39 ms·

No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

• tosh 6y ago
  anti-overtime, interesting! > We also have an “anti-overtime” rate: past twenty hours a week, people can continue to work at an hourly rate of 50 percent. This allows us to have a high hourly rate for the highest leverage work and also allows people to work more per week if they wish.
  • yawnxyz 6y ago
    I feel like this is only possible once the product and product-market fit have been established; the fire has started burning on its own and you can start stepping back and just stoke the fire
  • dboreham 6y ago
    Quick note from my HR friends: beware that there may be local labor laws that conflict with this scheme.
    • meowster 6y ago
      In the US, it makes sense for the company to be required to pay a higher overtime rate if they're requiring the employee to work more than 40 hours. If the company is saying they don't want you to work more than 40 hours, then it seems like the law is going against the spirit of its intentions.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • OJFord 6y ago
      They're all contractors, not employees, so it's just a different rate depending on the number of hours you bill. Your advice is sound in general of course, I just doubt that any jurisdiction that accepts them as contractors will have a problem with that detail.
      • protomyth 6y ago
        Being contractors isn't always a shield from some of these laws. Check with a lawyer and https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd
        • _nalply 6y ago
          I think the trick is that contractors don't work full time at Gumroad so that they can have other projects. In Switzerland for example you are self-employed only if you have several clients and are autonomous. It seems that it is easier for Gumroad contractors to fulfill these requirements.
  • elliekelly 6y ago
    This is a great idea but I think it would only work in the context of “no deadlines” like Gumroad has implemented otherwise it would just seem cruel.
  • kortilla 6y ago
    This sounds ripe for a lawsuit or some really bad PR. Wait until the labor groups find out you punish the people desperate for more hours to make ends meet. It’s better to implement an hour cap or require approval for any overtime.
    • _underfl0w_ 6y ago
      It seems you didn't read TFA.
    • yarcob 6y ago
      But this is an hour cap. The employer is saying, don't work more than 20 hours, or I'll lower your rate. It's better than a strict cap, since it does offer people to work more if they want. It would only be unfair if the employer would then instruct workers to work overtime; I assume that could be illegal (depending on where in the world this happens). But voluntary overtime is very different.
      • namdnay 6y ago
        The risk is that the employer is saying “don’t declare more than 20 hours”, but everybody knows that you have to do more if you want to meet your targets / not be dropped
  • cambalache 6y ago
    It is devilishly genius. You set a 20 hr/week regime and only keep the employees who work twice as hard, at 20-30 h/week you are actually extracting 80% of the worker productivity in any case at 50% of the cost.
  • nerdponx 6y ago
    This sounds like a nice way to make damn sure that you never have to pay benefits.
• samwestdev 6y ago
  Gumroad is a pretty barebone service, no wonder they have no deadlines...
• draw_down 6y ago
  This is maybe the only “how we work” I’ve ever read that is actually appealing. It really does sound wonderful. My only question is around health insurance for the US based folks (I’m guessing the answer is “take the money we pay you and go buy some” which is unfortunately not a good solution) but otherwise yes, sounds ideal.
  • meowster 6y ago
    It might be a better solution that tying health insurance with a job. Doing so seems to make it harder (more expensive) for people without jobs to get health insurance. But otherwise, what they're doing seems interesting. FYI, I had to vouch for your comment. Looking at your comment history to see why, maybe try staying away from one or two word replies. Edit: I see HN as a place for people to improve. If it seems like someone has the ability to make HN a better place with just a minor adjustment, it seems like the best course of action for everyone would be to make that person aware of the issue and giving them the opportunity to change it, rather than hiding it and basically ignoring the person.
    • draw_down 6y ago
      See, I was talking about health insurance, not HN posts. Nobody is arguing that tying your healthcare to your job is good, certainly I am not, but in many (most) cases it's what our system requires because otherwise you pay through the nose for crappy coverage. (Or pay a bit less for really crappy coverage.) I'm aware of my HN situation. If you want to vouch for posts that's your business, but feel free to take your posting advice and cram it. No offense bud.
    • meowster 6y ago
      Edit 2: Well then, I see now why that user is shadowbanned. My mistake.
      • draw_down 6y ago
        Hi, please refrain from making short, low-content comments on HN that are intended to deride other commenters. Thanks! <3
• BoysenberryPi 6y ago
  I've been a Gumroad user(consumer not creator) for a long time and remember the whole VC situation. At the time, I feared it might be the end of the service. I'm glad it wasn't. A lot of people want companies like Google or Tesla, however, my honest goal in life is to have a company like Gumroad.
  • root-z 6y ago
    Exactly. It can take decades and all the time you have to build the next Google or Tesla and that's in the case that it all works out. There are other things to pursue in life and with a smaller company you get a lot more control in both the company and your own lifestyle.
• spoonjim 6y ago
  I wonder if the VCs now regret just giving the company back to the founder who lost their money. $11m revenue growing this fast is a lot.
  • yawnxyz 6y ago
    I don't think they would, since I don't think Gumroad is growing at any VCs' expected pace, even though they're doing well
  • PedroBatista 6y ago
    VCs LOVE this! Not only they underwrote the losses but also were presented with an "interesting" experiment. You can bet Gumroad's case will be "studied" and pushed to other companies with VC money in similar situations ( but this time I don't think they'll let go the money invested )
• Pulcinella 6y ago
  TL;DR The founder of Gumroad fired all his employees and replaced some with and rehired some on contract. Gumroad does not provide benefits like healthcare. Your hourly rate gets cut cut in half after you work more than 20 hours a week. The article is a nice way of saying that the founder largely just collects rent while putting minimal resources into the business.
  • CydeWeys 6y ago
    Yeah, hard pass. If I'm gonna be a 1099 contractor my rate will need to be very high (roughly $500/hr). Otherwise I'm sticking with my FTE job. And I'd need to be able to pick up more than the 20 hours per week than this guy will give me too, so I'd need multiple clients.
    • dkdk8283 6y ago
      20 hrs a week @ 500 is 520k/y. you only need one client.
      • jacobsenscott 6y ago
        minus vacation, taxes, health insurance, overhead (time tracking, billing, book keeping, etc), time between gigs. 2050052 you are coming in way high. You can cut that in half and get a reasonable estimate for take home.
        • bing_dai 6y ago
          There are people who are perfectly happy with about $250K of take-home pay a year if that means they have plenty of freedom to do other things. In fact, I bet many people in the US will be happy with $30K a year, not $250K.
          • CydeWeys 6y ago
            Of course, but why would someone be happy with that if it's a significant downgrade from where they are now?
• simonbarker87 6y ago
  Congratulations on this success! Gumroad is a valuable service for many people and the founder seems to have a great balance of time, flexibility and income.
