Sathil Lavengia, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.
What are some of the differences
between these two lifestyles as a founder, and what are some of the things that have stayed the same?
What are some of the differences between the two?
Sleep was probably number one, gumroad was probably number two, exercise number three, etc.
My personal life and all of those things were at the bottom, and even my personal life,
I had architected it in a way that it was meant to further gumroad.
All of my friends, meetings, how I'd spend my time, even if I wasn't at the office,
it was all about how do I benefit gumroad.
I felt like I had a duty to do that. I'd raised a bunch of venture capital.
I raised $8.1 million from a list of Silicon Valley Angels and VCs and things.
I also had built a team. When you build a team, you have this duty,
financial incentive to work super, super, super hard and stay super, super, super focused
because every hour that you put in, you have 20 people that are going to see that
and mimic a little bit of that behavior.
In hindsight, stupidly, I didn't do almost anything else.
I didn't angel invest in any of my friend's startups.
That would have been smart.
John from Stripe was a good friend of mine back in the day, not saying I would have been able to invest in it.
On my mind, I was so one-track and now it's almost exactly the opposite
where I am thinking about how can I build gumroad in order to benefit my life.
It's very selfishly.
The weird thing with that is I wasn't really proud of doing that.
When I moved to Provo, I told my investors I'm doing this thing,
but I wasn't shouting it from the rooftops or anything.
I'm going to go to Provo and learn how to write and paint.
That's a weird thing for someone who's raised $10 million at this point to do.
I kept it under the radar for a while.
Then I wrote this post at the beginning of this year
reflecting on my failure to build a billion-dollar company
because I just felt this dissonance where I was having these private conversations,
but I wasn't really reflecting that publicly.
The reception to it was like, yeah, you gave it a shot.
It didn't work out, but you built this really great thing.
I was kind of allowed to say that you did that.
That really opened the door for me to be like,
hey, it's totally fine to say, look, I care about my livelihood.
We call them lifestyle businesses.
It's okay to prioritize my lifestyle.
I've been upfront with the investors that have remained on board
through this whole process with new employees,
some of the same people that actually used to work for us back in the day.
It's surprisingly fine to do that, to say, actually,
Gumroad is my last priority of the day.
I want to write, I want to paint, I want to go to the gym,
I want to travel, I want to hang out with people,
and I want to read.
If Gumroad doesn't fit into that day, that's totally fine.
It turns out, I think one of the things that sort of gave me the freedom
to do that was to look at this chart of the growth of Gumroad
over the last eight years, which is incredibly consistent.
It's one of the most boring graphs you'll ever see.
There's very little drama in it.
To think about, wow, there are weeks and months in that process
that we had a 20-person team, we were working basically all the time,
all the waking time that we had.
Then there were times where we had no team.
It was just me answering support emails once a week,
working four hours a week, and same sort of growth trajectory.
I think it gave me the freedom to say,
I'm just not that important to the operations of this company
and the success of this product and the success of our creators.
Let me give myself a little bit of permission to sort of experiment
and do what I want to do.
It turns out that doing that actually has driven almost more empathy
and more loyalty to what we're building and what we're doing this year
and beyond than ever has been in the past, which is kind of fascinating.
How much of that do you think is due to you living this more relaxed,
I don't want to say self-centered, but focused on you lifestyle?
How much of it do you think is attributable to you
just putting in more effort to actually share your story,
to write blog posts, to tweet more often?
Yeah, I think it's a whole host of things that all just come back
to being myself and being open and transparent
about what I want to do with my life and how Gumroad is a component of that.
Inherently, I was the founder of this company.
I was the solo founder. It was my thing for a little bit.
There is this inherent alignment that happens.
I think in many ways, I was trying to force it.
To convince employees to join the company,
you sort of have to drink your own Kool-Aid first
before you can get anybody else to drink it.
Otherwise, you're just lying, which is probably not wise.
I think drinking it so much that I was just convinced
that everything in the world was going to get better because of Gumroad.
To say, look, the world is going to do what the world is going to do
and I can have some amount of impact on it,
but I'm not going to necessarily sort of slave over that.
I'm just going to build what I think is the right thing to build
for the group of creators that we already have,
which is far easier than going out in the car and customers and far cheaper.
I think people see that and they're like,
oh, yeah, I think people sort of respect the ability to say,
look, I am not a product visionary. I'm not Steve Jobs.
I'm not building cars. I'm just building a faster horse and that's fine.
That's what most people can do. Very few people can.
The car was invented by one person one time and that's about it.
I think the other thing that's sort of unique about Gumroad
is that we have so much in common with our creators.
The more that we share about what we are actually doing,
which is just building a great product as much as we can,
we're talking to customers, we're not raising money from VCs,
we're not having fancy dinners with other founders anymore.
That's what our creators do every day.
I think when they see that, they're like,
oh, cool, Gumroad is actually just like me.
We're both trying to build businesses.
We're creating some form of software to do that.
We're selling it to our audience.
I think when we started becoming more open about the journey,
we actually became much more accessible and much more relatable
to this Silicon Valley startup that had raised $10 million
and is trying to become this billion-dollar company.
Most people are never trying to do that.
That's one of the things I sort of had to realize
when I moved to Provo is I started talking about,
yeah, I'm writing this thing.
It's about my failure to build a billion-dollar company.
It was just like people would look at me funny.
They're like, wait, what?
First of all, you were trying to build a billion-dollar company.
I thought you were just oil painting.
Who are you? How is that a failure?
You're telling me you built this multi-million-dollar business
that you own the vast majority of,
and you can kind of do whatever you want.
You're here oil painting with us Thursday at 2 p.m.
How is that a failure?
That's kind of what I wanted to talk about with that essay.
I think why it resounded so much was because
even though I think intellectually people understand
the absurdity of trying to go for building
this massively successful company
in a way that I felt like I could just do it.
I tweeted, I'm going to build this thing.
It's going to be a billion bucks.
It's just sort of that denialism of other people's agency.
Other people have to decide that you're worth a billion bucks.
It doesn't just happen.
Otherwise, there would be a lot more of them in the world.
Yeah, I think that almost peeling back some of the absurdity
and sort of the surrealism of Silicon Valley sometimes,
it was almost like stating the obvious.
That's sort of what I think what a lot of people appreciated
is that kind of I had done this thing.
I was in it.
I was sort of the most inside of the sort of insider circle
you could get and then being like,
yeah, it didn't work out and that's fine.
There are a lot of stories like this, I think.
I've talked to a lot of founders that have raised
bunches of money that have gone through a similar journey,
but people just don't talk about it.
I think there's sort of a component of shame.
I think there's a component of failure.
I think there's a component of my reputation is at stake here.
And because I think I moved to Provo and because I just sort of
was able to sort of physically get that distance,
it just meant less.
I was going to suffer less if people were going to look at me
and be like, wow, you made some really stupid decisions
that prevented you from building a billion dollar company, you idiot.
I would be fine.
Whereas if I was still in San Francisco,
it would have been a very different story.
I think it would have been a lot more difficult for me to really
have that thing go live and feel comfortable and safe.
I've had a lot of conversations in San Francisco
where people don't feel safe talking about failure.
They'll tell you they're killing it even when they know they're not.
And in Provo, you tell people, oh, I failed to build a billion dollar company
and they look at you funny and they say, you're still killing it.
I don't know why you're sad about that.
Yeah, it's funny because even in Silicon Valley,
everyone talks about the failure rate.
I don't think anyone is delusional about the percentage
of startups that raise venture and fail.
I mean, that's the majority of them.
I think 70% or something.
And for some reason, when it starts to happen to you,
you freak out and you're like, no, that's not possible.
And I think part of it is just,
it's kind of like when your topic just didn't really happen to me.
But I've heard of it described as when you're sort of top of the class
in high school, right?
You're just like the valedictorian and then you go to Stanford
and everyone is you.
And all of a sudden, you're like no longer interesting
in this existential crisis, like who am I?
And I think it's similar but maybe even more pronounced
where you go to Silicon Valley and raising a million bucks is nothing.
I mean, it's meaningless there.
And so you go from the top of your field
or top of your class or all of these sorts of things
and then you start from the bottom again.
And I think there is this sort of, because yeah,
because you're seeing all of your friends
and all the people that you hang out with,
say, raising bunches of money and hiring a lot of people
and at these crazy evaluations
and getting these crazy BD deals done.
And everyone is sort of inflating their chest a little bit
because you feel like you have to, right?
Like if everyone is playing that game and you're not,
you frankly just look like a failure out of the gate,
which is sort of self-fulfilling in that way, right?
If you're an engineer and you're looking at all these hot, sexy companies
and then this one random one that is sort of like,
you're failing all the time, it's great.
It's just not really going to work.
I liken it a little bit to football helmets
where I think everyone kind of acknowledges
that these things are not good for you, right?
Like it doesn't really make you safer.
It actually is more dangerous.
But you're not going to be the one person on the football field saying,
okay, cool, I'm going to do it.
I'm going to take this off and I'm going to play it
like we actually should play.
Like you kind of need somehow everybody
to kind of agree on doing this at the same time, right?
It's like prisoner's dilemma.
And it creates this sort of, yeah,
this unsustainable, very unhealthy environment, I think.
And I think everyone knows that it's broken,
but I think very few people want to say it.
I looked up some stats about Proville, Utah,
and it is definitely not San Francisco,
definitely not Silicon Valley.
Population size is just over 100,000.
It's 89% Mormon.
The median household income is $32,000 a year,
which would probably not get you a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco.
So I imagine you stand out like a sore thumb there.
What do you say to people who ask you what you do
and how do they react?
Yeah, I normally say I'm learning how to paint is sort of my default.
I'm learning how to paint and I write a little bit.
Yeah, basically my girlfriend, she now is comfortable with it.
But in the beginning, she was like,
everyone just thinks you're a bum, dude.
Everyone thinks that I'm just dating this weird, washed up, bearded brown dude.
I'm 26, so I'm a little bit older than the average college kid, right?
So it's like that kind of guy that never graduated
and it's like kind of still figuring out what he wants to do
and is learning how to oil paint,
probably doing shrooms on the weekends or something like that.
I think the vibe that I was giving off from San Francisco, et cetera.
I mean, Provo is the most conservative city in America, over 100,000 people.
You know, no one here swears.
And so it's sort of very noticeable.
But everyone's super nice, you know?
And I think it's one of the first things I noticed being here
is how little people cared about what people did for a living.
It was, you know, the questions were always oriented towards, you know,
how are you, how's your family, are you Mormon?
You know, things that sort of reflected their priority stack,
which was sort of so fundamentally different from mine,
which was like, you know, I would ask,
what do you do for work?
Where do you work?
You know, not how much money you make specifically,
but these sort of ways to almost gauge someone's value to the society
in this sort of very transactional way,
which is kind of how everyone in San Francisco does it.
You go to a house party and everyone's like, you know,
what do you do? Where do you work?
You know, which VC, have you raised any money?
Have you, you know, from who?
Your work is your identity, NSF.
That's who you are.
It is, it is, yeah.
And it makes sense, right?
I mean, you moved, I did move to San Francisco
to work at Pinterest, right?
Literally to work.
And it's a very transactional city for a lot of people.
And that's fine.
It just is what it is.
I'm sure New York is similar in finance
and LA might be similar in entertainment.
But in Provo, it's just like,
we're on this earth to be of service to other people
and to raise a family and to be faithful and test our faith.
That's sort of the literal theology of it, right?
And nowhere in there is how much money you make.
Nowhere in there is who do you work for
and how many employees do you have?
And frankly, I mean, a little bit is how educated you are,
but not really in any way that reflects, you know,
that is used to sort of make more money,
but just to be more educated so you can serve others.
And it really just got me thinking about how, you know,
when you travel, people always say it opens up your mind, right?
And you sort of see how different cultures solve the same problem.
And one of the sort of fundamental problems I think is like,
what is the meaning of life, right?
And in San Francisco, you're so in it, you're so in,
oh, the meaning of life is to like, you know,
change the world, have as much of an impact as possible,
typically through scalable means like building software
and building sort of hyper growth companies.
It just is what it is and you sort of forget
that you're breathing that air, it's just everywhere, you know?
And then when you move to Provo,
or when I moved to Provo, like over months,
it was like, wow, there's a totally,
like the way that they think, right?
The way that they view the world and their place in it
and their place in the universe is just so fundamentally different
than I was looking at it.
And it took a while, you know?
Traveling definitely has some of that, but it's very surface level.
And when you live in a place, you know,
I've lived in Provo now for two and a half years,
which is way longer than I ever thought I would live in Provo, Utah.
I thought I would last a year.
But you realize sort of just how, even though the houses look the same
and the streets look the same and the traffic lights look the same,
but the sort of the fundamental, when people think about doing stuff, right?
