Gumroad
Creators deserve to get paid for their work. We make it easy
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Interesting! Wonder how it will impact sales.
There's a lot of administrative and operational shit that you'll now have to handle internally at Gumroad, but the only thing that really matters is how noticeable the user experience changes are for customers — presumably things like 1) reduced administrative burden for e.g. tax calculations and compliance issues etc and 2) Gumroad itself will handle disputes rather than sellers. Oh, and also 3) will there now be higher fees given that Gumroad has to manage more administrative overhead?
Volume processed: $12.1M (up 126% YOY)
Revenue: $786K (up 118% YOY)
Gross / net profit: $282K / $107K
14 creators made over $100,000
162 made over $10,000
1,498 made over $1,000
6,041 made over $100
17,926 made something
I’m going to take a break from sharing these numbers here and on Twitter. Subscribe to my newsletter to get them instead, along with additional context: gumroad.com/sahil/follow
Volume processed: $8.3M (up 77% YOY)
Revenue: $543K (up 64% YOY)
Gross / net profit: $191K / $23K
6 creators made over $100,000
102 made over $10,000
1,067 made over $1,000
4,630 made over $100
13,935 made something!
We put a lot of thought and care into our "brand" at Gumroad.
As a product-first person, it took me a while to wrap my head around what that even meant. But we do a great job now, and I'm excited to open source our internal brand book in an effort to help others!
There are three major parts I'd like to share here, and the rest is linked to at the end of this post:
- Why we exist
- How we talk
- How we act
Why we exist
The through line that aligns everything that we spend our time, money, and stress on.
How we talk
Striking the right balance between the tone that makes us unique and the credibility we need to convey.
(10 examples of each tip linked to at the end!)
How we act
Guiding principles for how we work on a day to day basis that will help build a strong brand in the long run.
I hope that was helpful! It was something I learned from Travis Nichols and the many other Gumroadians who worked on it. I've even used it to help refine my own message. There's more strategy than you may think!
View our Gumroad Brandbook
View the original Twitter thread
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This is really useful for indie businesses as they grow/mature.
I passed it onto the team Ministry of Testing as I know this is something they haven't really had the chance to tackle in detail yet.
One of the biggest challenges I've had growing Ministry of Testing is communicating and transferring over the culture and the guidelines of who I was trying to be towards a team of 10 staff (+ other freelancers). I've found it pretty crucial for our growth and to maintain our ethos and brand. It's hard moving everything from the founder's brain over towards the team.
We've lacked on many things, which I've regretted in hindsight. I wish I had spent more time trying to be clear and strict in who the company is. This is especially hard with new people and freelancers.
I'm always looking at how others are doing things, it helps me learn and generate ideas. I copy where appropriate and appreciate it when people just openly share things for the benefit of all.
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This is awesome, thanks for sharing @sahil.
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Wow! This is really great. Thanks for sharing, always a pleasure hearing from entrepreneurs who are running a company with a big team.
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Thanks for sharing!
I think there is a small part missing about openness and sharing publicly information about the roadmap.
For me, as an author, would be nice to know if and when specific features are coming. For example at the moment the only withdrawal method worldwide is PayPal, I would prefer to know, when reading the gumroad documentation, why, when and if swift bank withdrawals will be available.
Currently I don't know how open Gumroad is when it comes to the product itself (I know it's open when it comes to earnings and other numbers).
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That falls outside of our brand book. We do open up our roadmap and board meetings but those decisions were made more recently so we haven’t had a chance to update the brand book to include those decisions.
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Cool, always like this openness. Also, I plan to use Gumroad for selling my upcoming book ;).
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Love it @sahil. Can I leave my 2 cents here (unsolicited advice, sry) -> Can you have someone from the team compress those images (tinypng.com or similar) on notion? It takes ages to load :D :D
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Apologies for being anal here but as far as I can see you haven't "open sourced" your internal brand book as I can see no "source" in any of your links.
You appear to have just published your internal brand book!?
Please correct me if I am wrong.
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It’s a PDF so there’s not really any “source” beyond the images. Would you like the illustrator file?
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"Open sourcing" code for a product and "publishing" code for a product are identical, no? Seems like a distinction without a difference. Of course this isn't literally code, but I believe the point is that an internal brand book itself is the source of a company's brand.
