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Hey, #1 on Hacker News! I don't think that's happened since...I launched Gumroad back in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 https://news.ycombi

Hey, #1 on Hacker News! I don't think that's happened since...I launched Gumroad back in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!

jrochkind1 8y ago
I hadn't heard of Gumroad before -- it actually looks like a really good product, and one that I would have occasion to recommend to people. To what do you attribute the challenges? Were you building a product there wasn't a market for, what you were delivering wasn't what people wanted? Or, a marketting failure, inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs? Or, what I think I get from your post, is maybe you think neither of these -- rather you just tried to grow _too quickly_, quicker than the market/product could bear, and then had to deal with that. Do you think if from the start you had _not_ tried to create a "billion dollar company", stayed smaller, accepted less investment with clearer expectations, had fewer employees, etc. -- you would have still been able to get to where you are now, but quicker and with less pain? You still would have been able to get _enough_ investment, and with the investment you had still would have been able to build the product succesfully? I think maybe that's what your essay is implying you are suggesting, but I'm not totally sure if that's what you mean to be suggesting; or maybe you don't mean to be "diagnosing" it at all and aren't interested in these questions of what-could-have-been at this point. :)
- sahillavingia 8y ago
  I really tried to avoid being prescriptive about the solutions. It's a lot easier to talk about the problems :) > aren't interested in these questions of what-could-have-been at this point Exactly. If we shipped this or that feature... If we raised more, or less.. If I stayed at Pinterest... If I invested in Bitcoin... I'm just not sure I gain a lot from thoughts like that!
  - mrskitch 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing this. It's really important not to give too much thought to hypotheticals as they're purely that: a hypothetical.
- jammygit 8y ago
  "inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs?" Just from visiting the landing page for gumroad.com, I wasn't clear about what the company did. Some questions that came to my mind: By e-commerce, is it like shopify or like stripe? By audience-building software, is that SEO, marketing, or analytics? Just writing the feedback I like to get from others. The features page answered most of my questions in general(I think its an online store platform for digital goods?).
  - amelius 8y ago
    > "inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs?" It's a bit ironic that one of the main features of the product is "audience building for creators".
kr4 8y ago
http://omswami.com/2011/11/the-successful-and-the-successfool.html http://omswami.com/2011/11/the-successful-and-the-successfoo...
asaddhamani 8y ago
Hey Sahil, Big fan of Gumroad! As a customer, it's one of the neatest checkout flows I've come across, among Stripe. Do you have any plans to expand into subscription offerings?
- sahillavingia 8y ago
  We do offer subscriptions! https://help.gumroad.com/11163-products-and-customizations/subscriptions https://help.gumroad.com/11163-products-and-customizations/s...
  - asaddhamani 8y ago
    Oh that's great! I'm gonna look into integrating Gumroad into my product in that case. One question: Do you support domestic cards from India? Or just credit cards? Because that's a problem I face with Stripe as well.
avip 8y ago
Thank you for sharing your story. It was inspiring to read. Couldn’t quite spot the failure though... maybe ESL thing.
freedomben 8y ago
Haha, it was crazy reading the discussion (in 2011) around whether Gumroad should take Bitcoin or not :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407053
- phoboslab 8y ago
  Ha, didn't expect to find my own comment there. I also mentioned selling jQuery plugins (remember jQuery?) and advertising my own game engine (now free) in the thread. Feels like such a long time ago. Gratz for pulling it off, Sahil!
saluki 8y ago
Thanks for sharing your story. I am a huge fan of gumroad, I remember your interviews on podcasts when you launched. I have a couple Gumroad T-Shirts that are still my favs. I have bought info products using Gumroad and it's a great experience. Will definitely use you guys to sell my own in the future. Thanks again.
giarc 8y ago
Any chance of finding these images again? They are 404'ing now but I'd love to see. https://letscrate.com/gumroad/gumroad-progress https://letscrate.com/gumroad/gumroad-progress
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I love your story Sahil, it is so true that people equate 'wealth' with 'success' but that is short sighted. If you step back and look at the big picture, you're on this planet for anywhere from 70 to 100 years, and at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to, which number is a better representative of 'success'? Working on things you enjoy, making a positive impact on people's lives, and raising a new generation to carry on where you left off, that is success. Stay focused there and you might accidentally accumulate so much wealth you have to work at putting it to use helping people like Bill does!
