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No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

sahillavingia.com

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Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#141

Post by Grimm1 »

paxys wrote: post #100
dcolkitt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a competitor takes interest in your space, and you're already profitable, they're as likely to acquire you as compete with you. A fully VC-funded SV unicorn is gonna demand a pretty high price tag. There's a lot of mouths to feed and liquidation preferences to payout. OTOH, $10 million is a pretty attractive payout for a single person, or even a handful.

Large companies are mostly looking for rapid growth and/or talent when they consider acquisitions, and this one has neither. Single-digit millions in revenue is inconsequential in the industry today.

You're missing IP acquisition which is the third well considered type of acquisition consideration. Not saying you're wrong here just wanted to add that.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#144

Post by pimterry »

jedberg wrote: post #61

In regards to the health insurance thing, there is a good middle option. I'm not affiliated but I use Savvy ( https://www.gosavvy.com/ ). They take advantage of a law that just started in 2020 that lets a company owner offer tax free insurance payments without having a health plan. Basically you set a budget, and then the employee chooses any health plan they want from any provider and pays with tax free money. If th…

They're not explicit about this, but I suspect part of the reason they don't offer health insurance is that their remuneration is intended to be location independent.

Moving any fixed X of remuneration into health insurance will be wrong in many locations (in many places, standard health care doesn't require employer insurance, so the expected X for most jobs is 0, and any X > 0 is undesirable). Doing wildly varying custom health insurance setups for each employee according to their current needs seems complicated. If every 'employee' here is actually an independent contractor, can't they just pay for health insurance themselves from their remuneration however they please, and do so tax free as their own business expense?

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#145

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #132
treis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their revenue is a bit misleading since most of it goes to CC processing fees. This tweet says net profit was 214k in 2019: https://twitter.com/shl/status/1215673023472140289 Probably triple that this year with the Covid bounce. So obviously doing well for himself, but not quite as good as you think.

From the Tweet, from Sahil (CEO) himself: Gumroad, Inc in 2019: Revenue: $5M (up 46% YOY) Gross profit: $1.7M (up 68% YOY) Net profit: $214K I not familiar enough with the Gumroad model to understand why how the creators made $73M in 2019, but Gumroad revenue was only $5M.

> "I not familiar enough with the Gumroad model to understand why how the creators made $73M in 2019, but Gumroad revenue was only $5M."

I would imagine that monies collected on behalf of someone else for transmission to them do not count as revenue since they do not at any point belong to the business. Banks do not claim deposits or incoming checks as revenue, for example.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#146

Post by Grimm1 »

kaftoy wrote: post #123
dcolkitt wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger issue to me is that there's no diversification of risk. If your company goes under, you lose 100% of your income all at once. From that perspective, it'd be a lot more rational to work say ten jobs at a single time. You're never at serious risk of losing more than 30% of your paycheck in any short period. You could even get smart and balance your portfolio of jobs between pro and counter-cyclical industrie…

For your example's sake, if the work for one job is just a tenth, then it means that for a 5 men job, a manager would need to hire 50 people. The manager would be overwhelmed and add cost to the company by asking for a colleague. It's not easy to manage 50 people. But maybe the manager wants to diversify himself, so instead of 2 manager for 50 people, you'll have... 20 managers for 50 people. You need a managers' man…

I think they're implying that the majority of current working time isn't actually work, that those jobs could be done with 1/10th the current man hours and still be just as productive.

In that world you don't need to hire anyone else because all you've done is cut back all the bs idling time that we all know exists in many jobs while keeping output the same.

FWIW I'm not sure I agree on the 1/10th but like 1/3rd or 1/2 absolutely from my position.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#147

Post by tekstar »

I worked at a FAANG-level startup for a number of years and am now doing my own thing, with hopes of building a stable part-time business. This appeals to me.

In any company, employee trust is a huge benefit when it works and a huge concern when it's missing. this Gumroad model would require even higher trust to operate so independently and not incrementally add more "check up" meetings and slack etc etc.

Can anyone from Gumroad speak to how they built the team? Hiring some roles from your customer community makes a lot of sense as they already will have some feeling of propriety. Have there been bad hires? I guess having everyone on contract makes it easier to move on.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#148

Post by ftruzzi »

My team got laid off a few months ago and after experiencing remote working this is the only kind of work arrangement I'd be happy to apply for. 40hrs a week of remote working does not allow for a lot of freedom, ~20hrs sounds amazing.

Really hope more companies start to adopt this.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#149

Post by gnud »

didip wrote: post #60

So... is this legal? I guess it depends on where you incorporate the company?

Hiring contractors is legal. I can't think of anywhere it's not.

Sometimes, companies try to cheat by claiming that their employees are contractors. But this actually sounds like they really are contractors. No fixed schedule, work with the tools you want, even choose the tasks you want (within reason). So this sounds completely fine to me. Of course, IANAL.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#150

Post by mperham »

alex_c wrote: post #68
thesausageking wrote: post #19

Let me understand this. Gumroad raises $8m from VCs, isn't able to grow fast enough, so the VCs agree to give up any claim on the company. Sahil fires all of the employees, hires a cheap contracting firm and some of the employees back as part-time contractors. The company now does $11m in revenue, most of which is profit and Sahil keeps. That's amazing. For Sahil. Not so great if you were one of his investors or form…

You know, I often feel like the success of a business is set at the beginning. There is certain trajectory created by initial starting conditions (founding team, vision, talent, timing), market fit, and external forces and events, and it is very hard to escape that. As CEOs and founders we like to think we have a lot more control than we actually do. The point of VC is to inject money to achieve hypergrowth. But how…

Exactly. If you have good growth at the beginning (not hyper), you can afford to bootstrap without any VC at all.

To me, VC money pays for marketing spend, most of which is ineffectual. Be hyper-focused on putting out the best possible product and let it sell itself.

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