When people wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night
and plan their days, et cetera, the very deep, deep, deep reasoning
behind making some of those decisions is very fundamentally different
than the ones that sort of feed into those decisions in San Francisco.
And it's almost like meditating, right?
When you meditate, you're sort of getting deeper and deeper
into your own thoughts and really figuring out
why you think the way you think.
And living in a place like Provo is almost like
an external version of meditating,
where you're forced to reckon with all of the ways that you've lived
and the decisions that you've made,
and you're just grappling with why you made them
and realizing how relatively baseless those are
and how mimetic they are, how based on other people's behavior they are,
which in turn are based on other people's behaviors.
And so you kind of are like, who am I?
Like you use the word identity,
which is like the sort of the word on the top of my mind right now,
which is like, yeah, what is my identity?
How do I define that?
It's a weird thing to think about when you've spent eight years
just being so sure of what your identity was.
I was going to spend the rest of my life building software products,
tweeting pithy things and just becoming a VC.
Whatever the track was that I saw in front of me, right?
Doing what Bill Gates did just in my own way.
And now I'm like, I have no idea.
There's not very many people that have done this sort of thing.
I'm still trying to find those people and learn from them.
Let's say somebody does a little bit of digging and to your business.
How do you explain to somebody from Provo what Gumroad is?
Yeah, I say I run a small software business called Gumroad.
We help creators like musicians, writers, artists,
filmmakers, software engineers, stand-up comedians.
Anyone that makes stuff on their computer,
we make it really easy for them to take that stuff,
upload it to the cloud and sell it directly to their audiences
that might exist on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, on Instagram
in order for them to own the relationship they have with their customer,
sort of transact directly, make the vast majority of the revenue
and earn a living doing what they really love to do
instead of maybe doing something else to pay the bills
and then making music nights and weekends.
Let's do a version two.
Imagine you were talking to a founder or an investor
or somebody in San Francisco.
How would you explain Gumroad to them?
Yeah, I'd basically say we're Shopify for digital goods.
We started out being a bitly plus a credit card form.
We wanted to democratize the ability to sell
just like you can share basically anything
and more and more people are sort of sharing directly with their audience
instead of having to go through middleman like Amazon or iTunes
or their label or their publisher.
We want to sort of democratize the ability to sell anything you can share.
And if we can do that, then all of these artists, creators, influencers,
celebrities, et cetera should be able to make a living on their own terms
instead of one dictated by all of these different middlemen.
And when you get rid of middlemen in general,
that means a more efficient, cheaper, just better economy
that sort of is serving the consumer and the creator
instead of all these other people that are sort of in the middle,
which is kind of actually, I've never done that before,
but it's profound how different of a pitch that was and how many, you know,
that's a cool thing.
I mean, it shows how much context is baked in a Silicon Valley, right?
Like middleman, democratization, all of these terms.
If you said that to, you know, one of the retired moms that I paint with,
she would look at me funny.
She'd think that I just had like an acid flashback or something.
It's also very mission focused.
When you're describing Gumroad to a tech audience,
you talked about how it was going to change the world, right?
How it's going to affect the market,
how it's going to make the experience of being a creator different.
Yeah.
One of the things I have sort of mirrored a little bit is in San Francisco,
yeah, the way that people talk is similar in the way
that they both want to sort of serve people, right?
I think that's sort of, we agree on that.
We both want to serve the world.
We're servants to humanity, et cetera.
But in San Francisco, it's all about this crazy long-term,
mega-large humanity sort of, you know, what does Steve Jobs say,
denting the universe, right?
And in Provo, it's just like, I just want to help people.
You know, I want to help my neighbor and my community,
my government, my family.
And if I do that and everyone else does that,
we're going to be in a really good spot.
And so, yeah, it's just the context and the scale is just so profoundly different
in the way that these sort of groups of people think about their approach
to actually being in the service of others.
Tell us about how you first moved to the Bay Area
and got involved in tech.
So I moved to San Francisco to work at Pinterest.
This was late 2010, early 2011.
I was a college student at USC in LA, and I got an email.
I posted some stuff on Hacker News,
and I started commenting that was my sort of way
of trying to get into the tech community
and build up my audience at the time.
And Ben, the CEO of Pinterest, sent me an email out of the blue.
He saw one of the apps I made on the top of Hacker News,
and it was basically like,
hey, we have this thing that we've been building called Pinterest.
We help people collect, organize, and share the things that they love.
And we need an iPhone app, and we don't have one,
and it looks like you're a pretty competent sort of developer
and designer of apps.
Do you want to help?
And so I quoted them $4,000 initially for Pinterest for iPhone.
Yeah, I ended up having to double that because it was way more work
than I thought, which is always the case.
And then I ended up being like, hey, guys,
I've started getting some full-time offers from other startups.
Would you consider making me an offer?
I'd love to work for you full-time
and sort of take a leap of absence from USC
and move up to the Bay Area.
And Ben was like, yeah, we'd love to talk about that.
Let us know when you're in San Francisco.
I was like, I'm not going to be in San Francisco.
I don't have plans.
I think San Francisco startups fly you up for the day.
But it was just so, I think, indicative of how they thought about it.
They were so frugal.
And they were just so like, yeah, if you're interested,
let drive up yourself and come talk to us.
And I was like, okay.
Eventually, a couple friends of mine were driving up to the Bay Area
to watch a USC Cal game.
And I was like, yeah, I'll come up,
and then I'll just bounce for a few hours on Sunday
and hang out with these two Silicon Valley founders
and talk to them about this app that we're building together.
And so I did.
My friends thought I was really weird.
And then I told them I was going to drop out of school
to join the startup called Pinterest,
be employee number two.
And everyone was like, okay, I guess.
You know Mark Zuckerberg had done this thing
and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
And you know the stories of these things.
But to actually do it was weird and also surprisingly uncommon.
I had sort of expected it to be like,
oh yeah, this thing that happens in the news happens all the time
to everybody, right?
Everyone knows someone.
And then I dropped out and I was the only person
from my high school that did that.
I was the only person basically in San Francisco.
And now it's a little bit different.
Software has sort of developed and matured
for better or worse.
And the social network came out.
I always considered the social network
like one of the pivotal moments of Silicon Valley culture and history.
But yeah, that's sort of what got me up to the Bay Area.
Initially it was to work at Pinterest employee number two
building and designing Pinterest for iPhone.
What did you hope was going to happen
as a result of you making this decision?
What was the best case scenario in your mind?
Yeah, so the way that I thought about it was
I wanted to get a software engineering degree.
It would take four years.
Then I'd work at Google and then I'd work at a small company
and then I'd start my own thing.
And when I was 35 or something like that,
that was the track I think that I imagined for myself at the time.
And the way that I justified leaving school to join Pinterest was,
well, if I want to do that, right?
If I think startups are genuinely like a thing that I want to do,
I should probably figure out now if that's a possibility for me,
if I'm going to be good at it, if I'm even going to like it.
Otherwise I'm going to spend 15 years and then realize I'm not made for that.
Which I don't know if it was like a way of just deluding myself
to make the jump and I was already convinced or not.
But that's sort of how I justified both joining Pinterest,
leaving USC and then also leaving Pinterest to start a company,
which was I want to maybe start a company.
I don't know if I'm going to be capable of doing this thing,
so I might as well try now.
And then if it's not the thing for me, I'll go back to school
and figure things out or what have you.
That was sort of it.
I was like, there is this potential job and career path,
which is you basically get to make software,
which is something I was already doing,
and I could get paid for it and I could do it on my own terms.
And that sounded amazing.
And then basically VCs would pay for me to do that.
And if those things are true, like how can I not try this thing?
It just feels too perfect and too good.
And so that's, yeah, that's sort of for better or worse
what I ended up doing and led to starting Gumroad.
It's kind of funny because you inadvertently
and unbeknownst to you at the time won the lottery
by being employee number two at Pinterest.
There's a ton of Silicon Valley companies you could have gone to work for.
The vast majority of them did not become billion dollar companies
that made all of their early employees rich, but Pinterest did.
Totally.
And it was incredibly stupid of me to leave
with a few months left on my cliff.
It was a multi-million dollar decision to do that.
But I think the truth is if I was smart enough
to stick around at Pinterest,
I would have been smart enough never to have joined.
Like it required a certain amount of ambition and ego
and ignorance, I think, to join Pinterest.
But then that was the same cocktail of things
that was going to get me to leave Pinterest
and leave all that money on the table.
And I think in hindsight, I think gave me this immense chip on my shoulder
where when I left, I kind of knew that they were onto something.
They were growing super fast.
And we just raised a Series A
and it was like the largest Series A of the year.
And it was like this has a good shot at being really big.
Therefore, Gumroad has to be significant
because otherwise I'm going to look like a fool,
which I think happened anyways a little bit.
But I'm still on the journey, so maybe one day.
But I would be remiss I think to say that
I don't think about what could have been
if I had stayed at Pinterest and who knows where I would be now.
Ironically, April Fool's Day 2011, you infamously tweeted,
just had an idea for my first billion dollar company.
Tomorrow I start building it.
What was going on with you energetically when you sent that tweet?
I imagine you must have felt amazing to be so confident about this idea.
Yeah, I think I was home on a Friday night
and I was just learning photorealistic icon design.
And I had made this pencil icon
and I wanted to see if I could sell it to anybody
and upload me on Twitter or on Dribble or something like that.
I had a modest audience at the time.
But I didn't want to invest in building a storefront
and a whole website or put it on some marketplace somewhere
and then get a tiny percentage in 60 days or something like that.
So basically what I called it at the time was a lemonade stand.
I just want a lemonade stand.
I don't want to invest in a retail experience or anything like that.
And it just wasn't possible.
It was surprisingly difficult, just kind of this weird sort of gap
between selling something and sharing something
and the minute you attach a price tag to something
it just became basically impossible for me to do it myself.
And I just thought that was super weird
and I remember going into this sort of the opposite of a death spiral,
whatever you call that,
in terms of just having all of these revelations about,
oh my gosh, musicians could sell all their stuff that doesn't make the album
and all these designers could sell all these wireframes and mocks
and you could see all this behind the scenes footage
and basically what happens when you allow all of this stuff to get monetized?
When you drop the minimum requirement for what is a sellable thing,
what can you charge money for?
Could you unlock this entirely new economy
that would power all of this creative output?
And I just couldn't stop thinking about it
and I was just so convinced in this that I thought I would tweet about it.
And so I did.
I said, yeah, tomorrow I start building my first billion dollar company,
which I think is hilarious because I said first.
It wasn't like a billion dollar company.
It was like, yeah, one of seven.
I don't know what I was on at the time.
I'm sure I was sort of euphoric probably.
And then I built, yeah, I built Gummer that weekend
and it launched Monday morning.
It was on the top of Hacker News, like 50,000 people saw.
And I was just like, it was probably the worst thing that could happen
because it totally just fed into that.
It was like, if this is going to be a billion dollar company,
this is how that starts.
And I'd say it wasn't, but it definitely sort of,
that confirmation bias was very, very strong at the time.
We talked about that movie, The Social Network,
and how that was sort of a turning point in Silicon Valley
where so many people who weren't really aware of what was going on
got suddenly interested and wanted to come out here
and sort of write the story of their life as this billionaire tech founder.
And that seems to be kind of like the wave that you were writing too.
How old were you when this happened,
when you launched Gumroad and it blew up over the course of a weekend?
I think I was 18 at the time.
So I was, yeah, I was super young.
And it was honestly, I think that was a big component
because, you know, if you imagine like a,
this happens to prodigies in piano and in different skills
where they have this trajectory
because their sort of professional development has taken place
over very, very few years.
The sort of the rate of growth looks like a rocket ship, right?
But in a lot of these cases, it's sort of asymptotic, right?
So it goes from zero to 90 in three years,
but then it goes from like 90 to 91 in another three years and slows down.
Whereas most people have a more linear growth.
It basically tricks people because what people do inherently is they extrapolate, right?
So I was like 18 at this time.
I just raised, I was 19 maybe at the time that I had raised money.
I was, you know, I had raised 8 million bucks.
I was 19.
I was on the front page of all these different things.
And it was just like, you can't help, I think,
project that line sort of breaking through the chart
and going into the stars or whatever.
And then, yeah, totally at the same time,
Silicon Valley was getting on the radar as a whole in pop culture
because of movies like The Social Network.
I think that was such a critically important movie and time and moment
because it really sort of mainstreamified Silicon Valley, right?
This was 2010 when, you know, people talk about Instagram being this massive thing.
But at that point, like Instagram, I think,
had not even sold to Facebook for a billion bucks.
It was, you know, which is now, if you think about Instagram being worth a billion dollars,
it would be laughed out of the room.