• systemvoltage 6y ago
  I honestly think this is great. We can precisely write, but cannot precisely voice. Auditory communication through mouth and ears is low bandwidth, has high dependency over who has more testosterone, energy, enthusiasm, listening skills, attention, retention and record, etc. Writing has a permanent record, you can take time to form your opinions and respectfully argue. What are the downsides? I think immediate feedback, and fast back and forth in voice communication is what I miss the most. And ofcourse, bonding with people.
  • agumonkey 6y ago
    Writing can be tweaked and even faked. Vocal communication has other valuable traits. Also human work is often emotional.
• staunch 6y ago
  I'm genuinely curious what Gumroad Creators are selling. Is it 95% porn revenue, with a veneer of ebooks and videos? Or is there actually a sizable market for other digital goods?
  • vlucas 6y ago
    All kinds of legitimate things are sold on Gumroad. I created BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.net https://www.budgetsheet.net ), which I sell subscriptions to via Gumroad. It's ramping up slow, but this year it broke $1k ARR. My goal is to 3x that this year. Income Proof: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wzatabooj5hocug/Screen%20Shot%202021-01-05%20at%202.06.35%20PM.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/wzatabooj5hocug/Screen%20Shot%2020...
  • philipkiely 6y ago
    Not porn, mostly, see https://gumroad.com/company https://gumroad.com/company Here is a small sample of things of interest to an HN audience that you can buy with Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/fullstack https://gumroad.com/fullstack https://gumroad.com/adamwathan https://gumroad.com/adamwathan https://gumroad.com/traf https://gumroad.com/traf
  • WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    I've seen some 3d printed items being sold (the blueprints)
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • dkroy 6y ago
    Such an odd way to ask this question from my perspective. Though this could be because I am missing something. Is this product popular in that industry? Is there a reason you lead with porn?
    • biztos 6y ago
      I was wondering the same thing, because just yesterday I encountered a mention of Gumroad together with OnlyFans in a blog by a creator. Had that not happened I too would have found the parent comment odd.
• philipkiely 6y ago
  I work at Gumroad, mentioned in this article. Sometimes, I read things by CEOs about how a company works on the inside and I wonder if it really looks like that, or if it is a view from the top that doesn't reflect what it's really like. This article, with its discussions of the upsides and downsides, is accurate to my experience and my understanding of other people's experiences. For many people, Gumroad wouldn't be a great place to work, but for those of us who want to work like this, it is exactly what we need. Very glad to be working at Gumroad and working in the ways the article describes. Edit: Following up with a few FAQs from posts in the thread: * Health Insurance: I'm personally lucky enough to still be covered on my dad's health insurance until I turn 26, thanks to the ACA, though for supplementary (vision, dental) I make more than enough to afford proper health insurance on the open market. Everyone at Gumroad is paid very well and should be able to afford the same. * Regarding overtime, benefits, etc: we make very competitive rates as contractors. I sincerely appreciate your concern, though. * On the shift from full-time employees to contractors, the company declined and was rebuilt over a period of five years. I'm a relatively recent addition, so I only know Gumroad as it is now, I cannot comment on how it was. All I can say is that it's not like Sahil went out and fired everyone and then the next day it was a bunch of contractors.
  • dkdk8283 6y ago
    I’d love something like this: I loathe the bullshit factory process has become.
    • ska 6y ago
      Process is one of those things you have whether you think about it or not. It's up to you collectively to decide if it is BS or not, too heavy, too light, etc. I'm not suggesting everyone has the influence to change process much at the place they work, but they idea that there is a single "thing" called process and some places have it and some don't is just dangerously misleading. It is true that process tends to naturally scale with org size and longevity because communication becomes more complicated with this scaling - but that only gives you a bit of a lower bound (i.e. if you go below this, you start shooting yourselves in the feet)
• jennyyang 6y ago
  Very interesting proposition, I hope the company flourishes! I'm not HR but I'm pretty sure the anti-overtime provision is completely illegal at least in countries like the US and Canada. I would outlaw overtime instead of pay people less for overtime.
  • caymanjim 6y ago
    > I'm pretty sure the anti-overtime provision is completely illegal at least in countries like the US This is incorrect. The tldr is that US employees are either "exempt" or "non-exempt". Without getting into pedantic details, employees can be categorized as exempt if they make over about $23k/year. Exempt employees are not entitled to overtime at all, and the Fair Labor Standards Act doesn't prohibit reducing someone's hourly pay for overtime in the unusual way that Gumroad does.
    • NationalPark 6y ago
      They're contractors not employees, but you are correct. There's nothing illegal about the arrangement.
      • Pulcinella 6y ago
        The wording of the article seemed unclear to me. You can have employees who are on contract. E.g. most public school teachers in America are on contract and full time employees of the school district. Most employment in the US is at-will and not on contract, though.
        • throwaway201103 6y ago
          A contractor is different from a contract employee.
    • etskinner 6y ago
      It's not the wage that dictates that a worker is exempt from FLSA overtime. Rather, being under $23,600/yr means you cannot be considered exempt. Being paid over that, by itself, doesn't necessarily mean that you're exempt. https://www.fws.gov/policy/225fw6.html https://www.fws.gov/policy/225fw6.html https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/flsa/screen75.asp https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/flsa/screen75.asp
• thesausageking 6y ago
  Let me understand this. Gumroad raises $8m from VCs, isn't able to grow fast enough, so the VCs agree to give up any claim on the company. Sahil fires all of the employees, hires a cheap contracting firm and some of the employees back as part-time contractors. The company now does $11m in revenue, most of which is profit and Sahil keeps. That's amazing. For Sahil. Not so great if you were one of his investors or former employees who had options.
  • hycaria 6y ago
    I think it’s $11M for the creators that’s going through gumroad. It’s not profit.
    • sokoloff 6y ago
      Above the fold in the article is "our creators earn over $175 million a year, and we generate $11 million in annualized revenue" I take that to mean Gumroad's revenue (not gross services sales) is $11M/yr.
  • sillysaurusx 6y ago
    The graph speaks for itself: https://sahillavingia.com/operating.png https://sahillavingia.com/operating.png You seem a little surprised. But why? This is the whole point of business: to make more money than you lose. As for why he did it, it looks like he wrote a retrospective here: https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting
  • MattGrommes 6y ago
    If this negatively affects any former employees that's terrible but are we supposed to feel bad for VCs? There have been other stories like this where the HN response is "Won't somebody think of the VCs!" and I just can't do it. They're adults and business people, they'll live.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• sahillavingia 6y ago
  Hey, #1 on Hacker News! I don't think that's happened since...I wrote Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company back in 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733 Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!
