In 2011, Pinterest designer Sahil Lavingia wanted to sell an icon he had made directly to his audience. But it was too difficult. Why setup a storefront? Just share a link–customers can click, pay, download. A weekend later, Gumroad was live.
A lot more has happened since then, but we won't bore you. If you're curious, you can read all about it on Medium.
We have a lot in common with our creators: we also earn a living by selling a product we love working on. But we are different from many other companies.
We're profitable.
We are focused on improving our product in a sustainable way. We even share our numbers, so that others can learn how to run a creator-focused business.
Gumroad in January:
— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) February 13, 2019
Volume processed: $5.2M (down 4%)
Revenue: $341K (flat)
Gross profit: $133K (down 1%)
Net profit: $59K (up 13%)
3 creators made over $100,000
72 made over $10,000
755 made over $1,000
2,578 made over $100
Let me know if you have any questions!
We donate a percentage of our profits to causes.
In 2018, we donated over $23,775 (eight percent of our profits) to different causes. We raised money for the hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico and the floods in Kerala. We helped fund the Presence-of-Blackness project in speculative fiction, and a Mexicanx publication.
We are not giving away equity.
We're not trying to sell the company. We just want to make Gumroad better. Without an exit in sight, we do something radical: we pay awesome people a fair rate to contribute to Gumroad on their own terms.
We're looking for engineers who want to work part-time on @gumroad!
— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) January 14, 2019
- Ruby + JS.
- 15-25ish hours a week.
- Project-based or hourly.
- Remote only.
- Everything you work on will eventually be OSS.
Send me an email (sahil@gumroad.com) or DM if you're interested!
It's been a while since April 2011. But rest assured, we're just getting started. Want to follow along?
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