- kbenson 8y ago
  > at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to, which number is a better representative of 'success'? Let's not forget personal satisfaction. I'm a little leery of putting the entire assessment of my life onto other people (even though if I was going to, I could do a lot worse than number of people helped). Hopefully helping other people leads to some amount of personal satisfaction for most people, and they'll have a fairly good life and good impact on others by the end. :)
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    > personal satisfaction You can be one of the people you help.
  - Retra 8y ago
    Personal satisfaction doesn't matter once you're dead. Those other things do. And your entire assessment of your life at that point will be put onto other people. With that said, optimizing for after you're dead might be selfish and reasonably desirable, but there's a lot to be said for optimizing for tomorrow instead. Life would be pretty pointless if none of us were supposed to optimize for some enjoyment while we're here.
    - FiberBundle 8y ago
davish 8y ago
Thanks for sharing your story, Sahil. Something I was wondering: do you think that Gumroad could have gotten to where it was without raising money to begin with? You mentioned sales not really changing with or whithout a sales team, but do you think you could have developed Gumroad in the beginning with a smaller group of developers, or even just by yourself?
- sahillavingia 8y ago
  I don't think Gumroad could be the high-quality, full-featured product it is today without raising VC funding. Less, maybe, but bootstrapped, no. (Though, I was living in SF.)
  - halfmatthalfcat 8y ago
    What was the biggest cost sink? Engineering, marketing, sales?
jonplackett 8y ago
Thanks so much for telling that story. In hindsight, what do you make of companies choosing or rejecting venture funding in the first place?
eruci 8y ago
Good job man! Money isn't everything.
rsp1984 8y ago
Hello Sahil, thanks so much for sharing this. I know it helps a lot of founders out there. One question: You mentioned that you raised ~$8m from investors, but that your liq. preferences used to be $16.5m. Was there a 2x preference in the Series A term sheet?
- sahillavingia 8y ago
  $1.1M @ 1X $7M @ 1X $2.25M (the bridge I mention) @ 4X
  - rsp1984 8y ago
    I don't see the bridge mentioned. But thanks a lot for clearing that up. There's so little data out there on companies' term sheets so it's always good to get a dose of real world.
    - sahillavingia 8y ago
      Oops, I think I nixed that to use in a future article purely on raising money. My bad!
moneywoes 8y ago
Congrats on the success
vertline3 8y ago
Cool! Ive bought multiple video lessons from Gumroad before! Nice to hear from you :)
people_not_bots 8y ago
Any thoughts on the recent drama on the changes on Patreon and their funding round?
- tracker1 8y ago
  Came to ask similarly... it seems the functionality that Patreon offers would be a good start for parallel expansion/features.
a-wu 8y ago
Thanks for writing this Sahil. > But I was accountable to our creators, our employees, and our investors–in that order. We helped thousands of creators get paid, every month. About $2,500,000 was going to go into the pockets of creators — for rent checks and mortgages, for student loans and kids’ college funds. And it was only growing! Could I really just turn that faucet off? I really appreciate that you value being beholden to your customers more than your investors. It seems like as you've bought back your ownership you've had more opportunity to run your company the way you want to, and I admire that that way is doing right by your customers. If I ever start my own company, I would like to run it this way.
FreeRadical 8y ago
I remember this very well and telling my sibling to use your service
happyweasel 8y ago
Gumroad is really cool, bought lots of tutorials on 3d modelling, photoshop, texturing etc.. Maybe 100 or so. The platform does not get in the way and has useful ui.
justfor1comment 8y ago
Hi Sahil, I don't know why but I see you a lot in my LinkedIn feed. Hope you succeed even more in building Gumroad. Just visited Gumroad for the first time. Here is some of my feedback based on initial impressions. 1) The homepage seems to be designed around creators and not customers. It's trying too hard to onboard creators while ignoring the main source of revenue for the entire ecosystem, the customer. 2) The search bar for products is not very useful. It felt like I already need to know what I wanted to buy. There should be an alternative way for discovering, for example, top 10 selling items in each category. Like the first page a customer sees when visiting Amazon. 3) The review system although designed to help customers make more informed decisions, is not useful at this point in the product cycle. I could only find 5-10 ratings on every product. Compare this to the several 1000 reviews on Amazon products makes me scared to spend money on Gumroad. I don't want to be too critical of the product but I feel like your motivations are genuine and hate to see you struggle. So, wanted share some honest feedback.