But, you know, back then, no one really used Instagram.
It was still like a relatively niche thing that for like photographers now,
it's just used by influencers and everyone to just post their life.
But I think it really...
What it did was it matured the industry, I think, really fast
where all of a sudden it went from a bunch of people building stuff
and their sort of their motivations definitely were money related,
but, you know, we're mostly there to build things
and truly, I think, changed the world.
And it turned into, I think, something like Wall Street,
which is this is a great business opportunity.
There is a massive amount of inefficiency in the world.
Software is this new thing that's going to fix a lot of that.
We're going to be able to capture a bunch of value by doing that.
So, inherently, it attracts people that are there to make money
and to have a career, which is totally fine and sort of necessary.
I think every industry sort of goes through that.
But I think it happened so fast that it fell overnight
that, like, one day it was just a bunch of people building stuff
and then all of a sudden it was, like, all of these people
wanting to sell stuff and wanting to grow stuff
and wanting to growth hack and all of these sorts of things.
And it just changed, I think, the vibe of the industry.
And I think, honestly, for the better, I think it's easy to sort of say,
oh, all these, like, finance bros came in.
But at the end of the day, like, I think it just,
it provides a mirror to what we were doing,
which is at the end of the day, tech is a great job.
You get to build a lot of really cool stuff and you make a lot of money.
And so I think it's sort of okay to say, look,
like, we are motivated by several things
and not all of those things is just sort of, like, hippy building stuff,
you know, on the peak of a mountain because we love the process of building software.
At the end of the day, that's just not true.
And it's, I think, healthy to be like, look, at the end of the day,
Wall Street and the tech industry are not profoundly different.
They are honestly almost identical.
And that's fine because most things are pretty similar
and everyone sort of has similar incentives and things like that.
There's not something sort of profoundly unique about software.
It's just money with logic built into it or something like that.
What was this process like of you building this app over a weekend?
Because I think most people, if they run into this roadblock,
oh, I really want to sell this thing I made online, I can't.
The conclusion would be that it's too difficult to do it.
And if no one else has done it, certainly you can't do it.
Something else.
What gave you the confidence that you could make this website,
this product that would actually help people sell stuff online?
And how did you build it in just a weekend?
I think it was a combination of things.
The first one was because I can design and code.
And so that was always, I think, a strength of mine.
I think it's what led me getting the job at Pinterest,
was they could basically give this kid a really loose spec
and then I could come back with a full app.
You know, I didn't have to necessarily work with anybody else too deeply
to get to sort of an MVP.
And it was similar, I think, with Gumroad where it's like,
okay, I'm not that competent of an engineer, certainly,
but I can make a CRUD app, which is basically what most apps are, right?
You create products, you upload files, you edit the name and the price,
you can delete them, and then you can tweet them out
and then people can buy them.
And I think the other thing that happened was I always try to ask myself,
why hasn't this been built yet? What prevented the past from making this thing?
And I think with Gumroad, it was this idea that people were still
building up these audiences on their own on social media
and it was a relatively new thing.
And so if you didn't have an audience on social media,
there was no point in selling directly, right?
You were going to sell through all of these judicial means
because that's how people interacted with their audience
and with their potential customers anyway through iTunes.
And things like that.
So that was part one, was the sort of that component of the system
was still owned, I think, primarily by these traditional middlemen.
And then the other one was Stripe.
It was so difficult to accept payments
and Stripe just totally changed the game on that.
Certainly, it went from a two to three week process
to a weekend process or a 30 minute process.
And I was sort of lucky, I think.
I knew John.
I'd met him a few months, I think, before that.
And I was like, hey, John, could I have a Stripe metakey?
And he was like, yeah, sure.
And so I think, I don't know what, I wish I could find out.
Maybe you can find out for me what user ID Gumroad has in Stripe.
But I think we're pretty early.
This is April 2011.
And so that, I think, made the whole thing super easy.
It was really, I think, not only a proof of concept for Gumroad,
I think, but a proof of concept for Stripe.
This is the sort of thing that's now possible
because of something like Stripe.
I think if I had used PayPal, which I think was the original idea,
I would have probably spent two to three weeks on it,
and then no longer sexy, right?
I think a huge amount of the appeal of something like Stripe
is democratizing the ability to accept credit card payments
and what happens when you do that.
And so, yeah, I was just so obsessed with the idea.
And I had this fixation already with building things in a weekend.
That was always one, I had a full-time job.
And so I was burnt out at the end of the day.
It was going to be hard for me to do that Monday through Friday.
But two, I really felt like there were all these ideas.
And sometimes people get caught up in the name or the branding
or the logo or the design and the FAQ pages
and all that sort of stuff and making it perfect.
And I was always like, no, I just need to build stuff.
My goal is to learn, not necessarily to build successful products
at this point, because I'm going to do that in 10 years, right?
That was still sort of my plan was in five to 10 years,
I was going to go try that.
And so my goal was just to be prolific
and ship as many different ideas as possible
because the product that I was really building was like my own brain, right?
It was my own ability to build products.
That was more exciting to me than anything else.
That was what I had to do.
I was like, I need to launch this Monday morning.
I think maybe that was part of why I tweeted it, I think in hindsight.
I think there were a couple sort of deep reasons.
One was that was just if I told the world that I'd have to do it, right?
It'd be really awkward if I tweeted this thing.
And then six months later, everyone's like,
hey, what happened to that thing that you said you were going to build?
And then I think the other one is just,
I wanted to put a stake in the ground.
I was so, I don't know if I was confident
that it was going to be a billion dollar company,
but there was a high enough chance that I wanted to like,
I sort of, I think I imagined like the times cover, you know,
like this tweet, this stupid kid in the middle of nowhere in his life
tweeted this thing and then it actually became a billion dollar company.
Like what the hell? That's crazy.
And so I think part of it was that too,
was like just thinking about the sort of the 10 years I could look back
and it would serve as almost like a time capsule of sort of my thinking at the time.
This is why I brought up the social network again
because it's the story of Mark Zuckerberg striking it rich.
But everybody in SF in Silicon Valley really has its own kind of story
about themselves, picturing themselves on the front cover of a magazine,
picturing the biography that will be written about them.
And I think that's also why it's so shocking to people when their company
ends up, you know, one of the 70% that don't make it
because it's contrary to the story that they've sort of written about themselves.
Yeah. And you need that story to a degree, right?
At the end of the day, like it's not easy.
It is relatively low probability.
And the truth I think is you need to have almost some amount of delusion
because five years in, I mean, it's not nearly as fun
or as sexy as the social network makes it out to be.
You're sort of constantly in like a fight or flight response
with something or the other.
You're building a team.
It's really high stakes.
It's a lot of stress.
And there are a lot of reasons to say, okay, never mind.
But I think when you, you know, if you're a basketball player,
like having the poster of LeBron on your wall,
like that's super motivating, you know,
even though you might not make it.
And I think you kind of just have to,
you just have to believe that you're going to be the exceptional case.
And I think what happens is you go so long believing that
and seeing all of these signs that sort of are like,
oh, we raised a Series A in like six months.
We raised 8 million bucks.
We hired this amazing person.
There are all these, you know, I'm meeting with this, you know,
with the CEO of American Express or whatever is happening.
And there are all these signs that are like,
oh, that's the story, right?
Like those are like, if you watch a TV show,
like that's the character arc that happens.
Yeah.
These are the scenes in your movie.
Yeah.
And exactly.
And then you get,
you feel like you're getting closer and closer and closer.
And then all of a sudden you just like the, you know,
you just hit a wall.
And at that point you've sort of gone so deep into the movie.
You're sort of just so unaware and so on present in your,
in your experience that, that it's a shock.
It becomes a shock, even though intellectually,
I think everyone's like, yeah, this is a thing.
It's a lottery timing market lock privilege.
All of these things really matter.
But all of a sudden when you're,
when you start to see these signs of success,
you don't really realize that a lot of other people are seeing these
same signs of success and very few of you are going to make it.
There's actually a story that a high school teacher told me one time
about a scam that happened in America.
And what they did was they would mail out,
let's say 10,000, uh, mail saying, you know,
if you invest in the stock, you're going to make,
you're going to make money.
And then every, every week they pick a different stock and they'd say,
if you invest in the stock, you're going to make money. Right.
And there are all these people that got to the end of, you know,
like let's say a 12 week process.
And literally every single time this mail was telling them the stock
that was going to make them a bunch of money.
And then on the 13th week, they get this, this mail that's like, Hey,
you know, we told you all of these things. It's amazing.
Like send, you know, invest in this new thing at $50,000,
$10,000, whatever it is, however much money you have.
And all these people are like, yeah, that, I mean, obviously this person
literally predicted a future 12 times in a row.
I'm going to give them a bunch of money.
But what happens is they actually mail thousands and thousands of people
that, and they pick all these different companies.
And then the second week, they only mail the people that,
they were right.
So smart.
And third week, fourth week, fifth week, et cetera.
And so it's a numbers game.
And so you have all these people that are like, they think they're the
chosen one in a sense.
But actually there are all of these people that got really close to Mount
Doom and died along the way that you just never heard about.
It turns out there's actually millions of hobbits or whatever, you know?
And you just, what happens is, is you figure out which one worked and then
great, you have all the footage of all these other ones.
You throw all that away and you just tell the story of this one.
And you just can't help but think, oh, like I am on the track.
I am.
I've been right all of these different times.
It's like, you know, you ever watched like a, you know, how to be a
millionaire or whatever that game is called, you know, and it's the same
sort of idea, right?
Like you, you're like on the, on the, on the story and you, you just can't
imagine not being the one to win a million dollars because you're getting
all of this confirmation bias all the time and then you lose it and you can
see the, their faces are just like in shock.
Yeah.
They're like, they couldn't even, even though the chance, the true sort of, if
you look at the statistics, probably like, I don't know, half a percent or
something, get from, you know, the lap, the penultimate question to the
ultimate question and end up winning the money.
It's sort of a fascinating, I'm sure they, they're mindful of that, right?
Like they build the game and the story that they're telling within the
episode so that people believe that they're the chosen one, they do that.
And then they ultimately lose.
Otherwise it would be very unprofitable for, for the, for the producers
of the show.
I've got a ton of stuff I want to say in response to that.
First, a note to the audience.
If you guys want to look at what Gumroad looked like back in 2011 when
Sahel first launched it, just Google way back machine and put in gumroad.com
click back to the April 2011 and you can see the homepage as he originally
launched it, which was super simple.
I think that's why you were able to keep it to just like a weekend project.
You weren't trying to be super ambitious.
You didn't have like a ton of different pages on it.
I think people can learn a lot that you can get somewhere ambitious over time.
If you start small, you don't need to start super huge, but back to what
you're talking about this process where you sort of have, you know, when after
when success after success, but in a lot of ways that's completely
indistinguishable from getting lucky over and over again.
It's pretty brutal.
You've actually tweeted that the best co-founder is luck.
What do you think are some of the luckiest things that happened to you early
in gumroad's history and what do you think are some of the things that were
very deliberate, considered decisions that led to success?
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, some of the most profound moments in my, you know,
in my career and these are, you know, these are things that other founders
and VCs have looked at and been jealous.
I mean, they told me after I wrote that article on failure, they were like,
wow, I kind of have to apologize because I thought you were a dick because
you were having all the success for doing absolutely nothing.
But I was really thinking about, you know, like when I got the job at Pinterest,
that had nothing to do with me, right?
Like what if Ben had emailed somebody else?
Who knows, right?
What if that post of my app on Hacker News didn't make it to the top?
What if he checked it 15 minutes later, right?
Like there are all these sort of things that went into that happening for me.
When I, you know, one of the things that got me really interested in gumroad
and really being like, wait, this can be a company, like I can raise money
for this, was investors.
You know, this one investor, Craig from Collaborative Fund,
he emailed me after he saw that on Hacker News.
Hacker News has played a pretty phenomenal part in my life.
And he just said, hey, like I know you're fully employed.
I know you're at Pinterest.
If you ever decide to leave Pinterest and start this thing as a company,
like I'll send you at least $10,000.
And I was like, hey, I don't know if I'm ever going to do that.
But if you want to send me $10,000, like here's a bank account, you know,
and like let me know.
And he did.
He literally sent me, you know, I mean, we had some back and forth
and agreed on some terms.
But he sent me $10,000 and I just sat there
in some Bank of America account or something I had made, you know,
for a holding company.
And, you know, it was just like this insane amount of validation
that I had that had nothing to do with me.
It was just other people constantly being like, hey, you know,
we think you have potential, you know, here's some validation.
Here's a contract.
Here's, you know, some money, et cetera.
And I think that played a really sort of profound role
in my confidence levels at the time and really sort of was like,
wow, I am.
I can do this.
Like this is something I can do.
