A reality 99.9% of us can only dream of, and I've always found his writing/tweeting a bit distasteful because of it. Lottery winner telling you how to pick a ticket kind of vibe.
Then he ground away at something that involved laying off a lot of people and watching his team dwindle to 1.
He does now have a lifestyle business, but from the number, it seems pretty modest.
Maybe it’s like a scratch off winner telling you how to pick tickets. But like one of those $20 tickets.
"Gumroad in February 2023:
- GMV: $14.5M
- Revenue: $1.81M
- Gross margin: 69.21%
- Net income: $834K
- Monthly churn (creators who made a sale in Jan that did not in Feb, in terms of GMV): 2.46%"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st8ns96z7d4
$10M/yr profit, very modest business. No luckier than a $20 lottery winner.
VCs gave you money for a VC business, you get to turn it into a "lifestyle business" with no or little obligation to them anymore.
Your employees joined what they thought was a growing startup, then you lay them off after they built the product because there's no need for them anymore since you're not trying for hypergrowth.
Kinda shitty all round except for you.
Because that's what happens for most startups.
VCs aren't screwed because they already accounted for the risk of failure. That's kind of their job.
Target smashes damaged goods instead of selling them at a discount so employees or customers don't purposefully cosmetically damage things they want to buy.
If the failure state of a business is "the founder can buy it for pennies and try to make something of it", then why wouldn't all lifestyle businesses pitch themselves as VC-backed growth businesses and then use up all that money and settle as a lifestyle business?