  • AkshatM 6y ago
    How do you stay competitive with similar products without instituting deadlines?
    • simpixelated 6y ago
      I work for a small company (less than 10 employees) that follows a very similar working process. No deadlines, one (very short) weekly meeting. We don't try to stay competitive with similar products. That's impossible with VC funding flooding the market. What we do instead is focus on making our current customers happy. Everyone is involved in support. We follow up with customers when we do launch features they requested, even if that's years later. It seems to be working well. It's not going to be hockey stick growth, but "freedom" for us (the employees) is well preserved.
      • biztos 6y ago
        I'm glad to hear that works for you. I'm a customer of several smallish (but bigger than 10 employees) services and if I'm paying something like $120/year for something even remotely useful, I'm not going to switch unless the competition solves a specific problem or I'm really mad at the current provider. In the former case I would at least have told support about my problem. I do believe that there is "enough" money to be made solving real-world problems for people and treating them like humans so they aren't going to drop you like a hot rock at the first chance. I'm happy to see some voices confirming that in this thread.
        • simpixelated 6y ago
          Yeah, we see plenty of churn on smaller/newer accounts, but a good chunk of our customers, especially on the larger plans, have been with us for years. It's partly platform lock in, because it's probably a pain to switch, but I like to think it's also we solve a majority of their needs at a decent price and provide good support. So why would they switch? I think it also helps that we are generally targeting that small to medium size company. Or even smaller departments/teams within larger companies. So we're not subject to the whims of a C-suite that is looking to cut 5% off their budget every quarter.
• martincmartin 6y ago
  an open source project like Rails. Except it’s neither open source, nor unpaid. Do people still think of big, successful open source projects as unpaid? Rails, for example, was created at Basecamp/37Signals. Most Linux contributions come from companies like IBM. Or am I the one who's out of touch?
  • nitrogen 6y ago
    It depends on the project. Some projects (can't think of examples off the top of my head, sorry, but they have come up here on HN) do reach pretty widespread usage without anyone being paid to work on them full time, and potentially with only one unpaid developer on the project.
  • alexellisuk 6y ago
    It depends. Many are paid as career OSS developers to contribute to Kubernetes. The ingress-nginx maintainer just stepped down today because nobody would fund his work. https://twitter.com/aledbf/status/1347273455448842240?s=20 https://twitter.com/aledbf/status/1347273455448842240?s=20 openfaas is also unfunded and a large project with many commercial end-(ab)users. https://www.openfaas.com https://www.openfaas.com Matt Holt behind Caddy gave up after years of struggle and managed to sell out to a company. My take on OSS maintainers - https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/ https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/ - see "2. Pay"
• underseacables 6y ago
  No health benefits, no unemployment ....
  • benmanns 6y ago
    But also fully deductible work-related expenses, including health insurance, and ability to fully fund a solo 401k.
    • jacobsenscott 6y ago
      Are you sure health insurance is deductible? There was a time it wasn't. Either way that's peanuts compared to a benefit that covers most of your premium. Fully fund a solo 401k is also nothing special compared to a proper matching 401k. This is just a freelancing gig, and not "working at gumroad".
      • tothrowaway 6y ago
        Health insurance premiums are deductible for self-employed people (and 2%+ S-corp shareholders): https://www.irs.gov/publications/p535#en_US_2019_publink1000208843 https://www.irs.gov/publications/p535#en_US_2019_publink1000...
  • throwaway201103 6y ago
    But an hourly rate which allows you to fund those things yourself.
• jkuria 6y ago
  By the way, here's an interview with Sahil, where he talks about his "Failure to build a $1 billion company..." and how it ended up being a blessing in disguise: https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/2987051/Candid-Interview-with-the-Guy-Who-Failed-to-Build-a-1-Billion-Company-Gumroad-Founder-Sahil-Lavingia https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/2987051/Candid-...
• paxys 6y ago
  I work for a large SaaS company with hundreds of engineers and a very healthy revenue. It's widely acknowledged that the company would continue to function exactly as it is now for a very long time if they fired 95% of the staff. Heck stability and uptime would probably improve due to fewer deployments/no new feature adds. So the graph with declining expenses and increasing revenue isn't at all surprising. The problem with this model is that you are coasting on the work done by your full time staff in the initial few years, whom you fired and replaced with part time contractors who get no benefits. Even putting the ethical issues with this aside, if a competitor takes interest in your space and has a large war chest, you'd be powerless to compete with them. And when your tech is dated and current/new customers want innovation, your low-price contracting firms working a few hours per week certainly aren't going to be able to offer that. So while I'm happy things are working in this case, no new company that starts with the environment you are describing is going to be successful.
  • dcolkitt 6y ago
    If a competitor takes interest in your space, and you're already profitable, they're as likely to acquire you as compete with you. A fully VC-funded SV unicorn is gonna demand a pretty high price tag. There's a lot of mouths to feed and liquidation preferences to payout. OTOH, $10 million is a pretty attractive payout for a single person, or even a handful.
    • paxys 6y ago
      Large companies are mostly looking for rapid growth and/or talent when they consider acquisitions, and this one has neither. Single-digit millions in revenue is inconsequential in the industry today.
      • Grimm1 6y ago
        You're missing IP acquisition which is the third well considered type of acquisition consideration. Not saying you're wrong here just wanted to add that.
• philmcp 6y ago
  In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week... So much so, I'm about to launch a website listing remote software jobs with a 4 day work week: https://www.28hrworkweek.com/ https://www.28hrworkweek.com/
  • spaetzleesser 6y ago
    Totally agree. Due to COVID most of my company worked only 4 days per week last year. The improvement in quality of life was amazing and productivity didn’t drop noticeably. There was a time when 6 days per week were normal. People thought the world would go under if people worked only 5 days but things were ok. The same will happen with 4 day weeks. Once people get used to it it will be hard to imagine working more.
    • philmcp 6y ago
      Exactly - the productivity boost employees gain from not being burned out, combined with a slightly lower wage bill. I see it as a win / win for both parties tbh.
  • jfengel 6y ago
    Some of it is a quirk of the American health care system. Your health care costs the same regardless of your work hours, and it's a significant fraction of compensation. If you were working 80% as much, they would probably only be able to pay 70% of your salary. (Assuming you were linearly productive, which it's not, but it's the same assumption you were making and is good enough for this illustration.) There are other fixed overheads, like your manager, human resources, the office itself, and even the cost of hiring you in the first place. It's possible that to make all things equal, they might have to change your salary to as much at 60%. Of course all things are never equal, so these numbers have really wide error bars. And after all that, you might well decide that 60% salary for a 32 hour week would still be a good deal. I know I'd consider it. But it's important to note that it's going to be rare to find a job that will pay you 80% as much for 80% of the work.