I, you know, I had always just read these stories
and I had imagined like Bill Gates like as some crazy profound CEO,
founder working on a supercomputer, you know,
like parked up against a wall or something like who knows.
Like I never related to them.
I'm not nerdy enough.
And that really was like, no, you can do this.
Like you are one of these people.
And so I think that was really important.
But I think the thing that I was good at and I think one of the things
I will take credit for is I was always very open and very transparent.
And so, you know, I wasn't just building stuff, you know,
in my dorm room.
I was posting on Hacker News.
I wasn't just posting on Hacker News.
I write a blog post about building the thing.
And then I shared that on Hacker News and I tweet about it.
And I think I was always really good at putting myself out there
and putting my work out there and building up a reputation and a brand.
And even when I raised the seed round,
it wasn't just this random person raising money.
It was this person who had worked at Pinterest who had this blog
that had gone back for a few years.
You know, people could see that and be like, okay,
this is a reputable person.
He really does care about building stuff.
He didn't just watch the social network and then move to San Francisco
and is trying to raise money and build the next Facebook, right?
Which I think is a lot of the stuff that they probably deal with,
I think, on a day-to-day basis.
I've always been really open about meeting people.
I was spending every weekend, you know,
when I was in Palo Alto meeting with different founders
and different people from Hacker News.
You know, some of those founders have gone on to create a billion-dollar company.
John from Stripe is one of them.
He reached out to me, I think, back in the day.
You know, we were both like 18 or 19-year-old kids at the time.
Brian Armstrong from Coinbase reached out to me
and asked me if I would consider working with him on some Bitcoin-related project.
And I said, that's weird.
I don't really think Bitcoin is going to work.
And then he made Coinbase.
And then, oh, I didn't even know that.
I totally forgot about this.
But apparently, the founders of Plaid,
which is also, I think, a unicorn at this point, are close.
I hung out with them recently.
We had a former employee go to them to lead their design.
And he's like, we actually met a long time ago
and you were giving us some advice on some stuff.
And I was like, wow, that is insane.
But I think it's important.
I think, you know, the best co-founder is luck.
But I think, you know, you can definitely work on your luck, right?
And luck, I think, broadly means all sorts of stuff.
But mostly what it means is the stuff out of your control.
But you can still kind of, you know, you can, you know,
like Ben sending me that email was out of my control.
I couldn't force him to do that.
But what I could do is post my app on Hacker News.
Email a bunch of blogs that wrote about app design
and try to get them to write about it.
Email TechCrunch every time I built something.
Tweet about all this stuff.
Have a Twitter account that people could follow.
You know, put my email in my Hacker News profile
so people could reach out and we could grab coffee.
And start building up these relationships.
And even I wrote this post reflecting on my failure
to build a billion dollar company at the beginning of this year.
And, you know, it did really well.
I think it probably would have done well anyways.
But I think a lot of it, I got probably over 100 people
that were like, hey, I met you at Cyglass Coffee in 2013.
And I just want to say I had no idea you were going through this,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But there are a lot of these responses.
And I think that probably led to a large amount
of the success of the article because it wasn't just like,
oh, this random founder went through this.
It was this person that people had met, potentially.
And, you know, you go to that Twitter post
and you'll see the replies of it.
There's like 200 to 300 replies of all these people
that are all Silicon Valley somebodies now that were like,
hey, we met up or this.
It's so cool to hear your journey.
And I'm glad you're doing well.
And it gives, I think, a depth to the article that goes deeper
than just like, oh, this story that you read on Medium
and it's really cool or whatever.
And I think that's really important because at the end of the day,
if you want to raise money, often the first round
of funding is called the friends and family round, right?
And that sort of implies that it has nothing to do
with what you've built.
That implies that you've built a network of people that trust you,
that believe in you, and that want you to succeed
and are sort of willing to help you do that.
And a lot of people don't have friends and family with money.
And that's super notable and important to talk about.
But I think at the end of the day,
I spent a long period of time building that network
and building that level of trust.
And so when I decided, hey, I'm going to go start this company,
I had that already going for me, right?
Like when I tweeted that Medium article,
I think I got something like 150 retweets in the first five minutes.
There's no way anyone read that article that fast, right?
But I think it was like, hey, this person that I, you know,
has helped me out, you know, somewhere in the last eight years,
I did the math and I think I probably had coffee meetings
with probably around 7,000 people in that time.
And it's like, you know, hey, like he helped me out that one time,
I'll help him out this one time, right?
And that boosts the post.
And Twitter looks at that and is like, hey, like this,
clearly this post is jiving with people, like let's, you know,
the algorithm will go put that somewhere else, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I think that those things add up over time.
You can't control when they're going to help.
I think Naval has some saying about that where it's basically like,
you should help people and it will come back to you.
But if you're counting it, if you're waiting for it,
you're going to get pissed off.
It's going to take a lot longer than you think,
but a lot of these things will come back and help you out.
You know, if I was bitter about Pinterest,
that could have burned some bridges that would have led to me
not being able to raise money at all, right?
I think I've always tried to be really, really positive about my relationships.
And even today, I think it's important to continue to build those relationships
with people I've never met.
And one of the things that I really believe now that's a relatively new realization
for me is that friends take time to build.
You don't become friends with someone overnight.
I always used to be upset, and I've talked about it before,
that San Francisco is a transactional place, right?
And like when I went through the layoffs and everything,
I felt like my network had sort of evaporated.
But the truth, I think, in large part is that these networks,
like they weren't friends because we hadn't known each other long enough, right?
Friends become friends over time.
Adults complain about it's always really hard to move to a new city and make friends.
But I think part of it is, well, it takes years.
Imagine, think about who you're friends with.
Who would you crash on a couch with when you're visiting a city, right?
It's probably the people that you've known the longest
that have seen you drunk and through some really hard times.
It's not just the people that knew you when you were the founder
of a venture-backed startup.
And I think that's been important for me to realize too,
something I'm actually trying to do now when I go to San Francisco
is not to status-seek and not to just hang out with,
oh, I have 50,000 followers on Twitter
and there are all these new cool people that I get to hang out with or whatever.
But really, like, okay, who did I meet over the last eight years
that I really just liked?
That I just think I really just want to be friends with these people.
I don't care how many Twitter followers they have or what they're doing,
but I just like them.
I want them to succeed and I want to help them succeed.
And I just want to spend time with them
and really sort of build out those relationships.
You talked about how so many people came up to you and said,
hey, we had coffee, but we had no idea what you were going through.
You talked about hitting a wall.
You also talked about Gumroad having the most boring upward trajectory graph
with nothing really super exciting going on.
So what was this wall you hit despite Gumroad growing
pretty consistently over time?
Yeah, I think the physical wall I hit
was just the Series B that we tried to raise.
So we had raised $8 million in six months with basically no team.
And so we had an insanely long burn.
So we went from, I think we closed the Series A in May 2012,
and that was $7 million led by Kleiner Perkins
and everyone took their pro rata.
And so we had, I think, three years basically
before we had to really be like, okay, we need to raise money again.
So I think part of it was we'd gone so long without any real external pressure.
I think that was a mistake in hindsight.
But basically, I started talking to investors again and saying,
hey, a year from now, we're probably going to be raising money.
These are our numbers.
They look awesome up and to the right.
And the investors are like, no, this is not where you need to be.
If you're going to go out to raise the Series B,
$15, $20, $30 million, sort of a $100 million plus dollar valuation,
you need to be growing a lot faster.
Your numbers need to be a lot bigger.
Your trajectory, your potential basically,
there's none of that here.
And I actually looked up when I was taking notes along this process
and I was sharing it with the team, which is something I'm very glad that I did.
So it was never a surprise when things got really tricky for us.
One investor from actually one of the firms that gave us a Series A term sheet
said, you're growing 7% a month.
You need to be growing 10% to 20% a month.
Those are the types of companies that we're looking at right now
in your stage.
And I think that's important to realize is when you're fundraising,
you're not fundraising their vacuum.
You're not just building a good business.
You're building a business that is competing with $10, $15, $20, $50,
I don't even know how many other businesses for a Series B term sheet
from less than 10 top-tier firms that can invest in this sort of thing.
And so when everyone else is growing at a certain rate,
10%, 20%, or even if just one of them is, there's one spot.
And if you're not that spot, you're a no.
There's no second place basically.
And that's the wall that we ran up against was we just were not growing fast enough.
And I think a lot of people, including former team members
I've had conversations with, they're like, man, we could have done something differently.
We could have raised money if we told a different story.
But I think the truth is, and Josh Koppelman, one of our investors says,
there's nothing like bad numbers to eff up a good story.
At the end of the day, I think that's relatively true
because when you raise money, you have to do it on potential.
You have to do it on trajectory because the numbers, frankly, are so absurd
that you can't raise money based on your normal metrics.
Otherwise, they would go invest in a very boring, profitable company
that had a guaranteed rate of return.
What they want to do is invest in incredibly high-risk things
that have incredibly high rewards if and when they work out.
And when you have, at the time, at this point,
five years of data, revenue, transaction data, et cetera,
and those things show the company growing at a rate of 25%, 35%, 50%,
even 80% a year when the other companies they're looking at are growing faster,
it's very difficult to say, look, it is growing like this,
but we're still going to be a billion-dollar company
just extrapolate.
And it's like, okay, this is going to take about 40 years
to be a billion-dollar company at this rate.
And I think it's just important to really understand that
while everyone's in it to build cool stuff and change the world,
at least hypothetically, at the end of the day,
investors are still money managers.
They have a job.
It's not their money.
They raised a bunch of money and they need to provide a 3x return in 10 years.
And you just start doing the math on what that looks like for firms
and they need an Uber, they need a LinkedIn, they need a Pinterest,
they need a Slack in order to make the fund work for them.
And if you're not going to be that,
and there's a lot of data that shows you're not going to be that,
you'd have to come up with something incredibly compelling to change their mind.
And I just don't know if that's possible.
It's pretty brutal as a founder to be in that situation
where you're not what these investors need.
You've got numbers, and the numbers are basically telling investors,
hey, you're not going to hit it out of the park for us.
But the numbers are also telling you that your company's working
and people like it, and you're doing 2x a year.
What are some of the things that you did early on
to get these numbers to consistently go up and to the right,
even if they weren't going up quite as fast as investors wanted them to?
Yeah, I think one of the things that we did well was
we really built the correct product.
I think we were really focused,
and one of the things that I always try to do is build things
that have a built-in word-of-mouth growth component to them
because I'm so scared of having to do that on purpose.
I think it's incredibly difficult,
and I have mad respect for people that figure that part of the problem out.
But for me, it's like I want to build a phenomenal product.
That product, if it's great, is going to grow by itself.
And then we can think about our sales funnels and our sales function
as how do we just get this in front of the right people
that are going to fall in love with this product.
And all we're doing is raising awareness, basically.
We're not sort of selling.
We're educating somebody on a problem that they know they have,
and we're just telling them,
hey, by the way, the solution exists now.
And I think that was just a lot of direct sales, basically.
A lot of cold emails, a lot of cold calls.
We try to think about, okay,
these are the aggregation points of these sorts of communities.
This is where all the musicians are.
This is where all the filmmakers are.
This is where they hang out.
Sundance, different talent agencies, labels, et cetera.
And we just really had to make it happen.
We had to sort of push the boulder up the hill.
And there are no real secrets, I think, to that.
It was really just crafting personalized emails to people saying,
hey, we built this thing called Gumroad.
This is what it does.
It helps anyone that has content.
We sort of do an all-in-one e-commerce.
We do the credit card form, the payments, the marketing page,
the receipt, the invoicing, the content delivery,
the download, the streaming, rentals, subtitles,
everything you need to sell your documentary.
And you can take 95% of the revenues home if you sell with Gumroad.
All you got to do is have an audience.
And it works.
I think it works if you do that.
People are going to say, cool, yeah, that's a fit for me.
Most people are not.
At the end of the day, most people are pretty happy with their lives.
There's a sort of profound amount of inertia.
Everyone is making things work.
And so I think there is a lesson there,
which is to sort of focus on the people that already have the need.
It's incredibly difficult to convince somebody that they have a problem
if their life is going fine.
To say, yeah, you're already selling this thing on,
you have a deal with Netflix, for example,
and you're making a few hundred thousand dollars a year as a filmmaker,
you should actually stop doing that
and totally change your business model
because this new way is even better.
It just doesn't work.
I think the humans are incredibly fearful of risk
and loss aversion, et cetera.
Yeah, I mean, that was honestly it.
And even one of the things that we used to track
was our organic versus sourced growth.
And we had this organic curve that was almost nothing.
