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Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

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Re: Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

#61

Post by phoboslab »

freedomben wrote: post #48
sahillavingia wrote: post #13

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!

Haha, it was crazy reading the discussion (in 2011) around whether Gumroad should take Bitcoin or not :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407053

Ha, didn't expect to find my own comment there.

I also mentioned selling jQuery plugins (remember jQuery?) and advertising my own game engine (now free) in the thread. Feels like such a long time ago.

Gratz for pulling it off, Sahil!

Re: Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

#62

Post by Eric_WVGG »

evanweaver wrote: post #45

Amazing and poignant story; thank you for sharing. I do wonder if there was a path for Gumroad to become a Shopify killer, instead of focusing on sellers too small and unsophisticated for Shopify, which limited the addressable market.

They're not really congruent products… if anything Gumroad is more similar to Stripe. But to take your question seriously, I'd far rather hack together a shopping site and use Gumroad for payments than grapple with Shopify again, they give me a migraine.

Gumroad is also going to have some new opportunities if Patreon continues to struggle with their similar deal-with-the-devil.

+1 Gumroad, glad to see it's found a way to thrive.

Re: Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

#63

Post by jjeaff »

rpmcmurphy wrote: post #25
holman wrote: post #11

Really love this post. My favorite line is: > Every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag. I think that's pretty insightful. 20% growth is great for a normal business, of course; for a VC-backed startup it can show some warning signs about future hard decisions you might have to face. I think there's certainly lots of discussion that has been had — and should be had — about "should I or shouldn't…

Actually 20% per year would be great for most businesses, which just shows what an outlier VC backed businesses have become.

It's also an unsustainable growth rate. But of course, VCs know that. They just need something that can front load the growth like that and unload it on the public before that growth plateaus... or plummets.

Re: Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

#64

Post by zhobbs »

mlevental wrote: post #30
sixQuarks wrote: post #2

Ouch, number 2 employee at Pinterest - a $10 billion company that’s about to go public this year. He probably would have been worth an easy 100-200 million.

crunchbase says pinterest has had 15 funding rounds. certainly they weren't all complete rounds and it would've been nice equity but nowhere near the nominal 1-2% early employees get.

If he stayed he might have ended up in an executive position, getting additional stock grants down the line.

Re: Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

#65

Post by why_only_15 »

fh973 wrote: post #29
holman wrote: post #11

Really love this post. My favorite line is: > Every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag. I think that's pretty insightful. 20% growth is great for a normal business, of course; for a VC-backed startup it can show some warning signs about future hard decisions you might have to face. I think there's certainly lots of discussion that has been had — and should be had — about "should I or shouldn't…

This would be 9x per year. What are examples of companies with such a growth rate?

Startups. To choose a recent one that turned big, Facebook was approaching such numbers: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pict...

Re: Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

#66

Post by kbenson »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #57
sahillavingia wrote: post #13

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 love your story Sahil, it is so true that people equate 'wealth' with 'success' but that is short sighted. If you step back and look at the big picture, you're on this planet for anywhere from 70 to 100 years, and at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to, which number is a better representative of 'success'? Working on things…

> at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to, which number is a better representative of 'success'?

Let's not forget personal satisfaction. I'm a little leery of putting the entire assessment of my life onto other people (even though if I was going to, I could do a lot worse than number of people helped).

Hopefully helping other people leads to some amount of personal satisfaction for most people, and they'll have a fairly good life and good impact on others by the end. :)

Re: Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

#67

Post by amelius »

jammygit wrote: post #58
jrochkind1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard of Gumroad before -- it actually looks like a really good product, and one that I would have occasion to recommend to people. To what do you attribute the challenges? Were you building a product there wasn't a market for, what you were delivering wasn't what people wanted? Or, a marketting failure, inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs? Or, what…

"inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs?" Just from visiting the landing page for gumroad.com, I wasn't clear about what the company did. Some questions that came to my mind: By e-commerce, is it like shopify or like stripe? By audience-building software, is that SEO, marketing, or analytics? Just writing the feedback I like to get from others. The features pag…

> "inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs?"

It's a bit ironic that one of the main features of the product is "audience building for creators".

Re: Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

#68

Post by austenallred »

sixQuarks wrote: post #2

Ouch, number 2 employee at Pinterest - a $10 billion company that’s about to go public this year. He probably would have been worth an easy 100-200 million.

Probably a fraction of that. Dilution etc.

My guess is he’ll make more from Gumroad over the long run.

Re: Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

#69

Post by lancesells »

I've always liked Gumroad as a product and service but this line kind of bothers me:

> There is, of course, the $178,000,000 we have sent to creators

This money wasn't sent to creators. They sold products worth $178M + Gumroad fees through the service. The creators made the products, marketed the products, acquired the customers, etc. When I use Paypal to sell something they aren't "sending me money".

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