Gumroad: Revenue, Profit, Growth, & Story Behind It All
Gumroad Revenue
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Gumroad hits $6M in revenue
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Gumroad hits $9.2M in revenue
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Gumroad hits $9.7M in revenue
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Gumroad hits $10.2M in revenue
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Gumroad hits $21.2M in revenue [source]
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Gumroad hits $11.1M in revenue
About The Gumroad Founder
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.
About The Business
Idea
How did Sahil Lavingia get 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?
Build
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.pyβone Python file. It was deployed on Google App Engine so he didn't need to know how to do anything related to ops.
Growth
What is the growth strategy for Gumroad?
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."
Pricing
How does Gumroad price their products?
Gumroad is free to use, they charge a 10% fee for the sales.
Similar Ideas
Discover similar business ideas like Gumroad:
SuperLemon, a WhatsApp plugin for Shopify eCommerce stores, crossed $29,000 in MRR as of July 2020, with 20,000 users from 50+ countries and 1700+ paying customers, all acquired through organic marketing strategies and a relentless focus on customer service and satisfaction.
Kiwi Sizing is an e-commerce plugin that simplifies size charts and offers fit recommenders, generating over $36k/month in revenue with a 5% month-over-month growth, and serving over 13,000 active stores worldwide.
More about Gumroad
Who is the owner of Gumroad?
Sahil Lavingia is the founder of Gumroad.
When did Sahil Lavingia start Gumroad?
2011
What is Sahil Lavingia's net worth?
Sahil Lavingia's business makes an average of $1.77M/month.
How much money has Sahil Lavingia made from Gumroad?
Sahil Lavingia started the business in 2011, and currently makes an average of $21.2M/year.
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- 4,818 founder case studies
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- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
