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Creator of the page over here.

Woke up to a really nice surprise here, especially having made this page two months ago. Submitting it to HN wasn't my plan; someone else randomly found the page and did that. Yes, indeed, it's Kout.me...if you care more, here's a short description:

Kout is a dead-simple eCommerce platform that enables anyone, anywhere to be a merchant across any platform with ease, elegance and simplicity. We make it fast & easy to both sell items and collect money online and do this by generating a simple one-page checkout that corresponds to a unique URL. We're also doing really cool things with dynamic pricing, payments, as well as social & mobile commerce.

Ah. I love HN.

I'd like to ask a few questions, if you don't mind:

1. why don't you mention kout.me on the page?

2. how does your product differ from every payment processor that already provides a link for a single product checkout?

hope your stunt goes ok :)

I'm not sure why I veiled it a bit. I suppose it doesn't matter now and I made this some time back...

We're not a payments processor. What we are is very simple selling (payments included; part of the simplicity) that enables you to sell across any number of different platforms, like Facebook, WordPress blogs, Twitter, Craigslist (with checkout implementation), emails, etc etc. The only reason we deal with payments is that it's a crappy experience for the end-user to handle payment gateways and merchant accounts on their own. We get you up and running in seconds/minutes, not hours/weeks. There's not a lot of ways to sell cross-platform with ease, elegance and simplicity.

Does that make sense?

1. Didn't really want to mention the product on the page.

2. We merge in the ecommerce platform with the payment processor. We really just process payments so we can control the whole experience, but if you have your own gateway you can just plug the api keys in. Most ecommerce platforms require you to go signup with a 3rd party payment gateway, and the quick hack for most people is to go with paypal.

Our focus is really on the ecommerce side. eJunkies lame. 1shoppingcart's lame. Yeah a few others have poped up this year (quixly & gumroad) they just really validate the need. If you don't need a fully fledged frontend store your options are pretty limited.

I think someone tweeted about your page (not you). I thought, "aha cool", so went ahead and submitted to HN. :-)
did you get your meeting?
Haven't yet been contacted by CrunchFund. I'll update all this later with a blog post summarizing what happened.

Crazy traffic and a nice collection of emails so far.

It's msg from http://www.kout.me/

(found it in css image link to www.ihany.com which is about kout.me, main image is also from kout :)

And you signed up just to post that. Mmmkay.
That's right.
I think it's a clever and bold move that fits the target demographic of Michael Arrington. :)

If it weren't Arrington, I might find it a little skeezy, but .vc domains aren't that desirable anyway.

Original founder here, took the prototype of Kout from a dorm room in the UK to SF in about 3 months (Stereotypical dropping out start up story) - so im emotionally inclined to defend product related posts ha.

Anyway.

Just wanted to cover a few points people have mentioned...

---

We merge in the ecommerce platform with the payment processor. We really just process payments so we can control the whole experience, but if you have your own gateway you can just plug the api keys in. Most ecommerce platforms require you to go signup with a 3rd party payment gateway, and the quick hack for most people is to go with paypal.

Our focus is really on the ecommerce side. eJunkies lame. 1shoppingcart's lame. Yeah a few others have poped up this year (quixly & gumroad) they just really validate the need. If you don't need a fully fledged frontend store your options are pretty limited.

We're not targeting big head merchants (shopify style merchants). We're targeting micro merchants, the long tail of ecommerce; think the blogger who's still using ejunkie and paypal to sell online, or the kickstarter style sellers who just have one product and need a quick simple way to sell it. www.mmfixed.com - is a prime example for a merchant we are targeting.

That's pretty much the current MVP. We've been live with around 200 merchants for just over a month, and we've processed a few k, again in the first month. We have a couple thousand on a waiting list, but waiting lists never convert at 100% :(.

And yeah. This is just initial build (mvp), our "linked based selling" app wont disrupt the industry, but what we want to build and our vision will... Well, it gets us up in the morning, which is the important thing, so we'll see how everything plays out.

shoot any questions or whatever to devan [at] kout.me

D.

Don't feel like you have to defend your product to anyone.

At this stage, it doesn't matter how similar or different you are from competitors, outside of the effect it will have on real customers. There's plenty of room for more e-commerce platforms and I'm sure you'll make money.

Good luck!

Thanks! Just really wanted to add a bit context.
While I won't comment on the product or company, the pitch was very well played. For a few hours (tops!) of effort they can guarantee a famous VC will look at them. Crunchbase should graciously take the meeting. Even if they don't, they will look at the product. Very good PR move. If they don't bite, then blame the product. :-)

Edited to fix a typo.