• tinyhouse 6y ago
  I must say that's impressive. I've been thinking about this for some time. I'm wondering if this new wave of companies would be a problem for the economy. Running a company is getting easier every year. That's good, more companies means more job opportunities. On the other hand, as we can see from the article, you can run a very lean remote company and still grow and be successful. Such companies would hire less and raise the hiring bar and if you're not great in what you do then you'll have a hard time finding a job. But long term it's a positive trend.
  • riversflow 6y ago
    It’s only a positive trend if society captures the wealth and spreads it back. I don’t think wealth inequality is a positive trend at all.
    • UnpossibleJim 6y ago
      I was going to say, it's like looking at the "gig" economy as a positive trend. This type of hiring process leads to less job stability and no health insurance, both of which are sorely under represented in the US for as developed a nation as we are. I think this is one more disconnect in business and success that we have been seeing in recent history.
  • treis 6y ago
    >On the other hand, as we can see from the article, you can run a very lean remote company and still grow and be successful. Eh, this is a pretty unique situation. They spent a lot of money and effort building the initial product and growing users. Now that the product is (mostly) feature complete and they have sufficient users they can run lean and mean. But that doesn't mean they could have run lean and mean while building the company. IMHO, you still need the upfront investment to build out the core product and acquire a sufficient customer base. The reality of today with interest rates so low is that growth is more valued than cash flow. So while lots of companies (Dropbox, Slack, AirBnB) could do something like this and start generating a bunch of cash they create more value in the eyes of investors by growing.
• antattack 6y ago
  "To be clear, we don’t provide healthcare. Everyone who works at Gumroad is responsible for their own healthcare and benefits. Everyone also pays for their own phone, laptop, internet connection, and all the other things they need." It seems to me that company operates like Uber or Lyft, and their product is exploiting wage inequalities.
  • randomchars 6y ago
    At least two people who work there commented, both earning 10k/month. A lot of things come to mind, but wage inequality and explication are not among them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25675002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25675002
  • kfk 6y ago
    I would agree broadly but “normal” salary contracts are burdened by heavy taxation in most countries. A contractor could pay really good private healthcare, build a pension fund, insure for disability and a bunch of other things and still net a lot more than a salary net for the same role. I don’t like it but it’s what it is and paying public pension for something you’ll never see is also not fun.
• lr4444lr 6y ago
  No deadlines? For how long does someone have to not "produce something that's better than what's on production" for you to decide he's not fit to keep getting a paycheck?
  • randomchars 6y ago
    People can get fired from 40h/week, meeting and deadline heavy jobs too.
  • wnoise 6y ago
    Deadlines are usually tied to specific things. "Being productive" only requires getting one of any number of things on a task list done.
• lrossi 6y ago
  > While Gumroad was no longer on track to become a billion-dollar company, I acquired a new asset: time. That’s okay, becoming a billion dollar company doesn’t have to be your goal. Staying smaller might be good not just for your work-life balance, but also for the user experience. Some prefer the stability it brings: you don’t have to worry that features or projects get canceled because they are not growing fast enough; that the app gets sold to some social network that starts spying on users or an AI is blocking accounts inexplicably etc.
• didip 6y ago
  So... is this legal? I guess it depends on where you incorporate the company?
  • randomchars 6y ago
    Why wouldn't it be? Hiring contractors, and not employees is completely normal and legal in most countries.
  • gnud 6y ago
    Hiring contractors is legal. I can't think of anywhere it's not. Sometimes, companies try to cheat by claiming that their employees are contractors. But this actually sounds like they really are contractors. No fixed schedule, work with the tools you want, even choose the tasks you want (within reason). So this sounds completely fine to me. Of course, IANAL.
• jedberg 6y ago
  In regards to the health insurance thing, there is a good middle option. I'm not affiliated but I use Savvy (https://www.gosavvy.com/ https://www.gosavvy.com/). They take advantage of a law that just started in 2020 that lets a company owner offer tax free insurance payments without having a health plan. Basically you set a budget, and then the employee chooses any health plan they want from any provider and pays with tax free money. If they spend more than your budget it just comes out of their paycheck, so you could theoretically set the budget to $0 and at least let them have tax free health care payments.
  • paxys 6y ago
    If you are self employed and itemize your deductions (like everyone working for this company I assume), your health insurance premiums are already tax free. Don't need an external service for that.
    • rwmurrayVT 6y ago
      This is for employees at companies that do not offer health insurance.
      • paxys 6y ago
        So is what I am talking about. If you are a contractor, your health insure premiums are a business expense and can be deducted from your taxable income, even if you are paying for them out of pocket.
    • jedberg 6y ago
      It wasn't clear to me whether they are 1099 or W2 employees. If they're 1099 then yes, it doesn't matter.
  • pimterry 6y ago
    They're not explicit about this, but I suspect part of the reason they don't offer health insurance is that their remuneration is intended to be location independent. Moving any fixed X of remuneration into health insurance will be wrong in many locations (in many places, standard health care doesn't require employer insurance, so the expected X for most jobs is 0, and any X > 0 is undesirable). Doing wildly varying custom health insurance setups for each employee according to their current needs seems complicated. If every 'employee' here is actually an independent contractor, can't they just pay for health insurance themselves from their remuneration however they please, and do so tax free as their own business expense?
• coldcode 6y ago
  I worked for a very large company you would all know, not tech, where deadlines are the start of any project, even before the details are more than vague ideas, meetings happen every day on multiple projects the same team has to work on overlapping, and full time is a dream (hint its a lot more). Living the dream.
  • root-z 6y ago
    FANG employee here. Same.
• abinaya_rl 6y ago
  Interesting way to run a company. I'm wondering if you provide any health care benefits to Gumroad contractors?
  • mediaman 6y ago
    It's in the article.
• xyzelement 6y ago
  I feel about this company the same way as I feel about driving Uber. If you already have someone in your family who's making money and has benefits, driving it could be a fun way to make a few extra bucks and talk to a few people. So if you're a housewife with a few free hours while the kids are at school, or a bored retiree, by all means drive Uber/work for this place. If you're someone in their prime and have to be self-reliant then this is as bad a deal as "I'll drive Uber for now" as a life plan. You're going to be down the road with no benefits, no growth, no title, and nothing to build the rest of your career on.
  • bitdotdash 6y ago
    Point out the Uber drivers making $10K/mo for quarter time work. Otherwise this argument falls flat.
    • xyzelement 6y ago
      Is it the guy who was making 400k at Amazon? Paying someone a quarter of what they are "worth" isn't that great a trick.