neya 8y ago
Hi Sahil, Thanks for sharing the amazing story. I was wondering, since Gumroad's announcement about 2-3 years ago [1], is the plan to open source Gumroad still on track? Thank you. [1] https://twitter.com/gumroad/status/811650470758359040 https://twitter.com/gumroad/status/811650470758359040
- Dumbdo 8y ago
  From the the article in OP: > Soon, we will also open-source the whole product, WordPress-style. Anyone will be able to deploy their own version of Gumroad, make the changes they want, and sell the content they want, without us being the middle-man.
  - neya 8y ago
    I missed that totally, thanks!
rubyron 8y ago
Sahil, thanks for sharing your story to date. I remember meeting with you in 2011 in Palo Alto shortly after your launch, and I could tell then you had the “right stuff.” Proud of you man.
soheil 8y ago
Hi Sahil, who are your most prominent competitors? Do you consider Patreon a competitor? I'm asking since with so many platforms for selling items online I find it surprising there is still room for more companies in this space.
apatters 8y ago
I was reading an article recently about managing small business growth. Not tech or startup related, just a good old fashioned blog post from an accountant who said hey you've started a business and it's growing, here are some things to consider. (I've lost the link unfortunately.) One point this guy made was that a lot of businesses develop additional overheads and need a lot of cash to grow after they reach around $1M in annual sales. Going from $1M->$10M is a big step which is hard to self-fund, there is some risk involved, and the owner's mindset needs to change. I couldn't help but think, hey a consistent annual $1M in sales is quite an achievement by itself. If you own most or all of the equity in that company, financially you're doing far better than most people (OK, maybe less true if you run in certain Bay Area circles). This is a perspective you won't hear from VCs, but if you hit that milestone, who says you have to go higher? Maybe it's OK for a founder to just stop at some point, especially if they don't enjoy what they're doing or they've been under-investing in other areas of their life.
- goatherders 8y ago
  People addicted to Startup Porn GREATLY underestimate the value of a business that generates a million dollars a year.
  - adwn 8y ago
    > People addicted to Startup Porn GREATLY underestimate the value of a business that generates a million dollars a year. Annual sales of $1M does not mean "generating a million dollars a year". In some industries, those $1M in sales might be as low as $30k to $50k in earnings (though it would probably be more for a software company).
    - goatherders 8y ago
      Semantics aside, I'll say it again: people addicted to Startup Porn GREATLY underestimate the value of a business that generates a million dollars a year. Even if the earnings are 5% or 3% or even 1% ....getting someone to give you that much money for something you are selling is a lot harder than most people realize. Whether it's a million widgets at one dollar each or one widget at a million dollars, that's a LOT of money to be transacting.
giis 8y ago
I had terrible experience with Gumroad (more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139000) and even pinged you on quora: https://qr.ae/TUrSmp https://qr.ae/TUrSmp No response what so ever. I still believe Gumroad provides one of arrogant customer support I ever received. If you have 'startup' with so many unhappy customer - its expected to fail. https://gumroad.pissedconsumer.com/review.html https://gumroad.pissedconsumer.com/review.html Focus more on being open, transparent and being kind. Good luck!
sytelus 8y ago
Just wondering how much of your decision for not starting new venture could be because of burn out. You can always hire your one person replacement to do customer service, fix occasional bugs etc so you move on. Especially if you hunt for good freelancer offshore/remote, you probably can do it with more devs and cheaply. This I wouldn’t recommend for spinning new products but for maintaining existing mature enough products it works out fairly well and lifestyle-level revenue is good enough to do this. Shouldn’t this allow you to move on to new ventures?
plinkplonk 8y ago
Sahil, thanks for writing this article. very useful to me (as someone working on iteration 2 of a company). (If you see this, could you please fix the paypal integration. In India, we don't have any protection if credit card data gets leaked, (and could end up paying off whatever the hacker charges the card) and I don't use my credit card online if I can help it Thanks in advance)
anthony90 8y ago
you are...dum

