From $1k to $700k Monthly Recurring Revenue (Gumroad’s Growth)

0:00in your audience the beginning is slow and tedious and you know like when I was in Syria Cisco I met seven or eight thousand people one-on-one over coffee over the over the six years that I lived there I rough math and so guess what I have a pretty large audience on Twitter because like I took the time and effort to like meet a lot of people and I didn't meet them just to build I'm following on the internet I built them you know I know relationships and enjoy doing that but it's like just you can do the math I'm like how to build an audience not that hard it's just time

0:30consuming and you know a lot of folks they just want to kind of get quick rich kind of scheme and they'll spend a hundred dollars on courses on the internet and there's someone who helps people sell courses on I'm like just don't yet just a waste of time like do that after the fact do that to optimize what you're already doing well like there's so many there's too many businesses honestly that kind of I feel like almost like prey on these people that are sort of like they think they're ready but they're not ready like they're kind of putting the horse before the cart they're learning about like adds an

1:00SEO before they've sold anything and it's like that stuff comes like years later like you don't need to worry about any of this stuff the person who's making and killing right now is the person selling that course to you you know so I the main thing and I do want to get into the meat for me this has been really interesting I want to get into like for the people out there that are selling and all the stuff in cover at insights that you have access to the one thing Before we jump into that era I'm curious what that is how are you running the business very specifically

1:34when you were funded and versus how are you running it now is more you bought it I think you bought everyone out or they yeah most people like we still have like a little under two million on the cap table but yeah most of the businesses it's been bought back so yeah I mean so we raised ten million bucks over the course of like few years from all these Silicon Valley people and we ran it like a Silicon Valley company you know we hired a bunch of people we got an office in San Francisco we did that whole thing we solved you know every problem by

2:04spending money or you know on a service or people and it was great honestly it was a lot of fun like we had a great culture and like great people and everyone was living a great life but the business like was not profitable at all you're burning 300 plus thousand dollars a month you know that will the whole thing and so in 2015 we did the round of layoffs got to profitable basically we like reversed everything we did like instead of having an office we didn't have an office instead of having meetings we didn't have meetings it was like we all know what we need to do to

2:33get profitable like let's just focus on doing that and we don't have to talk we'd often we don't do team building exercises we hope to do any of this stuff you know we don't need an office like none of that and then once we got there in 2016 ish you know I was like okay cool what do we want to add back right like now we can have money we can sort of like pull some of these things back for the company and I realize like basically none of it like I don't I don't really need any of that stuff right now and now you know we're three

3:05or four times bigger than we were when we did two layoffs we're you know growing faster even even like relative numbers and it's just like it turns out I don't need that stuff I don't need an office I don't need you know like a big team of people we operate remote a synchronous like we just used slack notion and github to like communicate you know super low drama everything's in writing everyone works their own schedule and it works like it works great and we don't need people ask me all the time like how do you do how do you deal with like community and a social sort of social bonding and

3:45politics and like stuff and I'm like we don't do any of that like we don't have any of it by the way people have figured out now with coronavirus that like a lot of you don't need a lot of this stuff it turns out like your company is probably still functioning some of them some of them are but I think this solid good companies that have you know you can work remote obviously it's a privilege in many ways but you can work promote possibly you don't necessarily need to come into the office every day you probably don't need a bunch of meetings in your calendar that you think you

4:17might you don't need you know like crazy documentation on sprints and actual development and like you just need to ship a product and and charge money for that product and everything else is all right stop stop making it simple cuz it's complicated I need to buy books I need to buy courses people are trying to sell you on stuff and I'm sure I'll saw you on something too at some point but like they just yeah you don't need it I think it's a big I like to think about it like I'm built Gumroad it did its thing day one Monday morning that night that you know that weekend or

4:53whatever and then I've just been adding to it but like that's it's all kind of unnecessary you know hmm it's not like I need sound like Gumroad needs any I mean clearly didn't it works it does its thing we you know we've sent ten million dollars to creators in the last 30 days like it's clearly doing a thing it's working wrong so like you can tell me we need an office but it's you're missing like the second half of a sentence like every time you say need you need to write so you you need an office to blank so you can just clarify what that is for me and then I'm happy

5:28to listen to you but if you just say I need this I need that I clearly don't like I don't have a water cooler channel and slack we don't do team meetings we don't do All Hands we don't do any of this stuff so like we don't need it clearly we operate we're profitable we're growing you know I don't know what metric like what would that to is for people yeah but my guess is that it's just to be normal to be like not weird to feel like you're not sort of sort of like maybe unfeeling that maybe there are other things that they might feel

6:05like they they think they need and you're showing them that maybe they don't and they're dealing with this dissonance I think that's a lot of it probably but my guess is that we're gonna see a lot more companies that look a lot like Gumroad a lot more like I'm right at least maybe not zoom oh for sure dude yeah but like a lot less certainly a lot less like what Gummer used to look like in 20 you know 2012 to 2015 the thing I've been wondering and excited about is like there's so many problems nowadays and there's so much opportunity now I'm just trying to get that message out

6:36and I think Gumroad is one of the best platforms for that for me I think about all the challenges now like communicating in a group of more than two or three online is actually really hard that still has not even being close to solved and there's just so many other kind of interesting things that are out there what are the key metrics so you'd mention this twice now I want to hear about it what what are the numbers like I always Secours put the pilot with dials you look at so what are the dials you look at to see how your plane is flying and then I want to start jumping

7:04into what stuff is selling really well what stuff is actually disappointing and then I wanted okay I'll do that and then I got the the follow-up on that yeah totally yeah so the dollars I look on typically there's two only really there's a couple more but they're so secondary hmm and so they deferred to the top two are basically how much volume creators are processing so how much money creators are actually making right which is around ten million dollars a month right now and how much revenue were making which honestly like I could probably just track the first one yeah it's roughly the same these roughly

7:45scales but the revenue which is around I think we just crossed 700 M RR 700 km or dude congratulations man so like eight million yeah so you know it's all it's pretty good sizable business now yeah took nine years