Gumroad
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| Industry | Digital distribution, self-publishing, e-commerce, music, film |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2011 |
| Founder | Sahil Lavingia |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, U.S. |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
| Website | gumroad.com |
Gumroad is a platform that enables creators to sell products directly to consumers. Designer Sahil Lavingia founded the company in 2011 with the intention of making selling as easy as social sharing. The company has received more than $8 million in funding.
Creators of all types, such as authors, comedians, designers, filmmakers, musicians, and software developers, use Gumroad to sell products directly to consumers, mostly digital content like albums, comics, ebooks, films, games, music, or tutorials. Gumroad is built as a plug-and-play product that offers payment processing, file hosting and delivery, marketing and communications tools, and consumption experiences for a diverse array of verticals. Lavingia has stated that his product philosophy is to ask what creators spend their time on making things, and then build features for Gumroad that do those above-mentioned logistics functions for them.
Gumroad’s model is notable for the decentralized nature of its marketplace, placing the product emphasis on the relationship between the creator and consumer, instead of discovery. It was also originally notable for having a substantially lower fee than other commerce platforms (5% + 25¢). The service later changed its fee structure, requiring a monthly hosting fee ($10) plus an additional per-transaction charge (3.5% + 30¢).
Sahil Lavingia built the first iteration of Gumroad in a single weekend, in 2011. Lavingia, previously the first designer hired at Pinterest and the designer of the Turntable.fm app, was 19 years old at the time.
The idea came to Lavingia when he wanted to sell a photorealistic icon he’d created and realized that the amount of effort - even for an engineer and designer with a deep technical skill set - it took to sell an item directly to consumers was considerable. He decided to build a product that would make selling digital content as easy as sharing it.
In February 2012, while still the sole member of the company, Lavingia announced a $1.1 million seed round from a notable group of investors including Accel Partners, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Naval Ravikant, Collaborative Fund, and Danny Rimer.
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