jrochkind1 8y ago

I hadn't heard of Gumroad before -- it actually looks like a really good product, and one that I would have occasion to recommend to people. To what do you attribute the challenges? Were you building a product there wasn't a market for, what you were delivering wasn't what people wanted? Or, a marketting failure, inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs? Or, what I think I get from your post, is maybe you think neither of these -- rather you just tried to grow _too quickly_, quicker than the market/product could bear, and then had to deal with that. Do you think if from the start you had _not_ tried to create a "billion dollar company", stayed smaller, accepted less investment with clearer expectations, had fewer employees, etc. -- you would have still been able to get to where you are now, but quicker and with less pain? You still would have been able to get _enough_ investment, and with the investment you had still would have been able to build the product succesfully? I think maybe that's what your essay is implying you are suggesting, but I'm not totally sure if that's what you mean to be suggesting; or maybe you don't mean to be "diagnosing" it at all and aren't interested in these questions of what-could-have-been at this point. :)

sahillavingia 8y ago
I really tried to avoid being prescriptive about the solutions. It's a lot easier to talk about the problems :) > aren't interested in these questions of what-could-have-been at this point Exactly. If we shipped this or that feature... If we raised more, or less.. If I stayed at Pinterest... If I invested in Bitcoin... I'm just not sure I gain a lot from thoughts like that!
- mrskitch 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. It's really important not to give too much thought to hypotheticals as they're purely that: a hypothetical.
jammygit 8y ago
"inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs?" Just from visiting the landing page for gumroad.com, I wasn't clear about what the company did. Some questions that came to my mind: By e-commerce, is it like shopify or like stripe? By audience-building software, is that SEO, marketing, or analytics? Just writing the feedback I like to get from others. The features page answered most of my questions in general(I think its an online store platform for digital goods?).
- amelius 8y ago
  > "inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs?" It's a bit ironic that one of the main features of the product is "audience building for creators".

kr4 8y ago

http://omswami.com/2011/11/the-successful-and-the-successfool.html http://omswami.com/2011/11/the-successful-and-the-successfoo...

asaddhamani 8y ago

Hey Sahil, Big fan of Gumroad! As a customer, it's one of the neatest checkout flows I've come across, among Stripe. Do you have any plans to expand into subscription offerings?

sahillavingia 8y ago
We do offer subscriptions! https://help.gumroad.com/11163-products-and-customizations/subscriptions https://help.gumroad.com/11163-products-and-customizations/s...
- asaddhamani 8y ago
  Oh that's great! I'm gonna look into integrating Gumroad into my product in that case. One question: Do you support domestic cards from India? Or just credit cards? Because that's a problem I face with Stripe as well.

avip 8y ago

Thank you for sharing your story. It was inspiring to read. Couldn’t quite spot the failure though... maybe ESL thing.

freedomben 8y ago

Haha, it was crazy reading the discussion (in 2011) around whether Gumroad should take Bitcoin or not :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407053

phoboslab 8y ago
Ha, didn't expect to find my own comment there. I also mentioned selling jQuery plugins (remember jQuery?) and advertising my own game engine (now free) in the thread. Feels like such a long time ago. Gratz for pulling it off, Sahil!

saluki 8y ago

Thanks for sharing your story. I am a huge fan of gumroad, I remember your interviews on podcasts when you launched. I have a couple Gumroad T-Shirts that are still my favs. I have bought info products using Gumroad and it's a great experience. Will definitely use you guys to sell my own in the future. Thanks again.

giarc 8y ago

Any chance of finding these images again? They are 404'ing now but I'd love to see. https://letscrate.com/gumroad/gumroad-progress https://letscrate.com/gumroad/gumroad-progress

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I love your story Sahil, it is so true that people equate 'wealth' with 'success' but that is short sighted. If you step back and look at the big picture, you're on this planet for anywhere from 70 to 100 years, and at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to, which number is a better representative of 'success'? Working on things you enjoy, making a positive impact on people's lives, and raising a new generation to carry on where you left off, that is success. Stay focused there and you might accidentally accumulate so much wealth you have to work at putting it to use helping people like Bill does!

