Hey folks, welcome to the 51st post. Today I am going to start a discussion about opportunities I see in ‘selling products‘ and how Gumroad could be a huge magnet towards attracting the selling side-hustlers.
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Gumroad is a marketplace to post, manage, and sell digital products. Digital products like e-books, micro-saas, comics, digital art, video games, and anything that isn’t necessarily a physical product. Gumroad started as one big file of Python, coded by Sahil Lavingia over the weekend, and launched on Hacker News on a Monday.
The making of Gumroad rounded up in a tweet:
Jakob Greenfeld@jakobgreenfeld
He coded it over the course of one weekend. And in a style that would make @levelsio proud, it was basically just one huge Python file.
github.com
gumroad/gumroad-v1
12:10 PM · Apr 22, 2021
3 Likes
Cool now, let’s wrap the intro for Gumroad and head towards what this essay is actually about. However, if you wanna dive deeper into how Gumroad was created and what it is, check the website and this blog. In this essay, we are going to discuss what opportunities can be realized by keeping an eye on Gumroad. Opportunities as in side-hustle opportunities. Well, investment can also be added to this opportunity list, particularly since Gumroad recently raised 5 million USD from the general public via the Republic platform, but the campaign is over and we are going to instead look at the solopreneur opportunities.
Why now? The simple answer is Gumroad just raised 6 million USD and the money has to go somewhere. In 2020, Gumroad doubled its revenue YoY to over 9 million USD and has clocked a profit of 1 million USD. The next simple answer is that the passion-creator-hustle-indie-sideproject market seems to be moving somewhere with all newly acquired remote and wfh leverage. So, as more creators start selling on Gumroad, we can definitely expect more buyers and traffic.
Create: This is what’s already happening and might be more common as we move forward. New features like Gumroad Memberships allow products with recurring payments like newsletters, micro-saas to be posted as well. Also, there’ll be modifications to the UI that will make the individual Gumroad profiles look more like a website or a Shopify store.
Sell: Not just the products we create, but we can also sell affiliate products. Selling good creator products makes total sense, especially when research is put into understanding the product and when you simply have bought it and love it. It could be like helping a D2C product dropship or even better than that! Dropshipping hustle needs you to manage all the physical supply chain and customer support initiatives, but when it comes to a digital product the supply chain part vanishes and Gumroad takes care of refunds and all. You might say that there are third parties managing dropshipping supply chain and customer support, but in that case, we lose the leverage of choosing the product. And who takes care of taxes in the dropshipping model?
There’s another good analogy, think of sales as an opportunity to ride the growth curve by a means other than acquiring equity. The question we can ask ourselves is: if there already exists a good product that we idolize, would you put effort into building it from scratch or just join hands and help the creators sell for a percent of revenue? (though, we should create if it can be better).
As Gumroad launches new affiliate tools and a dedicated dashboard, this idea of selling would be more popular.
To wrap up, selling researched and good products can just be as viable a hustle model as creating products. Put another way, there’s a possibility that a bunch of well-chosen affiliate products might create as good revenues as possible via the creator path.
Gumroad is also investing in building a community and creator school. Raising 5 million USD from the public is an indicator that a huge community already exists. Another good push would be by integrating more payment systems into the product and pushing it to become global.
I think decentralization is another driver for people to choose solopreneurship instead of one job all life. You can work for many different companies on a single day and your identity won’t matter much to the employers. A smart contract can just deploy work tickets and fund the accounts that complete them accurately (I call this an advanced version of what 1729 is already doing).
0xPranav🚀@pranavdotexe
In context of coding jobs, interviews are real barriers. Aka if you can please a compiler/problem, why please a human? How interviews can be totally removed: 👇 1. Build a smart contract which rewards if a specific problem can be solved. It could have many many parents.
7:37 AM · Mar 6, 2021
1 Repost · 2 Likes
Then there’s another thing where you can invest in people instead of directly in startups. Like creating SPACs to invest in individuals. MicroSpacs.
For now, I’m trying to live up to the following idea I tweeted about. What’s your hustle-nomics? (Comment)
0xPranav🚀@pranavdotexe
Broad categories of side hustles we can start doing today👇: 1. Find good products and invest in them 2. Find good products and help sell them 3. Create art and monetize it
2:14 PM · Apr 29, 2021
4 Likes
By the way, this essay was inspired by Jakob GreenField’s ‘Gumroad Subscription Products’ analysis. As in, I was exploring Gumroad as a hustle opportunity before reading as well, though the point-by-point opportunities listed in Jakob’s article and the data pointing directly to the subscriber counts and the performances of other products made me confident on how real good scalable products exist on Gumroad. Hence, helping them affiliate sell will be no less than having equity. (Hint: For subscription products on Gumroad, as an affiliate, if you sell one time, you receive the recurring benefits of successive months as well! No brainer)
I have myself bought opportunities.so subscription via Gumroad and find it helpful. I’m pretty sure you will feel the same if you are a solopreneur and exploring opportunities as a hustler. Here’s my affiliate link if you want to take a look or buy. Now you know I’m living up to what I said in this essay, find good products and help sell! Haha
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