A different kind of domain squatting.
Yeah.

Product aside, I'll give the guy credit for an innovative pitch mechanism. That said, I can't help but detect a bit of sleaziness there.

It just makes my day when i see something this out-of-the-box. PG must be so proud ! Talk about hacking a non-computer system in style !
"An e-commerce version of Square." So, Square. Or Square in a year from now.
What square does is make merchant services much better for brick & mortar. They might move online, but I doubt they would defocus within a year. The underserved offline market is too big
Square's going after a trillion dollar industry, ecommerce is a drop in the bucket.
I like that this isn't just an attention grab. You have already been validated by another group.. so getting a call from Arrington's crew is almost guaranteed, me thinks

Nicely done!

Thanks :)
It's a creative way to get their attention, no question about that.

The business idea is in a highly competitive space, with some businesses that have been around for over a decade. (pg co-founded one of them in 1995.)

That said, it might be workable if they specialize in making e-commerce sites for a specific under-served niche with specialized needs?

I see a new trend in naming web services:

chipmunk --> hipmunk

checkout --> kout

An even nerdier bonus of the name, our one-page checkout urls: https://chec.kout.me/DHjPci
That page has some bugs/usability issues:

- Labels below the input are going to be a mess. I made the same mistake because I copied wufoo, but moving them to the top cut the time to fill out the form, and the number of errors significantly. Just trust me on this one.

- County/State/Province should be State/Province. (County and country look the same, and only the UK uses county in shopping carts, but it is unnecessary.)

- I am getting a mixed content warning: I see a <img src="/">, which loads https://chec.kout.me/ which redirects to http://kout.me/ which causes the mixed content warning". You need to fix the code so when there is no flag, it loads something like "blank.gif" through https.

- The credit card expiry year is way too long. I think the official limit is 4 years, but double check that.

- the security code question mark doesn't seem to do anything and you should be aware that the code is on the front of Amex cards, though pretty much everyone knows by now.

Hope that is useful.

Ah, that's cool! I kept mixing your name up with Klout for some reason, but this full checkout URL is awesome.
"it might be workable if they specialize in making e-commerce sites for a specific under-served niche with specialized needs?"

It's silly to assume that it's competitive therefore they have to carve a totally unique niche to win. There is always room for innovators and competitors if they can execute a good product.

New e-commerce platforms appear all the time and build profitable businesses.

Perhaps it's just me, but this story has disappeared and doesn't show up at all any more. Was it removed from HN for some reason?
I don't understand why either.
This. Is. Brilliant.
Except for the fact that Mike is no longer a part of TechCrunch or CrunchFund.
How would you say your service differs from Stripe? I love Stripe, so I'm always closed minded when it comes to competitors. Hit me!
Stripe's beautiful.

I covered it in a comment above. We're an ecommerce platform for micro merchants, we just handle payments (for those who want us to) so we can provide a seamless experience.

Here's the reply.

"We merge in the ecommerce platform with the payment processor. We really just process payments so we can control the whole experience, but if you have your own gateway you can just plug the api keys in. Most ecommerce platforms require you to go signup with a 3rd party payment gateway, and the quick hack for most people is to go with paypal. Our focus is really on the ecommerce side. eJunkies lame. 1shoppingcart's lame. Yeah a few others have poped up this year (quixly & gumroad) they just really validate the need. If you don't need a fully fledged frontend store your options are pretty limited."

You're re-defining eCommerce? Sure.
Strangely, the screenshots shown look pretty much the same as anything else.
Impressively un-called for remark. I don't know the man, nor do I know much about kout (hence his private beta), but give the man a chance to make a difference in the space.
Raising money is not doing a lot, creating usable products is. Why don't you explain exactly what makes your ecommerce offerings so different? Ecommerce is incredibly complex and getting more complex with new changing tax laws, shipping calculations, plus schema.org integrations for accommodating the massively wide type of products that are sold online.
It is missing the point rather impressively to comment on this fellow's product. It is the clever pitch that makes this front page worthy.
It's an underwhelming landing page. I agree.

Our vision and what we want to do over the next few years is what wakes us up in the morning.

props to the stunt. that's a never-seen-before way to grab attention :) hope you get funded by crunchfund.
Arrington once ran Pool.com

He'll just let the domain drop

Brilliant!
so you invented a shopping cart. Why the fuck are you not funded!
Much more to it than that, it's a pretty old landing page.

Most of our beta testers agree.

Pretty snarky comment, what have you invented?