Monetize Your Google Drive! - Idea Validation
Hi Indie Hackers 👋
Would love to get your thoughts on our early-stage idea, Vendle. Vendle is a platform that enables anyone to monetize their google drive with ease.
Simply point to your google drive folder, set a price (either a subscription or a one-time purchase), and we'll do the rest. The idea is that Vendle will accept payments, manage subscriptions and deliver folder access to your users.
Simple use-cases include:
- Helping aspiring indie-hackers sell data to validate their ideas
- Helping the average person sell bits and pieces of data (e.g. student selling study notes, musician selling sheet music, or stock trader selling their daily notes sheet)
- Helping businesses facilitate the sale of data to one another
We're still working to narrow down our initial target market, so any thoughts or comments here would be awesome.
Many thanks from @jringer & @iamchris ❤️
You can check us out at vendle.co 🌏
Hey Chris, cool idea! We're doing something similar now at Fast.io but we're abstracting it a little more from Google Drive by syncing the data to CDN-ified URL where we control access instead. https://tlangridge.imfast.io is a folder in my Google Drive, actually, for example.
Hey Tom, thanks for reaching out!. I like the concept behind Fast.io although, It's a bit different from our goals. But it has me thinking about the ways in which our products could work together.
Drop me a line anytime :) In the meantime, best of luck with the new product!
I like the idea of this. There is so much that could potentially be added within a Google Drive and the idea that we can just update it is quite cool.
As part of my newsletter I provide access to a private Notion, it's a similar concept. Though I manage the access manually.
Thanks so much Rosie! Newsletters are a use-case that we hadn't thought of. Can I ask what you like about managing it all yourself as opposed to a service like substack?
I have a Substack with paid subscribers. The Notion resource is an extra add on.
Ah ok interesting.
Sounds interesting! As a person who takes a lot of notes and has considered selling access, there's on piece of resitance in my mind, namely:
Why would I want to sell the Google Drive, instead of taking a bit of time to package the notes/data up into a format that drives more conversions?
A potential solution here is to give simple sales pages templates to users of Vendle.
Hope that helps!
I think that I can use PayPal or any other subscription service to handle such case.
As long he is paying he gets access to the url.
When he is canceling the subscription the access is been removed automatically or an email is sent to the owner to remind him to remove the user manually
What is your added value?
Thanks for your reply! But yeah the value lies in the automation. As it can't be done easily with any of the existing payment services. Say, for someone who has a thousand users and maybe a couple of products, it quickly becomes difficult to manage manually.
I've been selling access to files on Google Drive for several years now.
I couldn't find solutions to automate the process. I like where you're headed!
that's awesome. thanks tony!
Not sure I understand. Is your platform intended for selling access to digital content hosted on the publisher's storage space in Google Drive?
Hey Paolo, yeah it's being designed for users to monetize the data in their google drive.
It's an interesting concept, a low-friction way of monetizing stored content or a tool for quickly putting together a MVP.
This is a nice idea @iamchris. Interested to see how you build this out!
Thanks Gordon! The idea was all @jringer
Nice idea.
Something like this?
Sketchapdata.com
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Hey anikilic, thanks for the feedback!
But yeah, that point was trying to say that indie hackers could use it as a tool to quickly setup shop for some data they have, and see what customers are willing to pay. Before building a website for their business e.c.t. The target being indie hackers who are building products that are centered around some core data. Like a visalist for example.
Yeah you are right though, we are still figuring out if we can find the right market for this. Some of the advantages of this approach are:
⁃Integrated with google apps (google sheets, google docs, http://draw.io, etc.)
⁃You already know google drive, and your data may already be there (easier and more painless onboarding).
⁃We can be cheaper because we have less operating costs (don’t even host data)
But that’s a really interesting point about reach and access in some countries. Something we really hadn’t considered. Thanks so much for that insight. And thanks for taking your time to comment🙂