sahillavingia

We're hiring software engineers, product designers, and design engineers at the IRS!

https://www.usajobs.gov/job/882910800

sahillavingia.com

How do you pay taxes?

Gumroad — NYC (onsite/hybrid) — Hiring Product/Engineering

We build tools that help creators sell directly to their audiences. Small team, big surface area: you’ll ship end-to-end (product → design → code → metrics).

Looking for: strong product-minded engineers (backend, full-stack, or generalist). Bonus if you’ve built marketplaces, payments, or creator tools.

Nice-to-have stack: Rails/Stripe/Postgres/Redis/React/TypeScript—but we value ownership over checkboxes.

Email sahil@gumroad.com with a couple links (GitHub, portfolio) and 2–3 sentences on why you want to build for creators.

What is the largest app powered by this framework?

Yes!

Bt, Gumroad is written in Rails and open source: github.com/antiwork/gumroad

Appreciate the feedback!

We’ll look into making it easy to support a self-hosted model.

Shortest.com - AI writing my test suite for me, so I can focus on shipping features

Big believer in Blender becoming the default tool to design and build buildings this century.

We’re building this for ourselves at Gumroad: Flexile.com

It’s currently SaaS to manage contracts, onboarding, and payments. It will expand over the course of this year into a marketplace.

Same thing that motivates all business software: save time, save money, make money.

Gumroad has one FTE (me) and 21 part-time contractors.

I write more about it here: https://sahillavingia.com/work

It was a natural outgrowth of working remote and then async to lean on the hourly contractor model.

It’s a little tough to scale, so we built some custom software to do payroll, contracts, etc: https://flexile.com

Gumroad is hiring. We hire globally, and pay the same no matter where you are.

Software engineers make about $148,750/yr. We don't have meetings, nor deadlines. Everyone is a 1099 contractor and people work between 20 and 35 hours a week.

Learn more here: jobs.gumroad.com

We do this at Gumroad. Works great; will never go back.

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

Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!

Solo founder of Gumroad here. Highly recommended. It forced me to learn a lot more about every aspect of building a business than I would have otherwise.

I'm also a fan of investing in solo founders: https://shl.vc

Does Gumroad count? We raised VC but most of that was bought back or written off. I run it by myself now.

Gumroad helps creators sell digital products directly to their audiences. We're expanding to Memberships this year.

I wrote about most of the story here: https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...

And COVID-19 has been a boon, as we help folks earn a living from home. We'll see if it sticks!

We (Gumroad) open sourced ours: http://github.com/gumroad/wilfred

Here's what it looks like: https://twitter.com/shl/status/1128039742308737024/photo/2

Since I'm the only one on the board, every meeting is a board meeting :)

This is a huge problem with Gmail. They've been filtering legitimate receipts and things from Gumroad in the last couple of months, and I've heard similar things from founders of several other companies.

Please check your Spam folder, and mark the legitimate emails as such.

Hopefully it'll help the folks (or AI) over at Gmail get better!

Fair enough. I think I'd make this change if I could go back in time!

Oops, I think I nixed that to use in a future article purely on raising money. My bad!

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.)

$1.1M @ 1X

$7M @ 1X

$2.25M (the bridge I mention) @ 4X

I'm sorry you had those interactions with me in the past!

I think I've grown since, but it still sucks to hear that about past-me.

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!

We do offer subscriptions! https://help.gumroad.com/11163-products-and-customizations/s...

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

Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!

I prefer not to do the math.

Yes, we're working on updating the iOS app as we speak and will move onto the Android app after that. First half of this year.