I mean, so much of our volume in the first two, three years,
I think over 80% of our volume,
when we started thinking about the Series B,
so probably even 2013, 2014,
so like two, three years in with a full product team, et cetera,
we were still mostly funneled, fueled by direct sourced growth,
people that we reached out to and had to teach about the product
because at the end of the day, we're a relatively young company.
We're unknown.
We have a weird name.
We don't have enough SEO power.
It's so difficult to build a business that's purely self-serve.
I think the beauty of SaaS is now, for example,
when we had to do the layouts, we continued to grow
because we'd invested so much in the self-serve component.
But the truth of the matter is, three, four years in,
the vast majority of the sales were coming through,
people that we had built relationships with.
And I think this is similar even with our own creators.
When we see successful creators,
I know Adam didn't interview with you recently,
a lot of that is building relationships with people.
And when you're, you know, that $40,000, right,
like when you're ready to go, like you can see that payoff, right?
That's the version of all those retweets on my Medium post,
is really taking the time to build these relationships up,
similar with when I fundraised, right?
It was mostly people that I had known before.
And if it wasn't someone I had known before,
it was someone that intro'd me that I had known before,
that was willing to vouch and put the reputation on the line
for me as a person.
And so I think that's like really, really, really important,
is to say, okay, I'm building an app, you know,
that in the podcasting vertical, and we help people,
we build these marketing pages for people with podcasts.
That's not gonna happen organically.
You can build the best product,
but at the end of the day, it's unlikely to happen.
You're gonna have to figure out, okay,
who's the perfect customer for this?
Okay, like go email them, go talk to them,
get an intro to them, and get them to use your software.
And if they don't use your software,
figure out why they're not using your software.
And that's just kind of what you have to do.
I mean, Stripe is, I'm sure, the same story.
Of course, now they're probably relatively self-serve.
But in the beginning, you know, it was like, okay,
let's ping every single YC company.
I was one of the first users.
I was a friend of John, right?
These are relationships that existed off of just a purely,
you know, I googled, saw Stripe credit card processing
and said, oh yeah, sure, I'll sign up for this thing.
I'll just give them all of my banking information
and let them power 100% of my business's revenue.
That sounds like a great idea.
And it was a lot uglier at the time.
So yeah, I think it's just so important.
And I wish more people talked about it, too.
You know, people write these articles about these crazy growth hacks
and all that sort of stuff.
But those things only work once you have your initial audience, right?
Once you already have your initial set of users,
then you can start messing around with stuff like that.
Like, that stuff works well, you know, as a multiplier
on your existing growth.
But at the end of the day, you still need your existing growth
to make that stuff happen and to make that stuff work out long, long-term.
And I think the other thing that I think sometimes people miss
is when you listen to people talk about these things,
even like me, right?
Like, you're talking to someone who did this seven, eight years ago,
which is very different than someone doing this today, right?
The markets are totally different.
The way that you might get into contact with people
is so profoundly different.
And I think it's really important to talk to people
that are just a little bit ahead of you.
They have more skin in the game to teach you
and to help you out as well.
It's funny because it's so deceptive from the outside looking in.
When you look at Stripe, you don't see salespeople
doing direct sales to people in self-stripe.
You just see the sort of self-serve form.
You look at Gumroad, you don't see all of you guys
working behind the scenes to get the word out to tons of people.
You just kind of see like, oh, here's why I sent it for Gumroad.
So I think a lot of people who want to start a company
really underestimate how much you really need
to be putting in a lot of this work, this relationship building,
this one-on-one sales outreach to people to really get the ball rolling.
That's totally spot on and even when you see stories like
50,000 people saw Gumroad in the first day or whatever,
none of those people used Gumroad.
Most of them didn't.
We basically had this crazy spike
and then it went back to whatever our normal growth curve was,
which at the time was basically nothing.
So I think that's another important thing to understand is that
having an amazing launch on Product Hunt might look really sexy,
but that's sort of like winning an award for a restaurant.
All that says is that your peers think you're great,
but that has nothing to do with
if anyone's actually going to eat at your restaurant long-term.
So I think that's also important to understand is at the end of the day,
make sure you're measuring the right thing,
which is how many people are actually using this software,
paying you money to use this software,
not just, oh, I got number one on Product Hunt.
That's not typically what builds great businesses.
So I'm still on the way back machine,
scrolling through different versions of what Gumroad looked like in the past.
And it's funny, in 2011, you had a quote on your homepage from Nathan Barry,
who I've also had on this podcast.
And he also had a big inflection point on his business
where it wasn't growing, it was super small,
and then he just said,
screw it, I'm going to start doing direct sales.
And that was his breakthrough moment.
I think what's remarkable about your story is you guys were doing this,
you said the first three or four years,
your primary engine of growth.
For most people that I talked to, they're like,
yeah, I got my first 100 customers,
my first 1,000 customers by just sending a ton of emails.
But after that, it kind of took on a life of its own.
When did things switch around for you guys, if ever?
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think things switched around by necessity
when we literally couldn't afford a sales team anymore.
And so it was like, I remember that, actually,
because the way that I was thinking about it was,
we failed to raise a Series B,
we had conversations with investors, it wasn't happening.
I was going to shrink the team from 20 to 5,
and we did, and we got to profitable.
And what I told myself was,
I'm going to run this business for a couple years
and see what happens.
We have no sales team.
I'm doing all the support at this point.
We basically can't ship any new features.
We don't have enough resources to really do that.
What happens to Gumroad if we literally do nothing
besides the bare minimum?
And that's what we did.
When you look at that graph from 2015 to 2018,
it's the best part of the graph.
It continued to grow.
And so it paid off.
I think the journey down that mountain,
that boulder was gaining momentum and we're actually growing faster.
The rate of change is actually increasing every year as well,
the rate of growth.
But it was almost undetectable
because those numbers were so small in the early days.
And I think the reason for that is because
when we do direct sales with M&M,
it does $2 million in two days.
We're processing $20 million in 2014, I think.
So you just do the math on that.
It's like a tenth of our volume from one user in two days.
Whereas a self-serve person like me is like,
I'm going to sell my pencil icon on Gumroad and make seven bucks.
You just do the math on that.
And what happens is it goes to that whole vanity thing.
What you're doing is you're tracking all of these people
that use your software, like the 50,000 people,
the number one on Product Hunt, all the accounts that are being created.
But you're not tracking your revenue.
How many people are actually making a living using your software,
which is going to be a lot smaller?
And you even look at a company like what I highly recommend
a lot of startup founders do is go read the S1s
of some of these companies that have recently gone public.
Look at Slack, look at Zoom, look at PagerDuty.
The number of companies that drive the majority of their revenue,
of their revenue is often in the hundreds.
Think about that.
You're Slack.
This is a company that basically everybody uses at this point.
You'd be probably surprised if you met a friend
that didn't know what Slack was or didn't use it
for something or the other.
And I think something like 850 companies drive
40% of their revenue or something like that.
It just is insane, the long tail of these things.
And I think if you look at the people that advertise on Facebook
or Google or Twitter, you'll see a similar long tail
where there are very few companies that spend an insane amount of money.
I think Microsoft's contract with Slack
is like four million bucks a year.
Think about how many gum roads you'd need
to get paid four million bucks a year.
You'd need thousands of them or at least hundreds.
And so I think often...
And by the way, Microsoft is never going to sign up
for Slack self-service.
That's just not going to happen.
I'm sure if you look at Stripe, you'll see a similar story
where a huge amount of the revenue
is coming from these massive marketplaces
like Lyft or what have you.
And so I think part of it is just being open
and honest about that internally.
I think one of the really hard things about that
is that people don't want to talk about it
because it creates this dissonance
with why you started the company in the first place.
Because imagine you're Square, you're Stripe,
you're Gumroad, you're Shopify,
and you're like, yeah, we're going to help democratize.
That's the word.
We're going to democratize this ability.
All these people that have never been able to monetize
their content or launch a SaaS product
are going to be able to do this.
And then you look at your numbers and you're like,
wait a second, all of our money is coming from Microsoft.
I'm pretty sure they could have done this already.
But at the end of the day, it is what it is.
A lot of your money is going to come from these
very, very few companies.
Even with us, we have an incredibly long tail.
But even with us, the top user on Gumroad,
we process $6 million a month.
The top user on Gumroad does around over $500,000 a month.
So 8% or so of our monthly volume is one person.
So even when you look at a product that seems
almost entirely directed at the long tail,
we're still having a power law within the long tail itself.
We don't have a Microsoft doing $4 million a year,
paying us $4 million a year, but we do have a creator,
the Microsoft in our world doing really, really well.
And so I think it's just important to understand
that you will have, in gaming, they're called whales.
These people that spend tens of thousands of dollars a month
on FarmVille.
And that's the majority of the revenue.
And that allows you to build software
for all of these other people.
But I think it's important to understand that
the reason your business works at the scale that it does
is because you have these beasts, these behemoths
spending a lot of money for your software.
And at the end of the day,
they're not going to sign up for your software organically.
It's just maybe one day.
But for now, if Stripe wants Lyft,
there's, I guarantee, at least one phone call
that's happened in that process.
So how does this affect your strategy running Gumroad today?
Do you spend a lot of time looking for these whales to sign them up?
We've actually done the opposite.
And honestly, it's a tough one because I think a lot of people,
including former employees, were like,
look, we should just focus on M&M, right?
If he makes two million bucks in two days,
we get 50 of those and we're good.
And it just wasn't really the type of business I wanted to build.
I saw that power law and I said,
someone needs to support these creators at the end of the day.
These innovating creators, basically what happens
is all of these companies go upmarket because they see what I see, right?
These whales making the vast majority of their revenue for them.
And they stop supporting these folks.
And then there's a new service that does the same thing.
And then they go upmarket and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so my philosophy now is like,
we're not going to try to build a massive company.
We're not going to seek the whales.
They are going to become whales on our platform.
And some of them will leave, unfortunately,
because they need certain functionality or a lower transaction fee
or all of these sorts of things.
A dedicated customer support person, an SLA,
some security features, et cetera.
And we're just going to focus on what we call the zero to one,
the people just getting started.
Because at the end of the day, someone needs to help them.
And the amount of value being created, I think,
by Gumroad creators is massive,
even though we can't capture all of the value.
An example of this is someone you mentioned, actually, Nathan Barry, right?
ConvertKit founder, he was on Gumroad.
He made a significant amount of money on Gumroad selling books and software.
And he used those proceeds to start ConvertKit.
And now ConvertKit is a much larger business than Gumroad is
and doing an amazing amount of good for the world.
And so I think, for me, it's tricky, honestly.
It's not easy.
And I definitely am still figuring it out.
But for me, it's like, I really just want to bias
towards the ConvertKit stories and bias less towards
the enterprise sales model.
Even though it means we're not going to build
as profoundly significant of a business,
we will be able to build a business that people,
hopefully, credit with some important inflection point in their life.
And then the other thing, I think, is just we're going to talk a lot
about building the business.
And hopefully, we'll be able to get some of that satisfaction,
not in the form of revenue or valuation
or a nice bank account balance,
but people saying thank you and appreciating the work that we've done.
Similarly to a company that I like a lot is WordPress,
the automatic team.
And I think they, I don't know, some amount of the internet,
20% of the internet or something is powered by WordPress.
And if that was the case and they had a very different model,
they could be doing a lot better.
They'd be a lot more famous, et cetera.
But at the end of the day, I think that the amount of value
that WordPress has created for the world,
the amount of value that the Rails framework has created for the world,
Laravel, et cetera, is, in my opinion,
billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars,
maybe trillions of dollars cumulatively,
and certainly over time will be true.
And none of those people are going to be worth billions of dollars
or anything close to the amount of value that they've created.
And I think that's fine.
I think that's great.
I think as a society, it would be cool if we recognize that a little bit more
and the status and the leaderboard that exists in everybody's head
is the scoreboard on the side of the wall of the Silicon Valley.
Basketball court is not revenue, is not valuation,
is not number of employees, but value creation.
And we figured out a way to measure that.
I think society would just be a lot better for it.
All this money that basically these people become billionaires
because of the status and then that money just sits around, frankly.
I know some of these people, they don't even have cars.
I always joke that if I made a buck a load of money, I would buy a Tesla.
But I could do that now if I really wanted to.
I just haven't.
And so I think, yeah, I think if as a society we could reward
putting some of that money back into the system
or building our companies in a way that means we never got that money
in our bank account in the first place.
But we did get some of the status, some of the credit, some of the fame.
I think society would be better off.
I think humanity would be better off.
And I think there would just be a little bit less animosity
in the world towards other people
if we were just a little bit, quote unquote,
less selfish about some of this stuff.
Obviously, it's a little bit hypocritical for me to say, I think,
because I certainly tried to do that and I failed.
And I wrote this post about it and that gave me all of this status
and boosted my ego and all of those sorts of things.
But I see the value of that now where I'm like, oh, cool.
