How I made my first $5 on Gumroad (7 days after launching a free product)!

It took 7 days from the day I put my first product up on Gumroad, to the day I made my first dollar.

I set "Pay what you want" pricing on the product, and I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that first notification:

One week and 6 free sales later, I got my first two paying customers who voluntarily decided to pay $5 each for the product – I made $10 that day. The next day, someone else also paid $5.

How it all began
I started my journey as a ‘solopreneur’ in July 2022 which was when I joined Cohort 15 of Daniel Vassallo’s Small Bets course.

I got added to the Small Bets Discord server and found it incredibly fascinating to read posts from all these people with whom I shared similar beliefs, who were actually taking action (and not just dreaming about it like I had been doing). They talked about their ideas, launching products, challenges, wins etc.

I spent my first month lurking – I honestly felt overwhelmed as I didn’t even have an idea.

Starting a Newsletter
The Small Bets Discord community is very active and so every Sunday evening, I would sit and read through all the conversations in the channels, to ensure I hadn’t missed out on any important information from the previous week.

I started documenting my take-aways and thought others might find my summaries useful as well, so I decided to ask:

The response and few comments I got led me to create a Gumroad account which was how I started the weekly community digest.

The Idea
I started to feel a little frustrated about 2 months after I joined the Small Bets community (about 1 month after I started my newsletter) as I still didn’t have an idea. I decided to share my thoughts:

A day prior to writing the above post, I had created a Google Sheet and started entering information about creators, the products they are building, and how much income they generate as a way to inspire myself to come up with ideas for businesses that can actually generate revenue (my previous 3 ideas failed!).

A little while after that, a member of the Small Bets community shared the below post:

It suddenly occurred to me that my little Google Sheet (which had about 25 entries at the time) could be useful to other aspiring solopreneurs like myself. So I decided to move everything to Airtable (because I thought it would look nicer 😊).

It went from this 👇🏽

To this:

Next, I created the Business Idea Bank as a free product on Gumroad, and then told my list of 40 newsletter subscribers about it.

Results
I got my first Gumroad sales notification the day I sent that email out to my tiny list. I made 6 sales that same day (and $10 in revenue from 2 of those). I made an additional 3 sales the next day (and $5 in revenue from 1 of those). That was how I made my first $5 online.

What Next?
The truth is I don’t know what direction the Business Idea Bank will take - we live in an unpredictable world and if there's one thing I've learnt from the small bets course, it's that ideas should be treated like cattle (not pets).

Having said that, I plan to continue to grow my newsletter subscriber base and figure things out as I go along.