Layoffs Hit Gumroad as the E-Commerce Startup Restructures

Layoffs Hit Gumroad as the E-Commerce Startup Restructures
techcrunch.com

    The company had 22 employees as of earlier
    this year, and it has been in the process
    of laying off all but what is expected to
    be around 3 of its staff.

I hope the frontend engineers making $75,000-$125,000[1] for a shot at one day accumulating up to 1% of Gumroad decide to pursue market wages at the next company they join :-\ The economics of startups rarely offer a worthwhile return to those who choose to play the game. For what it's worth, this is something I've found out the hard way.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130516103241/https://angel.co/...

In emailing with Sahil about my concerns about Gumroad's new direction, he said "We want Gumroad to be the core channel for everything. We started with sales, and are moving into audience/list management."

He made it clear that they want me to import my audience lists to Gumroad and that they don't plan to support future integrations with CampaignMonitor, Mailchimp, etc. That makes sense, since those email platforms are now the competition I guess. It's bad news for me though - if I wanted to stay with Gumroad, I'd now have a project on my hands to move everything over to a (currently) much less powerful email platform.

I imagine this will work for many of their customers, but there are customers like myself that don't want to be pushed in this direction. I prefer to keep my audience management separate from my payment provider. I don't want my payment provider deciding that my customers are now their customers that they can now spam and upsell them in order to grow their platform. I'm not saying that that is Gumroad's plan - but I'm increasingly worried that it might be. Particularly if they get in a "desperate for growth" situation like this article hints at.

Again, they've been great for years and I really appreciate that. The new direction just seems too risky and not a good fit for folks like me who don't want their payment provider as the middle-man for communicating with their audience.

I guess there's an argument that they're not a payment provider, but a "sales platform" or something.

Currently I'm looking for a replacement payment provider (or whatever they should be called) to use. SendOwl looks promising. If you've used them, or have another provider you'd recommend, please let me know!

If you want to be part of something revolutionary as an early employee, I suggest a better plan. Go talk to your employer about starting something small inside the already big and solid company. Negotiate the equity and terms before getting started.

If your company is too big and complex to get this going, then simply cut your hours and work part time on your product with someone else. 1% to 3% is just way too small for someone who is capable.

A gal who loves this game and spends 10 years working at different startups can end up loosing $500k to a couple of millions considering she could get paid very well at big co.

Note: Capable is the keyword here.