If I can get that without building a billion dollar company,
that's not bad.
That's a pretty good place to be.
And I'm sort of trying to convince other people like, hey,
is this an accident or is this actually a thing that more people
would want to do on purpose if they knew this was a possibility?
Maybe you'd be able to do this without having to lay off
75% of your company.
That would be kind of nice.
It's appreciating the intangible effects of the work that you do.
It's tricky.
You're talking about people in Provo
and the way that they live in service to each other.
And for kind of the here and now and the people in their community,
I wonder if I tell you something like Gumroad has paid out over
$200 million to creators and artists over the years.
What's the emotional impact of that on you versus the emotional impact
of you being able to help someone in your oil painting class
reach some goal that they hadn't reached before?
Yeah, I do wonder about that.
And honestly, I think it's all the same at the end of the day.
When we sent $400 to some creator, we have this thing that we launched
called the Gumroad Creators Fund because we started making profits
and I just didn't really know what to do with it.
And so I saw all these Mormons around me tithing 10% to their church.
And I was like, oh, we can tie it to our creators.
We can redirect 10% of our profits and give back.
And so we started doing that this year and we gave $400 to this woman
who's going to a First Nations conference
and wants to bring a couple of her female students with her.
And $400 is not a lot of money.
To a venture-backed company, that's nothing.
And nor would they ever make this investment
because it's never going to be the thing that really inflects their growth curve,
which is typically what you're looking for
because you need to raise more money, et cetera, et cetera.
But it changed her life.
And she sent us this YouTube video and it was super emotional for me.
And it just was like, wow, this goes so far.
And I think at the end of the day, there's this story about the little girl
with the starfish where someone says, what are you doing?
She's throwing starfish back into the water.
And someone says, what are you doing?
This is stupid.
This doesn't matter.
Look how many millions of starfish you think you're really making a difference.
And she says, it matters for this one.
It matters for this one.
It matters for this one.
And I think at the end of the day, that's all there is.
The ocean is just made of drops in the water.
And at the end of the day, you can look at the ocean and you could say,
OK, it's only worth solving this problem if we can move the whole ocean.
But the truth is, if everyone thought smaller, I think it would be good.
But I think sort of to answer your question more directly,
I think, yeah, when I help someone oil paint,
or even if I'm just oil painting myself,
the emotional impact of that, the serotonin,
that sort of the dopamine or whatever that fires off in my brain is larger
probably than even hearing $200 million.
At the end of the day, we're massively driven by helping other people
and by hearing these stories.
And these stories are not data.
They're not numbers.
They're individual people whose lives change because of something that you did.
And that is the way that we're built, I think, is to help those people,
to help other people.
And at the end of the day, numbers are just numbers.
And I think one of the reasons that actually founders
that get more successful get less happy over time
is because what happens is you see the number go up like crazy.
You see the 10 go to 100, go to 1,000, go to a million.
But then all the stories that you hear, which are in general negative ones
because otherwise they're just going on with their life,
that goes from 1 to 4 to 10 to 20.
So actually as a percentage of the good stories, it's diminishing.
But as an absolute number, it's going up over time.
And that's all your brain can process.
You're just seeing all the people that are hurting because of what you've built.
Their lives are worse off for what you've built.
And I think that's a huge reason that some of these people go into these
sort of depressive states because the stories are the things that matter
to our brains.
You watch a Pixar movie and you start crying
because a toy can't be with the other toy.
That's insane.
But your brain, you just can't not cry
because your brain perceives that story as valid
and as true as anything else.
But imagine if at the end of that toy story it said,
4 million toys were not reunited with their owners.
You'd be like, that's weird.
But that's just the way that we're built.
And I think understanding and really grokking the way that we are built
in ways that we cannot manipulate, cannot control,
we can just sort of live within.
Those things are really important to understand
because if you want to be happy, which I think a lot of people do want that,
and also be in service of others, work for yourself and work for other people,
I think a lot more people realize these things.
It's funny because I wrote this post and I came to some of these realizations
and I know that anyone that has kids goes through this too.
I've heard it so many times, but you just need to go through it yourself.
I tell people, you're going to read this medium post
and then you're going to make all of these mistakes as well
because some of these things you just kind of need to go through the motions
and the whole body needs to realize what it's doing before you're like,
oh, oh, oh, oh, that's what he meant.
You could read meditations or by Marcus Aurelius or whatever,
but at the end of the day, it's not enough.
You're not going to truly understand what someone's been through
until you've been through it yourself.
Yeah.
And speaking of that, speaking of not really understanding
what someone's been through and tough experiences,
you laid off 75% of Gumroad's workforce.
You went from 20 people down to a company of five
and then down to a company of one.
So at some point, I think it was just you back to being by yourself.
Yeah, just me.
What was that whole process like and how did it feel going through those layoffs?
Oh, man. I mean, it was tough.
I mean, we knew it was coming, right?
And so it was like always there in sort of in the distance.
And as it got closer and closer, I describe it like treading water
where we were alive, but certainly we were running out of oxygen.
And at some point, if a VC didn't come along in their boat and save us,
we were going to drown.
And one of the decisions we made was to say,
okay, we could either cut the team in half now
and then have two years of runway, or we can say,
look, we're going to go for it.
We're going to keep the team the same.
And we're going to work really hard,
and hopefully we can sort of inflect the numbers
and we'll raise money and all will be good.
And it didn't happen.
But I think the thing that I did really well was to communicate
with the whole team the whole time that we were talking to investors
was going to be brutally difficult.
And the default state was we were going to have to do a round of layoffs.
And so when it happened, it was less like, hey, I'm doing this.
And it was more like, hey, this thing that we already agreed upon
is now happening because I'm not doing anything else.
It was sort of the default.
But it was so hard, and I think honestly one of the hardest things about it
was it was the first time in a long time for me,
maybe in my whole life, that I had sort of so visibly sort of contradicted
that story that I had been telling myself and telling other people, frankly.
And the world had been telling me about building,
being one of these people that was going to build this billion dollar company
and do the thing.
And it was like, honestly, sometimes it felt like I was on a TV show or something,
the Truman Show, it felt so perfect.
And when that wasn't going to happen, it was like, well, it's going to happen anyways.
We're going to raise money.
Obviously, these ups and downs are also built into the TV shows.
But then when we did the layoffs, it was like, oh, okay, I guess this is it.
It was like, imagine if you're watching some movie
and then at the sort of the final battle, Frodo just gets killed by Smeagol
and then he walks away with the ring.
I love these hopping analogies.
But that's really how it felt.
It just felt wrong, frankly.
It just didn't make sense to me.
And then the thing that made it even harder was at least I felt like I could pretend,
that I could sort of project a different image to the world.
I didn't have to tweet that this was happening.
But then the TechCrunch wrote about it and there was this,
I was on the front page of TechCrunch again for the first time in a little while
and it was for the exact, it was for a reason that I did not want.
And that was really hard because all of a sudden it was like,
it was a story that other people knew, but I didn't know how many people knew it.
So I was kind of in this weird mode where people would come by the office
for a meeting that I'd scheduled and the office would be basically empty
and maybe they'd read the TechCrunch article, maybe they hadn't
and I had sort of to play this face and basically lie, be sort of dishonest.
And I'm sure I was not present in those meetings to a large degree.
And actually since the article came out, people have told me that.
They're like, yeah, I came to the office and it was a very weird meeting
and I'm glad you're doing good now.
And so I wish I think in hindsight that I had been more honest from the get-go
and it was like, look, this happens, we're going to get through it.
But I think partly it was like I didn't want to tell creators,
I didn't want creators to find out if they didn't need to find out
because they'd leave and who knows what would happen with Gumroad
and maybe it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy
and we'd go into a debt spiral and then we'd die and then I would be real failure.
And so I pretended that everything was fine
and it was just the worst thing ever because I was still living in San Francisco.
I was still paying a lot of money in rent.
I was still hanging out with all these people that were there for startups
and I suddenly like didn't have anything to say at these parties,
at these dinners, at these hangouts.
And I think everyone knew what was up.
But it's like you ever have a friend go through something really difficult
and you just don't even know what to say to them
and so you say nothing, you kind of pretend like everything's fine
and then they are like no one cares, no one cares about this.
And I had a friend whose husband passed away
and she said no one reached out to her about it
and she felt terrible and then she was like, look, I also didn't reach out to anybody
and it was just this thing, no humans really know what to do in these situations.
Yeah, I just remember feeling incredibly lonely.
I had a support network but I wasn't engaging with it at all.
I hung out with my mom this most recent holiday season
and I asked her, I was writing this article
and I was like hey, when I was thinking about writing this article
and I asked her when I told her about all this stuff that went down
and the layoffs and everything and she said just now,
you never told me and I never wanted to ask or bug you or stress you out
and so I waited basically until today so I was like okay, I need to write this article then
because if my own mom, how many people have thought about this
and not been able to confront me or talk to me about it
or how many people could learn or just feel validated
or feel like they are not alone because everyone is too scared to talk about this stuff
and that's really one of the key moments that I think got me to like okay, I'm going to write about this
and I'm going to sort of publicly declare myself a failure
and luckily, I'm in Provo so if everyone thinks I'm a moron, it's fine, whatever, I'm a painter now.
I'll just fully embrace the painter lifestyle.
I'll be like what's another metaphor like the guy from Luke Skywalker, right?
Just go to the mountains and just be alone.
Just hang out by yourself?
Hang out by myself, it'll be good. Me and my paints.
And then it turns out like sort of exact opposite thing happened
and it turns out everyone wanted to hear this story
or wanted to hear a story like this because people had them and didn't want to talk about it
or whatever the reasons are but I think people were like,
I think it was like sort of almost felt like this like collective breath of fresh air in the industry
or it's like oh cool, yes, we're not perfect and like thanks for writing about it
so I don't have to, you know, sort of thing which is kind of funny but yeah, no, I think it was…
It's not easy to pull off a good failure story.
Yeah, it's funny because we almost joke about them, you know,
like they're kind of a meme like the sort of the failure medium post
and I think part of it is because even in those failures,
people are trying to position themselves as successes
and make a point or sell a new product or something like that
and I think with me, it was just like I have no skin in the game at this point.
I thought at least I'm just going to write this thing.
I'm not going to make a point. I'm not going to sell a product.
I'm not going to hype up anything else or, you know, I'm just going to say look,
this is what happened, you know, like at the end of the story I say like, you know,
I had a punchline I think at the end but I removed it
and it was just like this is my story, you know, for better or worse.
Take what, you know, take from it what you will
and a bunch of people that were giving me feedback were like,
you need to punch your ending, like you need, you know,
if you want this to go viral, if you want people to share this thing,
like you need to say like something controversial or opinionated or whatever
and I was like, I tried. I had a few drafts with something like that in there
and I was just like, I can't because I just, I'm exhausted, you know,
like I just need, I feel like I just need to hit publish and tell the story
and it's a reflection, it's not, it's, you know,
I was inspired by Susan Fowler who wrote Reflecting on My Very Weird Year at Uber
is what she called the post about all the sexual harassment and all that stuff
that happened at Uber and it was just like, I just need, you know,
it was hers just, I need to get this off my chest.
I'm reflecting on this thing, I'm not saying, you know,
I'm not like, you know, Uber should die, you know, or whatever.
It was just reflecting on my very weird year at Uber,
like no mention of anything crazy and I was inspired by that
and I was like, that's what I want to do.
Like, I just want to say, tell my story, get this off my chest.
90% of the value was me just writing it and if it goes, you know,
well, people like it, that's great, they'll share it and if not, they won't
and that's fine too because I don't know how many people I want reading
about my failure anyways and, you know, or, you know, it worked.
I think people liked it and I think people almost like it
was kind of the anti-article, anti-failure article too
because actually it was an article about success, you know.
It was like, I actually built this great thing,
I just didn't really know it at the time and now I do
and that's cool and it's okay to say, hey, look,
I built something cool as well and I think that's the other thing
that I think a lot of people appreciate and I think Silicon Valley
almost has this kind of weird sort of self-deprecating nature.
It's like, when we do succeed, it's like, what's the point?
Because no one buys a nice car anyways, like what, you know,
I feel like it's this weird thing that happens
where all these people fail but then even the people that succeed,
I feel like our culture is so like, we didn't do this for ourselves
so we can't even buy a nice car, like we can't, you know,
I remember meeting up with a friend who sold a company
and he hadn't asked in Martin and another friend who had an Audi R8.
They're the only like two nice cars I've ever seen in San Francisco
and he like apologized to me basically.
I was like, hey, could you like drop?
He's like, how are you going to get home?
I was like, oh, I'm just calling Uber.
He's like, I'll drop you off but just like,
please don't tell anyone I own this car.
