Paraphrasing TFA for anyone confused)
It's not just Firefox, and it's because https://threekindwords.com/words.json is not json.
But you didn't even lose two quarters. Shrug and move on.
Rock on man. The contrarian attitude reminds me of the “I Sell Onions on the Internet” guy
https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-inter...
Thanks for the link, I loved reading it. When you spend all day building software with sometimes unclear and questionable purpose, the straightforward approach of "just" selling a produce when in season seems deeply appealing. Greener grass, I suppose.
ha, onionman here : ) I also wrote an essay similar to this vending machine analogy... simple minds think alike I guess https://www.deepsouthventures.com/building-things-that-do-ju...
I love your website, and thank you for your writeups. I was sad to see that many of the domains in your "getting started" page are not up and running. www.kobebeef.com being dead hit me hard :'( I feel oddly inspired, and my wife will probably be sending you hate mail in the near future :p
Why is it contrarian? Entrepreneurial spirit is well appreciated in popular culture even if most people don't have the ability to lose 10k without worries. Risk aversion might separate most people from entrepreneurs but it's not really a contrarian attitude, right? Maybe I've been interpreting the word wrong forever.
Would it be less contrarian if it was apples?
> The machine was jammed. It wasn’t a big deal. I shrugged and moved on to buy my groceries.
I resonate with the sentiment, but this is very far from my experience selling cheap software products.
I had multiple people reach out to me because a software upgrade they paid $2 for 8 years ago stopped working. And they were, like, pissed about it.
This is my parents and my in-laws. They will gladly tip a bartender $5 for pouring a beer but God forbid you suggest they spend $2 on a productivity app on the app store.
I run a free website with a monthly active user count in the 100k range. When something breaks - even if it's a really niche feature or a compatibility issue with an outdated browser - I get an army of furious users contacting me however they can. I can't imagine what would happen to me if the site completely broke or went down for more than a few hours.
Probably because while they paid $2 for it, it was worth far more than $2 to them.
You can choose not to engage. What are they going to do, fire you?
That sucks, but with the stakes as low as $2, I'd happily give the money back and move on.
if someone relies on an upgrade for 8 years, $2 is not enough!
You should be able to pay for upgrades and not hve to ply russin roulette where there's any chance that updating removes features and puts them back behind an eternal subscriber paywall.
I guess the idea is to not provide contacts and to explicitly claim this position in the user agreement. How much pissed they are may really depend on how much of it is allowed. Some can kick the machine, but in this case it will be their pc.
> I guess the idea is to not provide contacts and to explicitly claim this position in the user agreement.
Unfortunately, that is becoming increasingly harder.
https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-co...
Before the inevitable victim blaming of “don’t do business with that platform/jurisdiction/whatever”, please remember to be empathetic and that not everyone has the same choices you do. I’m in no way defending this, just pointing out the state of affairs.
I'm trying to make an analogous product (native app) for learning vocabulary after Memrise shut it simple, flashcard app down.
One thing about the vending machine model is that the transaction is done. You don't require any continued interaction from the vendor to enjoy what you bought.
For that reason I made it:
The intention is to make it at some point a one-time purchase. I'm trying to conceive it more like writing/distributing a book than a subscription app.The hardest elements have actually been complying with the various app store requirements. Google Play now requires developers to have 20 users test your app for 14 days. I've been stuck with 4x 14 day cycles for the Catalan version with no specific feedback as to how to satisfy their desire that it has been sufficiently tested.
Interestingly with Google Play, if you want to make an up-front paid app, your testers must pay for the app too. If you make the app free, such that your testers can download it, you can't make it paid again afterwards. You can add in app purchases later, though.
If anyone wants to check it out, it's available for Spanish and Catalan for now: https://learnthewords.app/
Seems the App Store link isn’t working for me (in Spain). Would love to give it a try!
Mm, please see previous comments on dealing with the respective app stores.
In this case Apple have de-listed me from the various EU app stores while they verify my 'trader information' - the requirement to publish my name and home address on the app store, next to my app.
This vending machine seems jammed indeed on iphone. The select boxes are empty. All three cards show ”whats” as the word.
It's because the browser tries to fetch `/words.json` but that isn't JSON, it's the homepage.
Same on Firefox Desktop. The business didn't lose a customer though as I suppose it's US only anyway?
shrug oh well
Same on Android. Cute idea tho.
Hey is the blogpost reloading every second (on mobile safari)?