      • autarch 6y ago
        You missed the "for quarter time work". Earning $10k/month working 10 hours a week is pretty close to getting $400k/year for an FT job at Amazon (especially if FT ends up being more than 40 hours a week). I say "pretty close" because if you're working on a 1099 basis there are a bunch of extra costs (extra SSDI payments, health care premiums, etc.) that you have to cover. But still, nothing about the article suggests that the pay rates are poor, and the upper end ($250/hour) is quite good, especially when combined with the ability to work less than full time.
        • xyzelement 6y ago
          Autarch - thanks for breaking it down like that.
  • 6y ago
• pietrovismara 6y ago
  This looks really great. I've been thinking for a while to start a tech co-op with the only goal of giving the best benefits possible to its members in terms of pay and freedom, while being completely independent from investors/shareholders and the delusion of perpetual growth. This is both a confirmation that you can work on big projects without necessarily grinding away all of your time and energy, and that perpetual growth isn't a necessity.
• jimbob45 6y ago
  > Instead, I found an Indian firm called BigBinary and hired a few engineers as contractors. > Since its inception in 2011 BigBinary has been remote and all 100+ team members are spread all over India. So you outsourced development to take advantage of Indians so desperate for a job that they’d accept lower pay and pocketed the profit for yourself? I don’t understand how outsourcing is still legal when we have scumbags like you who show us problems with it.
• realDjangoB 6y ago
  Another california liberal fleeing to Texas and voting there for the same policies that made california worse.
  • lynguist 6y ago
    You mean outsourcing? Or what? Or concentration of wealth in one spot?
• dutchbrit 6y ago
  Hey Sahil, I remember you from way back (TalkFreelance days - Sam Granger)! Really awesome & interesting to see how you've grown Gumroad to what it is today, impressive!
• simpixelated 6y ago
  I work at a similar company (less than 10 employees, no deadlines, (almost) no meetings), but unlike Gumroad we actually have health insurance, 401K with matching, donation matching, etc. So it is possible to to have "freedom" without laying everyone off and removing all benefits. You can read more about it here: https://simpixelated.com/two-year-work-retrospective https://simpixelated.com/two-year-work-retrospective
  • dannyw 6y ago
    Are all of your employees there for true flexibility (ie spending more time on their own project than work?)
    • simpixelated 6y ago
      I don't think so. Everyone seems to put in a solid day working. No one is counting the hours, but we seem to be productive enough. Still, I definitely joined the company to get away from working more than 40 hours per week and feeling stressed all the time.
• vicary 6y ago
  Love this, really great approach.
• tekstar 6y ago
  I worked at a FAANG-level startup for a number of years and am now doing my own thing, with hopes of building a stable part-time business. This appeals to me. In any company, employee trust is a huge benefit when it works and a huge concern when it's missing. this Gumroad model would require even higher trust to operate so independently and not incrementally add more "check up" meetings and slack etc etc. Can anyone from Gumroad speak to how they built the team? Hiring some roles from your customer community makes a lot of sense as they already will have some feeling of propriety. Have there been bad hires? I guess having everyone on contract makes it easier to move on.
• ftruzzi 6y ago
  My team got laid off a few months ago and after experiencing remote working this is the only kind of work arrangement I'd be happy to apply for. 40hrs a week of remote working does not allow for a lot of freedom, ~20hrs sounds amazing. Really hope more companies start to adopt this.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Personally, unless there is some clear and dramatic advantage to a scheme like this, or it is enforced by law or collective bargaining pressure, I think it is unlikely to ever happen. I hold this belief because I am now convinced that too many agents within companies care less about profit and success than they do about straight-up owning people. Forcing people to spend their time at work is as close to actual slavery as contemporary society allows, so that's what they do.
    • ftruzzi 6y ago
      > Forcing people to spend their time at work is as close to actual slavery as contemporary society allows, so that's what they do. I completely agree with this, but I'm not sure this is necessarily beneficial for companies (compared to potential alternatives). In the end, the quality of their products benefits from happier employees, whatever "happier employees" means. When I switched jobs from contracting at a FAANG to working for a worse company it was mostly due to bad mood in general. The job wasn't interesting anymore and I would feel like a well-paid slave. It felt like everything, including the house I was living in, was tied to or revolving around my job. It felt like I didn't have anything, except the job and what came with it. Had they offered a part-time option with half the money or so, I probably would have stayed and started making the steps I'm making now as unemployed towards improving myself (more physical activity, side projects, volunteering, working on my mental health) It doesn't have to be all the companies though, it can just be a few and then a few more. Gitlab and now Gumtree definitely stand out to me as one of the very few companies I'd be happy to work with and that's because of their approach to work.
• olah_1 6y ago
  > There is another downside to this system: people have to track their hours. Some people solve this by billing 20 hours a week, even though they may work a bit more or a bit less. Others track it diligently, in 15-minute increments, and send a detailed invoice every week. I cannot stand tracking hours. No thanks.
  • valzam 6y ago
    It's really only as bad as you make it though. Sure, don't grossly over/underestimate but I would imagine that a lot of their contractors work in half day increments at least, which makes it a lot easier to track. A friend of mine works at a law firm and they track by the minute, as in people record when they go pee and when they come back. that sounds like hell. So I see where you are coming from.
    • olah_1 6y ago
      The biggest issue is actually recording the time, to be honest. An ex-coworker used to set aside 2-4 hours every Friday to just do timesheets. Some set aside a half hour every day to get them accurate. It strikes me as cruel. But in any case, just not my cup of tea.
• gricardo99 6y ago
  But we can compete–and win–on flexibility. And then the following part describes: In 2020, Sid left Gumroad to start his own creator economy company, Circle, together with former Gumroad coworker Rudy Santino I fail to see this as any competitive advantage since Gumroad's "employment" approach literally incubated a competitor.
  • leerob 6y ago
    If you study both brands, you'll understand Circle isn't a competitor.
  • 2ion 6y ago
    The owner of Gumroad is already rich, so competition doesn't matter so much anymore.
  • dflock 6y ago
    They were talking about competitive advantage on hiring and retaining good people, I think.
  • cambalache 6y ago
    This seemed straight out of a Silicon Valley episode.
• rgbrgb 6y ago
  This is a really interesting conception of a company structure that leans towards maximum flexibility. The thing I don't see talked about here or in the post is equity ownership stakes. Distributing equity to give employees real money incentive to improve company performance has been a hallmark of tech companies at least since Fairchild Semiconductor and the traitorous eight. On the other hand, I've seen small companies in other industries thrive with very concentrated ownership and no employee equity system. Do Gumroad employees get equity? Who owns Gumroad and would profit from a change of ownership? Are there ramifications there in terms of work output and team dynamic?