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Not to be too pedantic, but from the first sentence on Wikipedia: "Open source products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product," and I believe you have permission to use this document.
I get that you would like this to be more interactive, or on GitHub, which is fine. But when people take the time to share their internal documents on IH, let's be supportive instead of discouraging them by complaining that it's not enough or nitpicking the definition of open source. I'd prefer IH not turn into Hacker News…
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@csallen apologies if it came across that way, that was certainly NOT my intent. I wholeheartedly agree that we need more sharing and openness in the world which is exactly why i was trying to gently show the distinction.
The same wiki article states... "Confusion persists about this completely unrestricted definition because the "Free", also known as "Libre", refers to the freedom or the product not the price, expense, cost, or charge. For example, "being free to speak" is not the same as "free beer"."
I was just trying to make this point :-)-
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Again, Indie Hackers is not and will not become a place for "calling people out," getting upset about the fact that popular posts receive traffic, or making nitpicky complaints about titles. You can go to Hacker News for that. It's not helpful or constructive at all, and only serves to discourage sharing.
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We accomplished this by doing absolutely nothing special: we shipped about a hundred small iterative improvements to the core Gumroad experience, mostly around product creation and editing.
We believe the market is growing at a certain rate and our goal is to minimize the amount of friction, allowing creators to do what they already want to do faster and simpler, with less cognitive load.
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love the transparency and the fact that you are growing.
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
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I was there 🙋🏻♂️
Thanks for sharing Gumroad's journey with the public, Sahil!
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Loved that idea Sahil!
Been following since the very very beginning! I remember asking you questions on Skype about your projects instead of doing my high school homework. I think that was almost 10 years ago!
Back then you were building Crate (an awesome file uploader by the way!) and you were my inspiration to start building stuff online (also a reader of your blog, my favourite article was the nil-nil philosophy!)
Congrats and keep shipping!
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Ha, crazy! The good old days...
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Open board meeting is a cool idea. Did you source questions from the participants or was it more of a presentation.
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It was a presentation with some Q&A sprinkled throughout – definitely more at the end.
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Excellent job! Big fan of your product - it helped a lot of my friends in the digital art community to make a living.
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That's awesome to hear!
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Joined the call last week, really enjoyed listening along. Awesome transparency.
I think your current direction with GR is solid. Taking steps to integrate more into their websites and to extend to a broader range of products/services with memberships.
Good luck and it would be awesome to do such a meeting again after a while.
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Hi Sahil, thanks for the update. I like the stay small idea
JP
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"Digital Products". Hello, we make a digital product: part game, part book, and part Movie Cinematics (WebGL). A digital-novel, as a video-game-comic-subscription, wrapped in PWA (with audio). Is there a way to integrate such a thing with GumRoad? We looked, but were not sure. Fascinating to watch GumRoad grow! Would love to know if you already have this or if we could help integration for digital novel, digital product sales. Thanks.
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This was cool. Love the way you speak about everything Gumroad. Clear and level headed.
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Such a cool idea! Are there other aspects of your business that you're so transparent with? Financials, OKRs, etc?
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Our financials are on Twitter every month! The board meeting is pretty revealing though... not much more left...
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Exciting news: We've paid out over $200,000,000 to creators and artists on Gumroad!
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Congratulations, I can confidently say I am at least a little of that $200M. Gumroad is great! Keep up the awesome work.
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That's dope. Next step, $1B!
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That's quite a lot of money! :)
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Awesome! Congratulations! :)
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whoaa you're moving money at scale!! 👏👏👏 might as well open a bank haha
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why don''t you send some this way :)
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Sign up for Gumroad, start selling, and we're happy to!
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3 Comments
I think there's at least one competitive edge, which is that building a web app is an effortful hurdle that a loooot of people fail to get over. Even talented engineers get bored of their projects and abandon them before launching.
Fewer people launching web apps = less competition for you.
I agree, even with all the nocode tools out there, it's more like eating popcorn. It's good for a snack but it's empty food.
I don't think I fully understand what this means. Can someone ELI5 the assertion that "there's no competitive edge in web apps anymore?"