Yes, mobile (chrome)
Yes (mobile Firefox)
For me it is indeed
OP is in for a nasty surprise when they discover that the customers who complain the loudest are those that pay the least, and that it is difficult to turn a profit on a low-priced service due to the cost of acquiring customers.
Edit: And credit card fraud. A $5 price combined with a Stripe payment process is very attractive to people who want to test stolen credit card numbers.
OP addresses this directly, if you bothered to read the whole thing:
"The stakes should be low. Whatever you’re selling, it’s gotta be cheap. And if things go awry? No one’s going to launch a chargeback crusade. Just like a reliable vending machine, if it jams, it’ll return your coins."
I read it all. No need for snark.
Not sure which one of my points you are refuting with that quote.
If you introduce a process susceptible to credit card fraud then you're not keeping it low stakes.
I see.
I was commenting on the reality of his current site. He has a purchase form, where you purchase for $5, connected to Stripe.
In more detail:
A bad actor with a large quantity of stolen credit card info who finds this site (and eventually, someone always does) will use it to test whether each card works. Small-dollar-amount payment forms accessible without going through a sign-up-and-verify process attract these bad actors.
The point I was trying to make is that this won’t be the low-hassle, easy-to-run product that OP wants it to be.
Which sucks. It really does. The bad actors ruin this stuff.
(I write from the experience of running a pay-once B2C desktop app for 10 years and a B2B SaaS for 8 years.)
> test stolen credit card numbers
The stakes don't matter if you're testing credit card number. Just that the service tells you if it works or not. And low amounts are good, since you're not wasting the card's limit.
In New York, vending and videogame machines tend to be … ”connected,” … but maybe not the way you think.
I know someone that has made quite a bit of money, from vending machines, and he’s … um … “connected.” I generally don’t really deal with him too much. We run in different social circles.
Wiseguys like cash-heavy businesses. Maybe if they become cashless systems, that could change. I encounter vending machines that accept Apple Pay, fairly frequently, in more upscale venues.
I looked up alien stickers, and you can get 300 of them for $52. Assuming you sell them at 50 cents each and sell out in one month, that's a $98 profit. However, that depends on the cost of placing/location the vending machine.
I'm reminded of Kagi's privacy pass model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43040521
Generally speaking, kagi is not an internet vending machine. You have an account, you get billed monthly or whatever. Very much a normal SaaS in that regard. But the privacy system they've come up with fits quite well with the internet vending machine idea. You put a token in, you get a search result out.
I think it's got a lot of upside if you're trying to get paid to make software that isn't trying to manipulate its users. I hope to do something similar one day.
The article is not about vending machines even if it seems so.
It's about low friction (you don't have to sign up, sign it and the process of buying is very simple) and selling cheap stuff so the customer is tempted to buy without having safeguards (an account, customer support).
The title gave me PTSD flashback to the snack machine at my library, which requires you to scan a QR code, interact with a React app, and do internet banking to access the snacks.
I’d just bring my own snacks at that point
This is the analogy used in the first description of a smart contract in 1997
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/the-idea-of-smart-cont...
The problem is with our payments infrastructure there isn't a practical way to make a "machine" on the internet that accepts two quarters. OP's machine charges $5. The Stripe minimum charge is $0.50, and their fees on that charge would be almost $0.21.
How does that $0.21 compare to the cost of maintaining the coin machine on a vending machine and sending someone to collect the cash?
The difference between fixed and marginal costs applies here.
The costs you mention are essentially fixed costs. The marginal cost of a sale is then zero (ignoring the cost of the item itself).
With Stripe the marginal cost is 21c or 42%. You can increase sales ad infinitum and Stripe will still take 42%...
My understanding is that you can do it on layer 2 networks like Lightning, though it suffers from the same limitations shared by all decentralized systems (e.g., depends on gaining widespread adoption and weakness from internetwork blockades).
Not to mention, even intelligent adults in Silicon Valley don't own cryptocurrency. Quite the opposite of a vending machine; Analogous to a vending machine in the US that only accepts Turkish Lira.
I get the point that this is trying to make but what a terrible analogy. Vending machines suck! There are few things in life more frustrating than a printer that is jammed or a vending machine that is stuck. I don't want a vending machine on the internet. I don't want to buy junk food from Costco marked up by 5x on the internet. I want the finest goods available to humanity at rock bottom prices.
That was an interesting read, thanks for sharing!
How does the postcard logistics work? I.e. is there a platform that offers sub $5 drop shipping with three different templates and on demand print? Or is the author sending the postcards themselves?