kbenson 8y ago
> at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to, which number is a better representative of 'success'? Let's not forget personal satisfaction. I'm a little leery of putting the entire assessment of my life onto other people (even though if I was going to, I could do a lot worse than number of people helped). Hopefully helping other people leads to some amount of personal satisfaction for most people, and they'll have a fairly good life and good impact on others by the end. :)
- paulddraper 8y ago
  > personal satisfaction You can be one of the people you help.
- Retra 8y ago
  Personal satisfaction doesn't matter once you're dead. Those other things do. And your entire assessment of your life at that point will be put onto other people. With that said, optimizing for after you're dead might be selfish and reasonably desirable, but there's a lot to be said for optimizing for tomorrow instead. Life would be pretty pointless if none of us were supposed to optimize for some enjoyment while we're here.
  - FiberBundle 8y ago

davish 8y ago

Thanks for sharing your story, Sahil. Something I was wondering: do you think that Gumroad could have gotten to where it was without raising money to begin with? You mentioned sales not really changing with or whithout a sales team, but do you think you could have developed Gumroad in the beginning with a smaller group of developers, or even just by yourself?

sahillavingia 8y ago
I don't think Gumroad could be the high-quality, full-featured product it is today without raising VC funding. Less, maybe, but bootstrapped, no. (Though, I was living in SF.)
- halfmatthalfcat 8y ago
  What was the biggest cost sink? Engineering, marketing, sales?

jonplackett 8y ago

Thanks so much for telling that story. In hindsight, what do you make of companies choosing or rejecting venture funding in the first place?

eruci 8y ago

Good job man! Money isn't everything.

rsp1984 8y ago

Hello Sahil, thanks so much for sharing this. I know it helps a lot of founders out there. One question: You mentioned that you raised ~$8m from investors, but that your liq. preferences used to be $16.5m. Was there a 2x preference in the Series A term sheet?

sahillavingia 8y ago
$1.1M @ 1X $7M @ 1X $2.25M (the bridge I mention) @ 4X
- rsp1984 8y ago
  I don't see the bridge mentioned. But thanks a lot for clearing that up. There's so little data out there on companies' term sheets so it's always good to get a dose of real world.
  - sahillavingia 8y ago
    Oops, I think I nixed that to use in a future article purely on raising money. My bad!

moneywoes 8y ago

Congrats on the success

vertline3 8y ago

Cool! Ive bought multiple video lessons from Gumroad before! Nice to hear from you :)

people_not_bots 8y ago

Any thoughts on the recent drama on the changes on Patreon and their funding round?

tracker1 8y ago
Came to ask similarly... it seems the functionality that Patreon offers would be a good start for parallel expansion/features.

a-wu 8y ago

Thanks for writing this Sahil. > But I was accountable to our creators, our employees, and our investors–in that order. We helped thousands of creators get paid, every month. About $2,500,000 was going to go into the pockets of creators — for rent checks and mortgages, for student loans and kids’ college funds. And it was only growing! Could I really just turn that faucet off? I really appreciate that you value being beholden to your customers more than your investors. It seems like as you've bought back your ownership you've had more opportunity to run your company the way you want to, and I admire that that way is doing right by your customers. If I ever start my own company, I would like to run it this way.

FreeRadical 8y ago

I remember this very well and telling my sibling to use your service

happyweasel 8y ago

Gumroad is really cool, bought lots of tutorials on 3d modelling, photoshop, texturing etc.. Maybe 100 or so. The platform does not get in the way and has useful ui.

justfor1comment 8y ago

Hi Sahil, I don't know why but I see you a lot in my LinkedIn feed. Hope you succeed even more in building Gumroad. Just visited Gumroad for the first time. Here is some of my feedback based on initial impressions. 1) The homepage seems to be designed around creators and not customers. It's trying too hard to onboard creators while ignoring the main source of revenue for the entire ecosystem, the customer. 2) The search bar for products is not very useful. It felt like I already need to know what I wanted to buy. There should be an alternative way for discovering, for example, top 10 selling items in each category. Like the first page a customer sees when visiting Amazon. 3) The review system although designed to help customers make more informed decisions, is not useful at this point in the product cycle. I could only find 5-10 ratings on every product. Compare this to the several 1000 reviews on Amazon products makes me scared to spend money on Gumroad. I don't want to be too critical of the product but I feel like your motivations are genuine and hate to see you struggle. So, wanted share some honest feedback.

