4 ms·
I've always liked Gumroad as a product and service but this line kind of bothers me: > There is, of course, the $178,000,000 we have sent to creators This mon
by lancesells 8y ago
I've always liked Gumroad as a product and service but this line kind of bothers me:
> There is, of course, the $178,000,000 we have sent to creators
This money wasn't sent to creators. They sold products worth $178M + Gumroad fees through the service. The creators made the products, marketed the products, acquired the customers, etc. When I use Paypal to sell something they aren't "sending me money".
- vishnu_ks 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106780
- themagician 8y agoYou could say the same thing about Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Etsy, TaskRabbit, etc.. When you sit down and think about it you start to realize just how “temporary” all these so-called unicorns are, as they are just middleware services with no real differentiating benefits other than size and brand recognition and maybe some vague “guarantee” to the customer. You’ve got to get big fast, because what you actually do is easily replicated.
- benatkin 8y agoUber and Lyft are middlemen, but because they interface directly with the consumer, they also create demand. I deleted my apps when I realized that I was spending a hundred bucks a month compared with twenty bucks a month if I had used cabs, and getting little real benefit out of it. It just feels so convenient, but the fares add up quickly. I bet if they sent weekly or monthly summaries people would use them less.
- marcinzm 8y ago>because what you actually do is easily replicated. Not really for Lyft/Uber, at not now that it's flat fee and ride pooling instead of a traditional per minute/mile fee structure. To achieve those thing efficiently you need data and until you get that data you're burning through a lot of money.
- chkuendig 8y ago> no real differentiating benefits other than size and brand recognition and maybe some vague “guarantee” to the customer. - scale - brand - customer loyalty that's a lot of differentiation. more then 99% of the businesses in the world and more than even many public companies. (especially once you add the power gained from aggregating demand and supply which most of these companies have)
- themagician 8y agoMost of the businesses in the world make a widget and sell that widget.
- libria 8y ago> There is, of course, the $178,000,000 we have {sent, channelled, moved-through-our-platform, assisted in transferring} to creators All of the above seem synonymous and none seems particularly malicious, but "sent" is easiest way to express it. For a marketplace, I don't think anyone's naive to believe the host is directly advancing funds to the tune of millions. Is it really necessary to nitpick that?
- supermw 8y agoThey should have said $178,000,000 in transactions.
- komali2 8y ago"Enabled customers to achieve 178,000,000 in revenue they may not otherwise have," maybe?
- rossdavidh 8y agoThat would be better, but I also agree with the others who think the way it was written pretty clearly meant the same thing, in the context of the article.
- jVinc 8y agoMight be a language thing, but if someone sends me money through paypal, I definitely would say paypal receives the funds from that person and then sends them to me. Thus paypal can tally up how much money they have sent to their customers. I can't see how you could misunderstand that or think there is malice in the formulation. I can't possibly anyone would sit there thinking that gumroad ment he donated money to people or invested it.