  • enonevets 6y ago
    They’re contractors, not employees. No equity or benefits.
• jvns 6y ago
  One thing I find a bit strange about this (as a Gumroad user) is that Gumroad employees don't seem to be granted @gumroad.com email addresses -- when I've needed to email their engineering staff or marketing staff I often get replies from someone's personal email address. The fact that employees are using their personal email address to do Gumroad business makes me feel a bit uncertain about how securely my information / my customers' information is being stored.
  • that_guy_iain 6y ago
    > The fact that employees are using their personal email address to do Gumroad business makes me feel a bit uncertain about how securely my information / my customers' information is being stored. I know there is a legal thing in some countries where ext contractors must have a different email. Normally this is done by creating a new domain for the contractors or a sub-domain but Gumroad could be that new they haven't encountered this yet.
    • cromka 6y ago
      I truly doubt that's the case: absolutely none of the contractors employed by the global-brand investment bank I work for use e-mail addresses that are any different than those of the FTEs.
      • eloff 6y ago
        I've encountered this in my work as a contractor. Depends on the company.
        • that_guy_iain 6y ago
          I think it also depends on the country because we didn't seem to have it when we were just a German company but when other countries became involved I think we had to implement legal requirements for them.
        • cromka 6y ago
          I was referring to "I know there is a legal thing in some countries" part.
• juskrey 6y ago
  On the wave of fashionable gig economy, many forget that full time employee is not exactly a workforce, but a company's insurance which guarantees that chosen workforce will be guaranteed at any given point of time and will do nothing else (taxing for working abilities) at any other point. Also, from the worker's standpoint, having two half jobs does not equal one full job. It is either much less (with less compensation) or much more of what can be comfortable for healthy human.
  • musingsole 6y ago
    Agreed. I will argue that a benefit of the gig economy is the average person has more masters (and so is beholden to any one master less). I'm open to other models, but that's a feature we need to keep in whatever comes next.
    • andrekandre 6y ago
      > benefit of the gig economy is the average person has more masters how about no masters? > (and so is beholden to any one master less) that does not necessarily follow... if i still need say 3 jobs to make ends-meet, then im on the street if i get fired from one of them... now i need to juggle the demands of 3 masters, all with different demands on my time, energy and concentration...
      • musingsole 6y ago
        Sure, no masters is better...though I'm not aware of anyone in that position. Manufacturers have customers, billionaires the IRS. Everyone's accountable to someone on something. Hermits? Working 3 jobs and losing one is not the same thing as working one job and losing one. Losing revenue will always hurt. The point is to prevent it from being fatal. And still, you don't really have an argument here. All of this is in comparison to the current system which is worse on both these points than a hypothetical 100% gig economy.
        • juskrey 6y ago
• marcinzm 6y ago
  Personally I actually like deadlines if project scope can be adjusted to meet them and there's no crunch time. It forces everyone to focus on getting a concrete deliverable out rather than getting side tracked for months on pointless features or additions or optimizations. And as an introvert having N mini-jobs where I have to keep track of N times as many people sounds like hell.
• epa 6y ago
  No process works great until something goes wrong, then you need process to fix it/prioritize it.
• k__ 6y ago
  While I don't appreciate the firing and re-contracting of employees, I think the basic idea is good. Would just be nicer if he had it before he had to let down people who trusted him.
• happyweasel 6y ago
  Gumroad is basically feature complete. I use it to support content creators (about 300 purchases or so), and never found the website to be particularily cool or useful. Search sucks most of the time. At least it doesn't get in the way, well unless it does: They have this feature to archive an item in your library, and then it disappears from your library, and you have to dig it out again. Funny thing is: when you hoover over an item in your library, a menu appears, and the archive entry is exactly positioned in the middle. So if I try to select an entry by left-clicking it I often hit the archive button. lol. Also download sucked for a very long time (dl from europe was slow and completely downloading everything in one archive wasn't supported for a long time). So yeah, it's good enough at least it's a way to more-or-less-directly support content creators.
• orasis 6y ago
  These examples are important for the HN community. I also run a successful zero FTE company and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
• boo-ga-ga 6y ago
  I think the critics who complain about money, pensions and healthcare didn't do proper calculations. Gumroad pays from $50 to $250 per hour. Let's say you get $100 (below average) and work 60 hours per month (one-week vacation every month). This is $6000 per month, which is basically more than enough for a comfortable living in 95% places on the planet. They pay equal money regardless of location, so the proposition is great for anyone except a tiny number of people who want to live in extremely expensive places.
  • ryanianian 6y ago
    It's worth noting the hourly rate cuts in half after 20 hours. It's still enough pay for comfortable living, but 60hrs/wk is a lot of work and is decidedly against the lifestyle TFA talks about. [edit: parent says 60hrs/month. At $100/hr that's $72k/year pre-tax. I don't know how to delete this comment but would if I could.]
    • autarch 6y ago
      The parent says 60 hours per _month_. That's 15 per week. Sounds good to me!
    • StevenWaterman 6y ago
      Parent says 60hr / month
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • codemac 6y ago
    And as a contractor there are significant tax advantages, along with personal growth advantages. I think the big draw back is actually long term total earnings - the big companies in SV still pay order of magnitudes more than that.
• deleted 6y ago
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• thefrog 6y ago
  Fuck Sahil.
• alberth 6y ago
  Am I looking at their expense chart correctly .... it appears their monthly operating expenses is ~$100k/month ($1.2M annualized) and he states their revenue is $11m/year. Are they banking ~$10M/yearly in profit and have 95%+ margins?
• eloff 6y ago
  I've been working like this, 16 hours a week for the past year. About 3 hours of that is meetings, and the rest is straight up coding. I don't make a lot of money, but I've never been happier with a job. I honestly don't feel less productive than when I worked full time. I spend the rest of my energy working on a project I intend to turn into a saas business. I think this kind of thing, where your job doesn't dominate your life should be the future. It's just so much more humane.
  • samvher 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, where do you work? I'm in the process of negotiating a similar setup with my employer, at my previous organization I worked 60% and also felt very happy with that. It seems to be hard to arrange unless an employer already knows you, though. (At least for interesting/challenging jobs with growth.)
    • eloff 6y ago
      Yes, it's a small startup where I've worked with the founder before. I think it's get hard to find a gig like this, and it shouldn't be that way.
  • tra3 6y ago
    I misread "16 hours a week" as "16 hours a day". I've never had pity turn so fast into envy.
• thordenmark 6y ago
  Gumroad should have been Patreon. Sahil Lavingia is so much more respectful of creators than Jack Conte.
