Held Our First Open Board Meeting!

We held our first Gumroad open board meeting last week, with over a hundred participants!

Gumroad has had a rocky eight years, but the last few have been slow and steady – what we prefer! We seem to be growing organically quite well. Everything we do should just be gravy over a baseline 40%+ year-over-year growth. And we’re doing a lot. We hired Sid Yadav, former VP Product at Teachable, and shipped a few features for creators too!

We are small, growing steadily, and profitable. These were labels we ran away from previously, but now proudly embrace as competitive advantages.

It means we’re not going away, we’re not increasing our fees, we’re not going to overcomplicate our product for the sake of growth.

We are going to make our product across the board, revisiting core parts of the Gumroad experience such as product creation, and investing in Discovery (now at 4% of total volume).

A lot of this is necessary prep work for the largest identity-shift we’ll make to date: a full Membership offering similar to Patreon or Substack.

We want to help creators do more of what they love, which started with digital products. But it doesn’t end there.

Over time, as we grow what the Gumroad product can do for creators, we should see each cohort of creators do better and better.

Again, this is all gravy on our existing growth trajectory. Because we grow entirely via word-of-month!

We think spending on growth is probably a good idea, but we don’t want to do the same old boring stuff other startups do. Instead, we’re going to invest in creating our own content. Just like our creators do!

While almost everything about Gumroad has changed since 2011, our core mission hasn’t: help creators earn a living so they can do more of what they love. Thanks for being a part!

More info on this all here, complete with revenue charts and figures: https://twitter.com/shl/status/1160918653056847873