Gumroad

Gumroad: Revenue, Profit, Growth, & Story Behind It All

May 9th, 2024

Founded By

Sahil Lavingia

Monthly Revenue

$1.77M

Starting Costs

Days To Build

Score

Founders

Employees

17 (est.)

Monthly Traffic

16M

Gross Margin

69%

Profitable

Yes

Days To Build

Year Started

2011

Customer

B2B & B2C

Revenue Per Visitor

$0.11

Founded By
Sahil Lavingia: Monthly Revenue
$1.77M: Starting Costs
$0: Days To Build
2: Score
95

Founders
1: Employees
17 (est.): Monthly Traffic
16M: Gross Margin
69%: Profitable
Yes

Days To Build
2: Year Started
2011: Customer
B2B & B2C: Revenue Per Visitor
$0.11

Who is Sahil Lavingia?

Sahil Lavingia is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, an e-commerce platform that enables creators to sell their products directly to consumers.

Before this, he was an employee at Pinterest, where he designed and developed various products, including Pinterest for iPhone.

As a self-taught developer, Lavingia built Gumroad over a weekend, taking about 22 hours to complete everything, including the design.

How did Sahil come up with the idea for Gumroad?

Sahil loves building stuff. He really enjoyed the process of taking a problem coming up with a solution, and then shipping a prototype of that solution to see how good his concept was. Before finishing college he had already shipped a dozen products. Most of the time, they weren't that great.

But sometimes something works out really well, and then he has to decide if he actually wants to work on the idea some more. Very rarely, the answer is yes. That was the case with Gumroad. The question at its core was really compelling to him: How easy could one make it to sell something?

How did Sahil Lavingia build the initial version of Gumroad?

The first version was built in just one weekend back in April 2011. Sahil had learned Python while working at Pinterest and was able to hack together a basic CRUD application. The whole of Gumroad was a single main.py—one Python file. It was deployed on Google App Engine so he didn't need to know how to do anything related to ops.

An early version of the Gumroad landing page

What was the growth strategy for Gumroad and how did they scale?

Their main strategy in the early days: sending out a lot of emails. That's really it. They scoured the web for people who could benefit from a product like Gumroad, and then told them about it. Literally thousands of times. "That's the only way, really, when you're young and no one cares or knows who you are, to get folks to use your product."

"Over time, they needed to do that less and less. But until you have a lot of customers or some other force that can supply some momentum, there's nothing better than knocking on doors. My sense is that people really just don't want to cold email people, and are looking for an out. If that's you: stop! It doesn't exist! Just hunker down and dedicate some time to finding people, reaching out to them personally via email, phone, whatever, and being okay with it sucking for a while."

What's the pricing strategy for Gumroad?

Gumroad is free to use, they charge a 10% fee for the sales.

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