  • cambalache 6y ago
    Why is that?, genuine question
    • thordenmark 6y ago
      You can watch the episode of JRE to see the contempt Jack Conte has for creators. For example banning people because just because he disagrees with them, not because they violated any terms of service on the platform. Also, Patreon is sorely lacking in utility for users, so many missed opportunities for social networking, functionality, and usability. Everything I've ever read or seen by Sahil Lavingia has shown his dedication to fostering creatives.
      • cambalache 6y ago
        Well, then Patreon is for the "taking". I know it is not that easy, but sometimes being shitty does not pay off
• dd_roger 6y ago
  I mean, good for the contractors if they like it that way but basically this article is bragging that profitability has been achieved through a huge step backward in job security and legal rights for the employees (or rather, former employees now "reemployed" as contractors). The glorification of the gig economy, i.e stripping everybody of the rights usually granted by the status of employee, needs to die.
• solatic 6y ago
  > When someone new joins the company, they do what everyone else does: go into our Notion queue, pick a task, and get to work, asking for clarification when needed... Instead of setting quarterly goals or using OKRs, we move towards a single north star: maximizing how much money creators earn. It’s simple and measurable, allowing anyone in the company to do the math on how much a feature or bug-fix might be worth. Quite frankly, this doesn't seem sustainable. There's only so much high-visibility/high-value work. When your headcount is large relative to "desirable" work, people will compete for the "desirable" work. They will lie about the 60 hours of work they did last week, and tell you that it's the culturally-normative 20 hours of work, because it makes them look like 3x engineers. > expecting responses within 24 hours... we can compete–and win–on flexibility Including in SRE / ops roles, where people need to be on-call? Let's be clear about something here. You have a headcount of 25, and ostensibly nobody is full-time. It's certainly possible to avoid internal competition at that size, with the right culture. But can you really avoid adding headcount? Can you really protect your culture from the opportunists, the cutthroats, the workaholics? How large can the kibbutz grow before the workers' paradise is no longer so sunny?
  • gkoberger 6y ago
    Does it have to be "sustainable"? It wouldn't work for Google, but it works for Gumroad (and, like they said, most open source projects). Gumroad is a pretty simple site (and I don't mean that as an insult). They don't deal with huge customers, sales processes, large data, complicated tech, etc. Most "hard" things can be outsourced to a SaaS tool. So why overcomplicate things?
    • kgin 6y ago
      Premature optimization is the root of all evil
      • brianwawok 6y ago
        You say that, but the other side of this argument is having to rebuild every. Single. Part. Of a program because nothing was designed with forethought and scalability in mind. Great code is both simple and has the ability to scale if needed in the future.
• amoorthy 6y ago
  Sahil is such a good writer. So vulnerable and insightful. I'm envious :-) His insights on how to live and work better and making me think if my little startup can follow some of these ideas.
• didibus 6y ago
  > Instead of setting quarterly goals or using OKRs, we move towards a single north star: maximizing how much money creators earn I like this. I've always wanted internal metrics to be this (or something similar). Like just measure company revenue and target increasing it. Goals and OKRs seem like distraction sometimes. Relying on people intuition of just how to make the product better, not with a specific targeted goal, just overall. It's that kind of intangible thing, that's hard to reduce sometimes to an OKR or a goal. Which means you can meet all OKRs and Goals and yet fail to have made the product better. I think it's because OKR and Goals miss on the little details that add up, by having you focus exclusively on the big obvious things. Yes this is good in some way, get that 80% done, and initially it'll mean success, but once competition shows up, it'll be the little details and that extra 20% that you couldn't capture in a goal or OKR that'll make the difference.
• simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  I just want to say that I really loved this blog post. Of course it isn't for everyone. But I bet that most "online" companies should learn a thing or two from Gumroad.
• ilovegumroad 6y ago
  I wish I had $8M dollars and a bunch of really dedicated people to build a company to >$1M ARR and then get rid of all of them. At that price you are looking at a company at roughly $X0M value already. Most companies end up having to work tirelessly to grow because they have baggage of money that needs return. If you can get rid of that baggage it's relatively easy to just slow down and reap the rewards. FANG could all probably afford to pay 10x what you do for 1 hour of work a month if they stopped trying to grow. If this post is saying "Hey I got this $X0M company for free come hang out with me and I'll give you some of the insane money we are making. You don't even need to work much, the people before you already did most of work but I'm not giving them anything. By writing stuff like this we will get people to buy our coolaid and more of our content, by telling them they can also get the same life. More money for us." Then that's amazing and more power to you. It really is a pretty good deal for the 25 people at gumroad. Genuinely curious if gumroad was started again from scratch with no investment if it could get to any kind of scale with the kind of work and pay structure referred to in the post.
  • adewinter 6y ago
    I'm curious why you think folks at gumroad don't "work much" and that most of the work had been done by those no longer at the company. Did you used to work there and have some insider knowledge? Seems to me the post wasn't even claiming to have >$1M ARR either (there was a graph for the creators ARR which I think is different?) and that everyone does work... they just do it using a non-traditional process. edit: There's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25675713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25675713 which might point to >$1M ARR? edit 2: I also realized in a business like this ARR just doesn't matter (who cares? You're not trying to raise another round or IPO). https://twitter.com/shl/status/1215673023472140289 https://twitter.com/shl/status/1215673023472140289 shows the net profit and it amounts to 1 senior engineer's salary. That's amazing for a small business with a small number of employees but it's not exactly living high off the hog.
    • newen 6y ago
      ARR for SaaS companies do matter. It usually means you can sell the company for a decent multiplier of the ARR. And they’re definitely getting more than $1M ARR, not just creators ARR.
• aprdm 6y ago
  I really enjoyed reading this! If I had a company is how I would wish to run it.
• XCSme 6y ago
  I tried Gumroad for about a year and I really loved it but unfortunately I was forced to move to Paddle due to the lack of some core payment features (eg. localized pricing, VAT-inclusive price, wire withdrawals, ability to change subscription plans for an user). I was told that although those features are planned, it will take a really long time before they are implemented, which makes sense considering the fact that Gumroad seems to be in a maintenence-only mode.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > Instead of having meetings, people “talk” to each other via GitHub, Notion, and (occasionally) Slack, expecting responses within 24 hours. I like that. I'm not a fan of any IM system. I will use iMessage, from time to time, but it's usually email and Git Issues. I use Slack as a "store and forward" system, like email; only checking it occasionally. But I have the luxury of being the only tech person on one team; doing 100% of the coding, and being nothing more than a "hands off peanut gallery" on another. The designer for the first project uses Figma.
• alkonaut 6y ago
  The article keeps talking about “creators” and services catering to their needs. What are creators? Or perhaps, what are they creating?