And I saw him like, dude, this car is sick.
Like, what are you talking about?
He's like, yeah, I know.
It's an Audi R8, stupid but like I've always wanted one.
I'm like, you don't have to apologize to anybody, you know?
Well, that's the culture.
He was like, yeah.
That's just a different culture.
It is though but then it's like what?
You're not doing it for yourself.
But yeah, and it's like so wrong to admit that you are, you know,
to some degree you are doing this for yourself.
Like you are doing this because you want fame.
You want status.
You want to build something cool.
You want people to say, wow, you're actually pretty good at what you do.
And I just think it would be healthier if everyone kind of just was like,
yes, it's okay.
It's okay to sort of be who you are.
And it's almost the opposite effect where people can detect that too.
You know, it's like, I think people, you know,
obviously don't like when people are pretending to be better than they are.
But the same goes, I think, the other way around.
And it's okay to be like, yeah, we worked really hard and we won.
And, you know, obviously there are a lot of signals and a lot of factors
and we're grateful for all of them.
But, you know, a component of that was, you know, being smart,
working hard and doing the thing and giving it a shot.
And I think it's okay or it should be okay, I think, to say that, you know?
But you're right.
It is sort of the culture of Silicon Valley.
It is to sort of like accept no reward.
The evaluation speaks for itself and that's all.
But I don't think that's true.
You tweeted about a week ago that life is a series of distractions
from existential dread.
Is that what Gumroad is for you?
Yeah, well, it was a little bit of a, hopefully,
a little bit of a sarcastic sort of tweet.
But I think it is true in a large sense that like at the end of the day,
the problems that plague us have plagued humanity since before technology
and before software and probably before money and writing.
And those problems will stay the same and be the same
even when we have like a Dyson sphere around some star
and we're all, you know, we have invented teleportation and stuff.
Like we're still going to be like, oh crap, like what are we doing?
What's the point of all of this crap?
But I think that's, yeah, I think it's just sort of this acknowledgement
that like we all suffer from sort of the same demons
that we all deal with the same rough problems
and, you know, we can distract ourselves and it's okay to call them distractions
because at the end of the day, like, you know, Gumroad and Apple and Microsoft
and Facebook are all just tiny, tiny, tiny things in the span of the universe
or the multiverse or whatever scientists have discovered so far.
And to me, it's a sense of freedom to be like it lowers the stakes in some sense
and it lets me kind of do what I feel like doing
instead of trying to like solve the world's problems.
And, you know, I'm sure some people disagree with that
but I think for me at least it's like, look, like we can really get riled up
about all of the things that plague our society
and spend every waking second trying to fix that
and getting everybody to vote and doing all of these sorts of things.
But I think at the end of the day, there's like a,
I think it's important to recognize that like the world looks the way it looks
and it will roughly look the way it looks 50 years from now
and these things will change certainly but I don't know,
I feel like we have a lot less impact on them than we think.
I think if Steve Jobs didn't invent the iPhone, someone else would have
and like we can care about these problems
but we should care about them and work towards them in a way that helps ourselves
and like makes sure that we are feeling fulfilled and happy
and doing things for our own sake as well
because everything is a distraction, I think,
from the sort of the core lived experience
which is happening on our deep sort of subconscious.
I think we're not that different from ants in that sense.
Like we look at ants and sure they're doing stuff
but like they're sort of playing a role in a larger thing
and I think at the end of the day, like humans believe that too
and I think actually one of the, that's one of the things
I really picked up I think living in Provo
which is, you know, as you mentioned, 89% Mormon
and even they believe, sure, you know, like they believe
and actually much more significant to the mortal realm
because they believe it has like a very important purpose
in the grand scheme of things
but also they believe in the insignificance of it
because if you think of eternal life
like the 70, 80, 90 years you have on this planet
it's going to be nothing, I mean, compared to any of that stuff, you know?
And so I think it gives, I think I copied a little bit of their perspective too
which is like, you know, do the best you can
and hopefully there's something on the other side
and that side is going to be way better than anything we have here.
It doesn't mean you should just like sit around and wait to die
or something like that but, you know, just like do what you can
and do what you feel is right and what your conscious approves of
and if we all sort of do that I think the world's going to be
as good as it can be but, you know, sort of killing yourself over something
is going to do not much more, you know?
So if you want to kill yourself over something
because you want to learn a lot or because you want to really help somebody
that's great but just sort of, I think, just for me it was about perspective.
It was about, yeah, I can totally kill myself but it's really important
to just, yeah, to keep everything in perspective as well
and be present in the moment and take a break
and like, you know, not over-optimize every single thing that I do with my life.
It's okay to just watch Netflix for an hour or two.
It's, you know, it's another distraction, you know?
Everything is a distraction and I think it sort of levels the playing field.
It's not like going to the gym versus Netflix
versus doing a startup and I have to priority stack everything.
These are all just the same sort of thing.
They're a lot closer together than we think.
We just are so – that's all we see and so they look really different
but if you sort of expand your mind a little bit I think they're all basically the same.
It's funny because business in a lot of ways is one of the ultimate distractions.
As a founder you have a million different things you can do at any point in time
and it can take up pretty much your entire life.
Like you said, when you were in SF work was your number one priority besides sleep
which is really like not even – it's not optional.
Yeah, that's true.
But you also – you tweeted something recently.
I'm just reading all your tweets at this point.
You said startups shouldn't be scary or they should be scary.
They shouldn't be dangerous, right?
Scary is all the sort of things you have to do as a founder that are inherently hair-raising, right?
Pivoting when things aren't working, getting feedback,
managing people who are smarter than you.
That's where you sort of take this startup as a distraction too far
where you're racking up credit card debt as you said
or you're sacrificing your health and your well-being.
I think if you get to that point where you're literally killing yourself for this business
and I think you've gone to the point where you're missing the point.
Yeah, no, I think that's spot on I guess because I said it.
I agree with myself.
No, yeah, I think that's exactly right.
I think it is scary.
Just like roller coasters are scary.
They're triggering a very primal sort of fight-or-flight response within us when we do them
and we do it for the thrill but we acknowledge kind of what we're doing
and we have good bounds and if they actually led to a lot of deaths,
we'd probably stop doing them and I think the same goes with anything else.
You can do them. You can do them for the thrill.
You can do them for the personal growth or just because it's fun
or just because it makes you not think about something else which is a lot scarier.
Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it is important to consider if you are taking it too far
and if you are sacrificing your life for this thing that is relatively insignificant.
Yeah, I think exactly what startups are.
I think sometimes people conflate scary and dangerous.
People say, oh, is it dangerous?
I'm like, it's not dangerous. It shouldn't be dangerous.
It's just a startup. It's just a tech business.
You're sitting on a laptop in an air-conditioned room.
It can't be that bad but some people do take it really, really, really far.
I met a founder just this week that said he sleeps on average four hours a day
and I said you're basically killing yourself slowly.
You might not think that but there's a good chance that that's what you are doing.
You should go read this book and maybe you'll change your habits.
But yeah, I mean you can totally do it but yeah, at the end of the day,
you have one life. You can decide to go crazy with it and do all sorts of stuff
but at the end of the day, everyone has roughly the same amount of time,
roughly the same amount of happiness, I think, generated regardless
of your position in society and you should work to improve your life
in a way that also improve other people's lives.
I really do believe that similar provo learning, I think, is that if everyone did that,
if everyone was really focused on just being better people,
it's a very conservative approach, I think.
If everyone was just better on a local level and being a better version of themselves
and helping other people, truly helping other people
and treating others like they want to be treated, et cetera,
there's a great line I heard the other day which is treat your children
like how you wish your parents treated you.
It's sort of the passing of the torch, passing of humanity
to the next version of humanity, to the next version of humanity.
If we pass on really good positive energy, we're certainly not going to fix every problem
in a single generation.
I think things take a lot longer to fix than they do to break,
but that is ultimately the way that we will move forward as a society
and we need to do that and then also just treat ourselves pretty well too
because I don't know, what's the point?
If you work your ass off, you're not even going to see.
For you, the universe stops existing the second you die, right?
So what's the point?
I think there should be some selfishness.
For me, it's aligning selfishness with selflessness.
It's figuring out what can I do that makes the world better.
That also makes me happier and that's where Gumroad is now
and things like doing this podcast.
It's like, look, it's selfish for me.
I've got to basically rant on all these things.
I love doing that.
I've got to talk to you. That's awesome.
I get to basically produce content that a lot of people are going to listen to,
but it's also good and I think it's also valuable for the world
and I think if people can align themselves with each other in a way that does that,
that fulfills themselves and helps their own communities and broader society.
I think if we could do that better as a system, I think,
and we made it really easy for someone who isn't aligned with their surroundings to move,
then we would be in a pretty solid place.
The free market, I think, would do some really cool stuff.
We started this interview by talking about the differences in your life
as a founder of a high-growth startup
and as a founder of Gumroad as a more anti-hacker type business.
Why don't we end the same way?
What is on the top of your mind today?
What are you thinking about in regards to growing and improving Gumroad?
How, if at all, is that affected by the fact that you are a more independent business
than you ever were in the past?
Honestly, it's similar in many, many ways.
Someone asked me this where they're like,
are you happier now?
You seem happier.
You're not working 60 hours a week anymore.
I think, as I said, I've replaced a set of distractions with another set of distractions
and I feel like, in general, my happiness level is pretty close.
Long-term, I think the rolling average is probably pretty similar.
It's probably less spiky.
In general, the way I think about Gumroad is,
how can we create the maximum amount of value in the world
and how little do I have to do to make that happen?
Can I find someone who's incredibly self-motivated
and knows what they want Gumroad to do?
I'm like a user of the product themselves
and pay them money to go do that thing.
I want to almost detach myself and my identity from Gumroad as much as I can
because I think ultimately that will lead to better decisions for the company
because I'm making them, or the company is allowing itself,
I'm allowing the company to make its own decisions.
A big part of that is hiring a different type of person, giving them no equity.
I'm like, hey, look, we're not selling this thing.
We're not selling the vision of this thing to you.
You want to work on this thing, you get paid pretty well for it.
You get to have an incredible amount of impact and self-direction.
If that's interesting to you, Gumroad might be a great fit.
Otherwise, it's probably not and that's okay.
I'll tell the team, hey, I got to run.
I got to do this speaking thing in Denver or whatever.
I'll be gone for two days and that's fine.
I don't have to be on all the time.
I'm not trying because no one has equity in the company.
I'm not like, oh, so I was gone, therefore my equity is going to be worth less.
There's this almost freeing sense of it where someone asked me,
do you think people have less ownership?
How do you solve that problem now that you don't have equity?
They actually have more ownership over the product.
They have less ownership over the company.
But now they're focused on, if they get paid 100 bucks an hour,
200 bucks an hour to do whatever they want,
in general, if we hire the right type of people,
they're going to do what's actually most beneficial to creators
because that's why they're working on Gumroad
and actually not what's most beneficial for their stock price
because they don't have any of it.
Actually, we've seen almost a more selfless direction to the product.
I think strategically, and this I think is almost a necessity
just because of the way that we're building the product right now,
is we're just helping our current creators.
I do no sales.
I don't talk to prospective customers anymore.
I just say, hey, look, my focus is on people that already use the platform.
All you got to do is make one sale,
and now you're a current customer and I'm happy to talk to you.
But when we went through the down and out phase of Gumroad,
these people stuck with us, and we're just going to build stuff for them.
We're going to fix basically every bug that they report.
We're going to make the site as performant, as speedy as possible.
We're going to ship features that they've asked for
for a long period of time, and that's it.
We're profitable, so even if none of that leads to growth,
we're still going to be profitable.
The long-term hope is that actually,
really just focusing on our existing creator base
and being really public and open and transparent about that
is going to lead to more growth,
more sustainable, long-term, organic, word of mouth growth
than ever before. That's the dream.
Then the other thing, I guess the last point,
is I'm constantly trying to figure out how Gumroad can create value
that has nothing to do with revenue.
We're going to do a series of animated shorts on YouTube for kids.
We're going to release a comic strip
that is all about the problems and suffering that creators face.
I wrote this post on Medium that did really well.
We opened up our financials.
I'm probably going to start doing open board meetings
so people can start seeing what that looks like for a startup.
What are all the ways that we can create value for creators
and everybody else, too? Because we can.
We're profitable, and we don't need to grow,
and we don't need to raise more money.
If we stay the same size but we double the amount of value
that we're creating in the world,
that's better than, in my opinion,
growing the company's revenue by 10%
and growing the value by 10%.
That's pretty cool to hear.
Everybody has their own ND Hacker dream.
If they run a profitable business and they can do anything,
what do you do?
I tweeted about this yesterday.
Do you retire? Do you start another company?
Do you keep working on your same company?