Vending machine suggests automation, so the former; but I looked at some drop shipping options and couldn’t find anything like this.
there's a post about it here https://threekindwords.com/blog/building-a-postcard-vending-...
Thank you! I tried listing all blog articles earlier and it didn’t work on mobile. I now see them on desktop but I checked only after I read your comment.
The platform for printing postcards looks cool but I’m from the EU and it sadly doesn’t work for EU addresses. I’ll search again I guess, maybe there’s something similar here too.
The title of the post reminded me of a certain, famous, coffee pot!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
so this "vending machine" is a postcard drop shipping website?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vending%20machine
vending machine noun : a coin-operated machine for selling merchandise
Coin is currency. This website sells merchandise. If they wanna call it a vending machine, then why not?
Either way, silly hill to die on. The post does explore our understanding of a vending no machine and maybe how we may approach online versions.
Perhaps I disagree on the following:
> There’s no customer support, chatbot, or extensive documentation.
I've seen many vending machines with customer support channels. If the machine takes the money but merchandise is not delivered, people will complain.
Exactly! A website that takes people's money and doesn't deliver a product or provide customer service is basically just committing fraud. Some vending machines do get away with fraud for a time. The place hosting someone else's machine (like a shop or a restaurant) will often get complaints from people who run into problems and those shops will often refund customers without notifying the vendor every time.
After enough complaints they might remove the machine from their property or compel the owner of the vending machine to maintain it, but the fact that some amount of fraud happens via vending machines isn't an ideal that we should try to replicate on the internet, especially not because it's easier for the people who make webpages.
"I didn't know I was ripping people off because I decided it would be easier if I never checked and also decided not to give any of the people I stole from a channel to tell me about it." won't hold up very well.
I also got some bad vibes from :
> The stakes should be low. Whatever you’re selling, it’s gotta be cheap. And if things go awry? No one’s going to launch a chargeback crusade
"I hoped that because I was taking such a small amount of money that nobody would bother to do anything about it" isn't a good look either.
The most pessimistic reading of this post is "why shouldn't I provide a service as shitty and fraudulent as lazy vending machine owners do only on a far more massive scale"
That said, I really do agree that people can over complicate things and there's a lot to be gained by not allowing account creation, not asking for more data than you absolutely need, and not keeping data around any longer than absolutely necessary. Just please don't think you can get away with not providing any customer service or not keeping an eye on things to make sure customers are getting what they pay for.
This is probably all just marketing/seo for the service used to send the post cards. I’ve never seen a vending machine that tells you the price they pay for the product by linking out to their providers. $0.82 per card and charging $5 for 3.
With a cute gimmick to hook customers and so cheap / low stakes that people will toss a few bucks into it for fun and not think too hard about it. It's like the chocolate bars and other items at the cashier of a supermarket, works entirely off of impulse purchases. The problem for OP is that they aren't physically in front of hundreds of potential customers wandering by. They're on the internet so they need to go viral like the bag of dicks guy or do stuff like blog about it and get posted places like hn.
Sell courses, ebooks etc. online and use one of the many easy to use payment systems for that kind of thing. That is vending machine like.
I thought this was gonna be a story about that collegiate Coke machine from the 90s people could telnet into to see which rows were filled with what, the temperature, etc.
Big Drink got me through many long nights. I miss it.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/csh-coke-machine-info/
https://github.blog/news-insights/the-internet-coke-machine-...
Looks like it got the Rust treatment a few years ago: https://github.com/ComputerScienceHouse/bubbler
/dev/drink
Matt Webb's Machine Supply (2015-2018) comes to mind, albeit a bit higher brow. A vending machine selling books & notebooks, that also tweeted it's activity. https://www.actsnotfacts.com/made/machine-supply
I’ve been buying piano sheet music and I’ve seen the two extremes:
1. You look at a preview, buy it, get a PDF emailed to you. No account needed.
2. You look at a preview, you make an account, you buy, you get told your browser isn’t supported. You get told a PDF costs extra. You get told you can only try to print it once so be careful. You get told you have 24 hours to complete this.
As a developer the second one was incredibly offensive. As if business types who do not comprehend technology beyond smacking rocks together thought they actually could lock down and police consumption of the sheet music. I printed to PDF and then never came back.
I appreciate the article but if what the writer linked would not send one of the cards or even multiple I would chargeback, not on a crusade type thing but if you don’t deliver the service you promised it’s not a weird thing to do.
Also I’ve seen some people go mad over a vending machine taking their money and not spitting anything out, over the principle of it.
Just depends on the person and how they see vending machines.