Appiny - discounts for geeks!

Hello!
At the beginning of Augustus, Habr very positively met the idea of creating a discount service for geeks. Since then, more than 3 months have passed ...
After the publication, not only more than 1,500 people registered at once wishing to receive discounts on various products and services, but also the first partners and investors began to knock on us.
We did not disappear anywhere, and all this time we worked hard on launching Appiny , which we will try to tell about under the cut.

Attracting partners

Here we are faced with the fact that it was quite expected ...
When the potential of the market is unknown, nobody has heard about you, you have not yet had sales and, accordingly, there is no analytics for building sales forecasts, they look at your message very skeptically. It was especially difficult to negotiate with very large software companies. No wonder 37Signals in its sensational: Rework write that big companies are very slow :)
They swing very long.
But small companies turned out to be on the contrary more mobile and open to new distribution channels for their products, and perceived our offer much better.

One of these companies, Sparrow , which developed an excellent mail client for Mac OS X, can now buy it from us for just 192r. (with 40% discount)
')

Investors

In general, we decided from the very beginning that at the first stage we will develop at our own means. But we understood that it would be very difficult for us to “approach” large partners on our own, so we decided that we needed to look for a mentor with access to top management of well-known Russian and foreign software companies and experience in the software market.
We started posting information about the team and the project at specialized sites (Glavstart, StartupPoint, etc.) that help to find investments and received several different offers.
But as it turned out, our mentor spotted us after publishing on Habré.
We spent a lot of time discussing the business model, polishing the existing financial plan and other details before signing an agreement with it.

Payment instruments

This topic probably deserves a separate post ...
We thought that it would be more logical and easier to accept payments through the aggregator and chose Assist. Now we understand that this was far from an ideal choice, by the way, an excellent article on this subject http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/pay_system/124668/
The integration took only a couple of days and the technical part was ready, but the conclusion of the contract stretched as much as 1.5 months and did not receive its logical conclusion. We went to their competitors ...
Total: a lot of paperwork, a lot of time, a lot of calls.

And, nevertheless, we started! :)
What's next?
There will be even more interesting “tasty discounts” and our insights ...

PS Black Friday started ...