It's cool hearing how you're making these decisions about Gumroad
because I never hear the typical venture-funded companies
making these decisions.
Everybody's building for the hypothetical marginal next customer.
Everybody's trying to figure out what's going to inflect
their growth curve to get them to the next level
and if that means neglecting the current people, so be it.
Despite the similarities,
it sounds like there's a lot of differences as well.
There's not a problem necessarily with that approach,
and certainly many people do that,
and I'm jealous sometimes of their success,
but it never ends.
I think for me, the important part about where I'm at
is actually Gumroad creator told me this.
She said, enough is a decision, not an amount.
I really thought that was pretty profound
because I am at enough. I'm good.
I'm happy with the creators that we have
and I'm just going to make their lives.
Basically, the way that I pitch it to the team
and to friends and to other people I talk to
is I want to do things that are so good
that it just makes no sense.
It literally makes no money, no sense,
but also makes no comments.
Why would we do this?
Why would we open source Gumroad?
Literally, it's because it makes no sense,
which is why I want to do it.
I want to do things that are so outside the realm
of what normal businesses do,
and that's what makes it interesting,
and that's what makes it make sense
because that's the stuff that people don't get it,
so they share it and they appreciate it,
and that's why I'm going to do it, I think.
We'll see. We'll see how it goes.
But I think, yeah, to that point also,
if enough is a decision on an amount,
when you are seeking that, when does it end?
I think there is this loop that happens
and you just can't escape it.
I'm surprised, frankly, sometimes
when I see what some of these large tech companies
are doing, like Uber and Facebook now is in the news a lot
and Google is in the news a lot as well
for doing these shady things.
I don't know necessarily.
I think part of it is their valuations are so high
and they have no grounding in their revenues
and their actual trajectory.
Amazon is another one.
This 70x, whatever, earnings per share or something,
and they have to just keep growing
because they know that's why their revenues are so high,
and so you just get trapped in this loop
where you're just like, we need to just keep...
It's the football helmet.
If everyone was like, hey, we're not going to play this game anymore.
We're going to just go back to doing awesome stuff within reason, great.
But the problem is everyone's playing this game,
and frankly, at the end of the day, if you're a public company,
you're competing with every other public company
and actually every other possible type of investment,
and so you just kind of get on the hamster wheel.
To me, it's like if I did build a billion-dollar company
and then IPO'd, I would still be on that game today.
I'd still be doing that thing.
I'd just be trying to run as fast as possible,
grow the company, hire as many awesome people as possible,
ship as many things, go global, go international,
build a massive sales team.
I genuinely don't know where this goes
because we've never been here before as a society, as humanity,
and it seems clearly unsustainable to me,
but it's been like this for five-plus years,
and I think no one I've talked to really knows what's going on.
So people are like, okay, whatever, it's fine.
Let's just keep going.
I don't want to be the one that hops out
and then gets destroyed by this.
I think there's a big reason that Bitcoin is doing as well as it is right now,
which is people are scared of the traditional system.
No one really knows what the heck is going on,
and so everyone's like, well, we might as well hedge our bet
on this whole system and get some of this crypto money.
But yeah, it's a weird thing,
and that's the other thing that makes me really content with where I am
is because I know if I go back on that path,
people have asked me, would you raise money again?
I'm like, I just know where that goes.
I know how much of a drug it is to get into that mode,
and there's no escape from that mode.
Show me the escape. I haven't seen it yet.
The one example I have seen of it actually is Bill Gates,
who I mentioned in my post. He figured it out.
He got out of the system, and now he does this amazing stuff,
and I'm sure his wife played a huge role in that.
I'm sure he's more fulfilled and happier than he's ever been,
and his bank account is just dropping like nobody's business.
He's just giving it all away,
and I'm sure he's just the serotonin dopamine firing off in his head
is just awesome, and I think he got it.
And then you have Warren Buffett,
who I genuinely don't know what the hell that guy is doing.
I have a massive amount of respect for him.
I know it's almost blasphemy to say anything negative about him,
but what's the point?
I genuinely would love to be like, dude,
maybe he's just so fulfilled by that, and that's great.
There's nothing wrong with that,
but it's just kind of crazy to me.
Yeah, he's like late 80s.
His partner, Charlie Munger, is like 95,
still going to their shareholder meetings,
still running their business the same way.
Still drinking Diet Coke and playing, oh my gosh.
Crazy.
I mean, the best system, I think there's one example of this
that also I think has figured out, which is George Washington.
He got to the peak, and then he's like, I'm good.
I'm just going to retire.
I'm going to smoke weed on my cherry farm or whatever he does or did.
And the next dude can deal with this.
I'm done.
Unfortunately, the next dude has since now,
hopefully the next woman soon.
But yeah, it's just crazy.
And I think that opting out, I mean, think about how rare that is.
That's the most significant thing he did,
was not do anything anymore.
And yeah, I think if there are more people doing it,
it would be pretty awesome.
You'd make space for more people to do their thing.
Unemployment rates are at a record low,
and yet everyone is unhappy and making no money somehow.
So maybe the answer is all the people that are making money,
just buy a nice house and chill out for a bit
and make space for the other people that can make more money.
Well, the show happens to be listened to by a lot of people
who are ambitious, who haven't started yet,
and they want to get started doing something.
They're not quite ready to call it off because they haven't gotten started yet.
I've surveyed the indie actors' audience quite a lot in recent months.
They are mostly developers.
They really struggle with coming up with ideas
or once they do, how to get traction and how to grow.
And most of them have no interest whatsoever in raising any sort of money.
They're very dialed in to,
I want to start a business to improve my life
and the lives of the people around me,
perhaps my employees and customers.
What's your advice for somebody just getting started on this path today?
Yeah, I mean, I think the most important thing is to build stuff,
to start small and figure out what you want to build.
And honestly, a lot of people aren't going to know what they want to build.
So just like build something as small as it is
or maybe not even build something.
Just ask the people that you love in your community,
the communities that you care about how you could make their life better.
If you know how to code, I mean, that's a superpower.
You could build stuff.
You can automate stuff that people are doing manually.
So just ask them, like, what are you doing manually?
Are you spending 30 minutes a day dealing with an Excel spreadsheet
to calculate blank?
Are you going on Yelp,
trying to find a restaurant to eat
and you kind of go through the same process every single time?
Automate the boring stuff is a term I've heard and I like it.
Figure out what you can start building.
And I think once you start building stuff,
it's similar to painting where some days you're like,
I don't know, we're writing.
I have no idea what I want to paint it right.
But I'm driving down the highway looking at a spot
being like, okay, what do I want to paint?
And I'm like, fine, I'll just paint that stupid part.
Whatever.
And then I'm driving home
and every single thing looks like a painting,
like the same stuff I was looking at before.
And so I think a lot of it is just like you prime your brain
for that process, that creative process,
which is what building products is.
It's a creative process.
And then all of a sudden you're going to have more and more and more ideas.
But if you just sit around and you're like,
I'm just going to sit down and stare at this piece of paper
and come up with ideas,
I guarantee you that's the absolute worst way to do it.
Go for a run, go for a walk,
hang out with some friends and just live your life
and you're going to have those ideas eventually.
And then you're going to build one of them
and then you're going to figure out your brain's going to click
and your observation skills.
When you get better at painting,
what you're really doing is you're training your observation skills.
You're not really training your hand.
You're not really learning anything about how paints mix.
The vast majority of the learning is happening
and your ability to observe a disconnect between your painting
and what you're seeing and fixing that.
You just fix it over and over again
until you have a really great painting, basically.
And so it's kind of the same goes.
I think you just train your brain.
Your brain is sort of a muscle in that way.
You just have to train it and make it stronger
and it'll get better at those things.
So that's like the big thing, I think, is build stuff, build a lot of it.
I really like the weekend project thing
because it keeps the stakes super low
and also is a really great constraint.
I think when you're like, I need to build something,
I mean, anything looks like that thing.
But if you constrain yourself and you're like,
I'm only going to build things that use the Zoom API
because that's a new thing.
I feel like it's underserved.
Maybe there's something there.
Focus on that.
Really think about that.
Look through the API endpoints
and just prime your brain for that thing.
And then as you live your life and you'll be like,
oh, crap, wouldn't it be cool if I had a little bot
that I could invite to every single call that I'm on
and it would just transcribe the notes.
Or it would tell me how many times I said the F word
or whatever, something like that.
And then you can figure out what you want to build.
But unless you start, it's so difficult to really start moving.
Actually, the Mormon faith says,
I think something like faith is like walking in the dark.
You have to take one step at a time.
And over time, you'll build your faith
and the room will light up and things like that.
I kind of like that metaphor
because it's true in products.
You have no idea.
You can't build anything.
You look at the homepage of Gumra,
the homepage of Netflix, the homepage of Yahoo,
the homepage of maybe Google is the same,
but Amazon, et cetera.
When they first launched, it's totally different.
And you just have to start.
And then you'll learn and you'll iterate in your build.
And 99.9% of a product is built post-launch.
And so get to the launch as soon as you can.
Again, that's why I like the weekend thing.
And yeah, just think as small as you can.
And also, the other thing that I did a lot
was I didn't have ideas in the early days.
And so I just was like, for hire.
I just built apps and designed
and developed for other people.
And eventually, you will have your own ideas
because they're going to be like,
hey, you should build this.
And you're like, cool.
Yeah, what about that?
But actually, this is a really weird way to think about it.
Have you thought about this?
And they're like, oh yeah, that's better.
Do that instead.
And you'll start basically getting paid
to learn on the job.
And then you can always branch out.
And I guarantee you're going to start having your own ideas.
Experienced founders and product folks that I've talked to,
they have too many ideas at this point.
They have more ideas than they can even write down
because they've trained their brain so much
that everything in their life is a problem.
I remember I had dinner with Johnny and I from Apple,
he used to be from Apple.
And one of the things he said,
someone asked him was a group dinner
and someone asked him about,
yeah, does he obsess over things, right?
Is it a problem basically that he's like,
this is not design, this is not design,
this needs more aluminium.
And he was basically like, yeah.
You train your brain at such a level
to point out any inconsistency,
anything that could be improved,
and everything starts to look like a problem
waiting to be solved.
The hand soap dispenser,
the soy sauce container,
paper plates, blenders, everything.
You can't help it because you've trained your brain
and your brain is like, okay, cool, I have this skill now.
And therefore, it requires energy to maintain the skill.
And clearly, I learned this skill
for a reason related to my survival.
And so I need to use it as much as possible
otherwise it's going to go away.
And I think that's kind of what happens.
I don't know, maybe.
Some evolutionary scientists is going to get upset on me.
But I think that's how I think about it.
And so if you want to get good at something,
you just have to figure out a way to do it.
And you will get good at that thing.
That is just how our bodies work.
Love that advice.
Make a lot of stuff, build a lot of stuff.
Start small and just try to get the momentum going.
And you can sort of trust that your brain will follow
at what it's best at.
It just adapts to whatever the needs are that you place on it.
And it's like you're saying,
the goal really is to basically become the sort of person
who has ideas rather than just sitting down
and staring at a blank sheet of paper
and just hoping that you have ideas today.
Yeah, you got to train your brain.
And if you do get into that habit,
if you come up with, if you code every day from four to seven,
you're going to start, it's going to be like 340
and you're going to have all of your brain
just going to get into it.
It just knows.
It's much smarter than you are
and much more powerful if you train it, I think, in the right way.
Well, that seems like a great place to end the episode.
It's been two hours.
Sahel, thanks for coming on.
Give us a ton of your time sharing the story of Gumroad
and all the things that you learned about how to build a company
that makes you happier and more fulfilled as a founder.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about you
and also about what's up with Gumroad nowadays as well?
Definitely check out Gumroad, gumroad.com.
And then the best place to see what we're up to all the time
is to follow us on Twitter at Gumroad
and then to follow me on Twitter if you want,
which is at shl, which is where I tweet basically everything
that I think of at some point
and all the weird ideas I'm up to.
And yeah, that's where to go.
Thanks again, Sahel, for coming on the show.
You're very welcome.
Thank you for having me, Courtland.
In addition, if you are running your own internet business
or if that's something you hope to do someday,
you should join me and a whole bunch of other founders
on the AndyHackers.com website.
It's a great place to get feedback on pretty much any problem
or question that you might have while running your business.
If you listen to the show, you know that I am a huge proponent
of getting help from other founders
rather than trying to build your business all by yourself.
So you'll see me on the forum for sure
as well as more than a handful of some of the guests
that I've had on the podcast.
If you're looking for inspiration,
we've also got a huge directory full of hundreds of products
built by other AndyHackers, every one of which includes
revenue numbers and some of the behind-the-scenes strategies
for how they grew their products from nothing.
As always, thanks so much for listening,
and I'll see you next time.