What is Gumroad?
For years, Gumroad has been known as the single best way to sell a single product. Now They're hoping to become the best way to sell multiple products at once.
Gumroad is a marketplace where practically anyone can list almost anything for sale. The procedure is wonderfully straightforward and transparent, and it does not come with some of the problems that are associated with the more popular platforms.
To this day, more than 100.000 creators have made sales of their work through the marketplace, bringing in a total of more than $536 million. These creators operate in every specialized field imaginable, from education to music, sports to comedy, and everything in between. Even people who are interested in theater and dance can find a community on Gumroad.
To do this, they've introduced a new ‘Checkout' page. This page supports buying a single product, buying multiple products, applying one or many discount codes, tax info collection, and much, much more.
This additional real estate also allows them to (finally) offer analytics support on product marketing pages, as well as support 1-click upsells right on the checkout page (another finally!). They will email users about both of those features as they go live.
These are big changes, and they are both scared and excited to make them.
We could sit back and relax–Gumroad is a decent product–but we really believe these changes will lead to more money in Gumroad creators' pockets–which is the reason behind every change we make.
They also super appreciate your help in catching any bugs. The team (shout out to Maya and Connor, especially!) has been working hard and fast to make sure that no purchase gets left behind. You can see the full list of bugs they've caught here, and let us know if we missed anything.
Who is behind Gumroad?
In 2011, Sahil Lavingia constructed the initial version of Gumroad over the course of a single weekend. Sahil is a self-taught software engineer who has stated in an interview that he learned how to code by using Google to browse through and find solutions to each problem he encountered. Lavingia, who was 19 years old at the time, was the first designer employed at Pinterest and was also the designer of Turntable.fm. Lavingia was hired when Pinterest was just getting started.
Lavingia got the concept for Gumroad when he was trying to sell a photorealistic icon that he had developed and saw that the amount of effort it took to sell an item directly to customers was a significant amount of work. As a result, he came up with the idea for Gumroad. He came to the conclusion that developing a service that would make the procedure as simple as sharing web information was the best course of action.