neya 8y ago

Hi Sahil, Thanks for sharing the amazing story. I was wondering, since Gumroad's announcement about 2-3 years ago [1], is the plan to open source Gumroad still on track? Thank you. [1] https://twitter.com/gumroad/status/811650470758359040 https://twitter.com/gumroad/status/811650470758359040

Dumbdo 8y ago
From the the article in OP: > Soon, we will also open-source the whole product, WordPress-style. Anyone will be able to deploy their own version of Gumroad, make the changes they want, and sell the content they want, without us being the middle-man.
- neya 8y ago
  I missed that totally, thanks!

rubyron 8y ago

Sahil, thanks for sharing your story to date. I remember meeting with you in 2011 in Palo Alto shortly after your launch, and I could tell then you had the “right stuff.” Proud of you man.

soheil 8y ago

Hi Sahil, who are your most prominent competitors? Do you consider Patreon a competitor? I'm asking since with so many platforms for selling items online I find it surprising there is still room for more companies in this space.

apatters 8y ago

I was reading an article recently about managing small business growth. Not tech or startup related, just a good old fashioned blog post from an accountant who said hey you've started a business and it's growing, here are some things to consider. (I've lost the link unfortunately.) One point this guy made was that a lot of businesses develop additional overheads and need a lot of cash to grow after they reach around $1M in annual sales. Going from $1M->$10M is a big step which is hard to self-fund, there is some risk involved, and the owner's mindset needs to change. I couldn't help but think, hey a consistent annual $1M in sales is quite an achievement by itself. If you own most or all of the equity in that company, financially you're doing far better than most people (OK, maybe less true if you run in certain Bay Area circles). This is a perspective you won't hear from VCs, but if you hit that milestone, who says you have to go higher? Maybe it's OK for a founder to just stop at some point, especially if they don't enjoy what they're doing or they've been under-investing in other areas of their life.

goatherders 8y ago
People addicted to Startup Porn GREATLY underestimate the value of a business that generates a million dollars a year.
- adwn 8y ago
  > People addicted to Startup Porn GREATLY underestimate the value of a business that generates a million dollars a year. Annual sales of $1M does not mean "generating a million dollars a year". In some industries, those $1M in sales might be as low as $30k to $50k in earnings (though it would probably be more for a software company).
  - goatherders 8y ago
    Semantics aside, I'll say it again: people addicted to Startup Porn GREATLY underestimate the value of a business that generates a million dollars a year. Even if the earnings are 5% or 3% or even 1% ....getting someone to give you that much money for something you are selling is a lot harder than most people realize. Whether it's a million widgets at one dollar each or one widget at a million dollars, that's a LOT of money to be transacting.

giis 8y ago

I had terrible experience with Gumroad (more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139000) and even pinged you on quora: https://qr.ae/TUrSmp https://qr.ae/TUrSmp No response what so ever. I still believe Gumroad provides one of arrogant customer support I ever received. If you have 'startup' with so many unhappy customer - its expected to fail. https://gumroad.pissedconsumer.com/review.html https://gumroad.pissedconsumer.com/review.html Focus more on being open, transparent and being kind. Good luck!

sytelus 8y ago

Just wondering how much of your decision for not starting new venture could be because of burn out. You can always hire your one person replacement to do customer service, fix occasional bugs etc so you move on. Especially if you hunt for good freelancer offshore/remote, you probably can do it with more devs and cheaply. This I wouldn’t recommend for spinning new products but for maintaining existing mature enough products it works out fairly well and lifestyle-level revenue is good enough to do this. Shouldn’t this allow you to move on to new ventures?

plinkplonk 8y ago

Sahil, thanks for writing this article. very useful to me (as someone working on iteration 2 of a company). (If you see this, could you please fix the paypal integration. In India, we don't have any protection if credit card data gets leaked, (and could end up paying off whatever the hacker charges the card) and I don't use my credit card online if I can help it Thanks in advance)

anthony90 8y ago

you are...dum