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Gumroad
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Researched profile. Starter Story's AI research system compiled this page from 121 public sources — the founder didn't write it. Automated research can misread or misattribute a source, so treat figures as best-effort. How this works →
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How Gumroad Grew

Platform for creators to sell digital products

How did Gumroad grow?

Summary of the sourced claims below

Gumroad grew primarily through word of mouth and email marketing. Word of mouth accounted for a significant portion of the growth, while sending many emails was also a key factor.

Channels

11 channels · grouped by how Gumroad grows

  • Organic social media

    · 4 mentions · 4 sources
    “Today, he has close to 60K followers on Twitter(he calls it his market research arm). So what happened, how did he grow his audience? Well, he went viral! ... He wrote a blog post ... And posted it to the usual channels, IH, HN, Reddit. And it blew up. He got more than 1500 Twitter followers and ...”
    high
    Show 3 more quotes
    “Gumroad makes it very very easy to share your payment engine/link on Facebook and Twitter, as well as track views and purchases with its Bit.ly-like analytics and a simple interface. Lavingia thinks that Facebook and Twitter can become the new marketplace/store-front...”
    medium
    “he started to pick up a following on Twitter and made a video course on how to build an audience … with an existing audience he was able to have a big advantage over other content producers. And as word spread of his course, he got more followers!”
    medium
    “We’ve also spent years building up an audience of readers like you—people who love new technology and new businesses, and who want to try the things we make.”
    high

  • Word of mouth

    · 3 mentions · 3 sources
    “Creators who use @gumroad have to tell their audiences about it. This is how we grew 40% last year to $5M ARR without spending any money on ads or having anyone on the team dedicated to content, marketing, sales, or BD.”
    high
    Show 2 more quotes
    “Word of mouth grew us beyond that. Those two things are responsible for 99% of Gumroad's growth.”
    high
    “And as word spread of his course, he got more followers! And so his credentials improved meaning he sold more courses! … Word spread quickly in tech circles that it was a quality course.”
    medium

  • Direct sales

    · 1 mention
    “In terms of real customers, almost none of them came from all that fanfare. It was a lot of really consistent growth over a long period of time–mostly driven, especially at the beginning, by a hard-working sales team.”
    high

  • Affiliate program

    · 1 mention
    “he has been clever in using the Gumroad affiliates system … So with affiliates he has people like me speading the word about his courses and making money for him passively. It also helps that he gives 50% to affiliates which is a good incentive to share his course.”
    medium

  • Email List Growth

    · 1 mention
    “MailerLite (to collect emails)”
    high

  • Online Community

    · 1 mention
    “We’re creating a private community of Every readers who want to try our earliest experiments: our Early Adopters program.”
    high

  • Leveraging existing platforms

    · 1 mention
    “I stopped pointing traffic to Gumroad and started letting Gumroad generate the traffic.”
    high

  • Course

    · 1 mention
    “I often do like screen shares. Actually. Like I recorded these videos and I recorded this one with Josh Pigford on YouTube, which is like three hours long. And I basically did it because I wanted to, I was like, this isn't, you know, it got a lot of views actually.”
    high

  • Cold outreach

    · 1 mention
    “Just a lot of cold emails.”
    high

  • Competitions

    · 1 mention
    “So there's a couple of times here, I'll find you example of a Devin competition we did. So we did this competition where we did 30, $33,000, split amongst whomever opens and merges more Devin PRS than me over the course of May. So, you know, it's a kind of a fun way to like motivate people to lea...”
    high

  • Email marketing

    · 1 mention
    “People always ask me this, and the answer is always super boring: we sent a lot of emails. That's really it. We scoured the web for people who could benefit from a product like Gumroad, and then told them about it. Literally thousands of times.”
    high

How 2,739 businesses grow

Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each — Gumroad’s highlighted.
  • Referral/Word-of-mouth
    68% ◀
  • Social media
    60% ◀
  • Search/SEO
    57%
  • Email
    48% ◀
  • Community
    35% ◀
  • Content/Inbound
    33% ◀
  • Partnerships
    32% ◀
  • Paid ads
    24%
  • Events
    24%
  • Press/PR
    17%
  • Outbound/Sales
    17% ◀
  • Marketplaces/App stores
    10% ◀
  • Product expansion
    2%
  • Influencer partnerships
    2%
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