• Milank 6y ago
  Imagine if all the companies in the world switched to this friendly, non-competitive mode? I heard something like that before... hmm, communism? You don't have to work (hard), you'll still get your paycheck. Problem is - it doesn't work in the long term. It can work for a while, until your money runs out or someone more competitive comes along and blows you away.
• spoonjim 6y ago
  I mean honestly this is the entrepreneurial feat of a century. Get your company VC funded to the point of hiring 23 employees. Build your name, do all your failing, learn everything about the market with VC money. Then throw the employees AND the VCs in the dumpster and keep the core asset for yourself, rebuilding it into a $11 million business with contractors, so that you don't have to worry about things like their healthcare plan or giving them equity. The execution is just over the top unbelievable.
  • stuxnet79 6y ago
    Agreed. Really inspiring story. I'm not as far along on my entrepreneurial dreams as the CEO but as a freelancer, I'd be interested in working at a firm with a similar set up as Gumroad. I'm very much a mercenary and I find it's hard to be honest about this while still maintaining a good working relationship with colleagues.
    • Bakary 6y ago
      I think the person you replied to was being sarcastic but I'm not even sure anymore
      • cercatrova 6y ago
        Even if sarcastic, it really is an amazing model and the execution was great. Vincent Woo of Coderpad had this exact question, why not raise a seed or series A round, then never raise again? There's no legal reason stopping you from doing so, given you still own the majority of the company. It's just frowned upon.
• Ericson2314 6y ago
  One one hand, this is exactly the the sort of less-work more-productivity UBI and universal healthcare should unlock for everyone. Gig heaven not gig hell. When I heard "creators" I was worried this was some sort of platform where we had tiny aristocracy living off rents. But I gather it's turn-key software one runs on their website? That's great! No platform means it's a lot harder to extort your customers. Meaning this is much more likely to be "the real deal".
• bawolff 6y ago
  I feel like this would scale really poorly. But i guess they dont want to be billion dollar company so that's ok for their goals.
• systematical 6y ago
  What is Gumroad? Its not very clear why I should sign up. It says I can possibly make money...doing what?
• p0larboy 6y ago
  I think Sahil brought up a great point with talent hiring in a competitive space (tech) that I found to be repeatedly true - flexibility. Autonomy is a helluva drug.
• peter_d_sherman 6y ago
  >"While Gumroad was no longer on track to become a billion-dollar company, I acquired a new asset: time. I used that time to take classes on writing and painting. Because I was burned out and didn’t want to think about working any more than I needed to, I instituted a no-meeting, no-deadline culture. For me, it was no longer about growth at all costs, but “freedom at all costs.” This way, Gumroad stayed profitable, I could take a much-needed break to explore my hobbies, and the product continued to improve over time." [...] >"Today, working at Gumroad resembles working on an open source project like Rails. Except it’s neither open source, nor unpaid. Instead of having meetings, people “talk” to each other via GitHub, Notion, and (occasionally) Slack, expecting responses within 24 hours. Because there are no standups or “syncs” and some projects can involve expensive feedback loops to collaborate, working this way requires clear and thoughtful communication. Everyone writes well, and writes a lot. There are no deadlines either. We ship incrementally, and launch things whenever the stuff in development is better than what’s currently in production. The occasional exception does exist, such as a tax deadline, but as a rule, I try not to tell anyone what to do or how fast to do it. When someone new joins the company, they do what everyone else does: go into our Notion queue, pick a task, and get to work, asking for clarification when needed. Instead of setting quarterly goals or using OKRs, we move towards a single north star: maximizing how much money creators earn. It’s simple and measurable, allowing anyone in the company to do the math on how much a feature or bug-fix might be worth. But we don’t prioritize ruthlessly. People can work on what’s fun or rely on their intuition, because as long as we remain profitable and keep shipping, we tend to get to the important stuff eventually. Our public roadmap helps Gumroad's creators hold us accountable."
• marsdepinski 6y ago
  Congratulations, you turned a VC product into a business where revenues have to be more than expenses and can't come from a ponzi pyramid of other VC products with expenses higher than revenues.
• tmilard 6y ago
  I find refreshing this idea of likenind contractors just doing carefully their jobs. Without a 'coorporate culture'. I also find that in various development project I do people mater just more than the frame.
• smaslennikov 6y ago
  This is actually a business style I worked on describing[1], but it wasn't well received[2]. [1]: https://smaslennikov.com/posts/industry-and-workers/ https://smaslennikov.com/posts/industry-and-workers/ [2]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R4djofDLGRsYx5wqf/industry-and-workers https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R4djofDLGRsYx5wqf/industry-a...
• fao_ 6y ago
  > After the layoffs in 2015, even though the team shrunk, Gumroad itself continued to grow. Hmmmm. Sounds weird that there were layoffs given that you could clearly afford to keep the employees? The company itself was raking in more each year.
• b0rsuk 6y ago
  >What’s not so good at Gumroad? >“There's not a lot of room for growth. We're staying profitable, and not planning to double the team every year. While there will likely be a few leadership roles, there aren't plenty of them and they aren't built into the career path of working at Gumroad.” Interesting how he equates growth with raising in hierarchy. I suppose if you're a programmer seeking to improve skills, sharpen your tools and increase knowledge, you're automatically a loser for many people.
• jdthedisciple 6y ago
  384.843.424 $ / 78.306 = 4.915 $ was made on average per Gumroad customer since 2011, equating to roughly 546 $ per year per customer on average. Yea I'm not sure Gumroad users are making a living out of this xD
• habosa 6y ago
  While this doesn't sound like somewhere I'd want to work or how I'd run a company, I think they should be applauded for trying something different and succeeding. Seems like these ~25 people are happy with the arrangement and that's really all that matters.
• yowlingcat 6y ago
  After 2020, I've talked with a number of friends about what the future of remote work looks like. I can't help but wonder if it looks like this. The anti-overwork provision (creating 20 hrs/wk over time and allowing but disincentivizing going over) and single metric (total creator revenue) seem like major wins for me. Do others think that more companies will begin to go in this direction? Something about it seems so much more simple, sustainable and elegant.
• maxehmookau 6y ago
  Part of me is taken by this, but part of me feels like this is just the next step towards a culture of less stable employment. But instead of deliveroo drivers, it's tech workers. While I don't doubt that Gumroad pays and treats its workers well, it's the first step a slippery slope. As with other gig economy jobs, it's sold by virtue of its "flexibility", but you can still offer flexibility and health insurance. You can also pay for employee benefits, have them work fewer hours, have no meetings and no deadlines.
• saddington 6y ago
  really enjoyed reading this. and providing some light edits on the original. what a pleasure.