You can check out the finished (alpha) version of the product here: http://hawtcakes.com/
My co-founder and I worked on it from 10am to 3am on Saturday, 1pm to 3am on Sunday, and a little more this morning. It doesn't look quite as nice as Gumroad, but we can pretty it up later :)
Here's an example of a file you can buy/download with Hawt Cakes: http://hawtcakes.com/rfPFsN4q9
What do you thinks think? We're particularly interested in your thoughts on the payment experience :)
I would guess the $10 minimum is a way to "hide" or "bundle" these tiny transactions that you can't efficiently handle through the existing credit card/banking system.
More generally, I guess the whole Minno business model/insight is to aggregate these kinds of small transactions that can't efficiently be handled by the existing financial system. (Minno is the payment service underlying Hawt Cakes.) This is literally speculation; I imagine the founders will correct me if I'm wrong.
More generally, there seems to be an entire class of apps out there that could be really useful, but which are really hard to monetize with subscriptions and/or ads revenue alone. Think about an advanced file converter, or maybe a one-off fax service. There are also the more traditional use cases, such as purchasing a single article from an online journal, or streaming a single movie online.
Minno provides an effective alternative to monetize these services, and it does so with much more ease than with traditional payment systems.
We give you a unique link for each item you want to sell. You then can tweet, post, or share your link however you want. And as soon as your sales reach $10, we'll send over your earnings.
So if a user sells something and never reaches $10, is that essentially held in escrow forever? Is there any way for users to "cash out", so to speak, after a certain period of time?
But your right--we could make this more clear on the site. We'll also be sure to keep HN Posted as we add more features to the product!