This article was originally published on my personal website.
我在 2011 年创立了 Gumroad。2015 年，我们达到了 23 名全职员工的峰值。2016 年，在未能筹集到更多资金后，我最终回到了我开始的地方：一家单人公司。
今天，当我被问及有多少人在 Gumroad 工作时，我的回答是 “十个左右”。这就是我如何将我们拥有的人数转化为其他人的期望。但事实更为复杂：
如果我们包括所有在 Gumroad 上工作的人，那就是 25。
如果我们包括全职员工，那就没有了。甚至连我都没有。
我们没有会议，也没有最后期限。
它正在发挥作用：我们的创作者每年赚取超过 1.75 亿美元，我们创造了 1100 万美元的年化收入，同比增长了 85%。
也就是说，我不指望任何人会复制我们批发的工作方式。我们来到这里是偶然的，而不是一些宏伟的计划。
但是，我确实认为我们的故事和我们的工作方式的某些部分可能会使其他公司，他们的员工以及最重要的客户受益。
在 2015 年裁员后，尽管团队萎缩，但 Gumroad 本身仍在继续增长。
但是，雇用全职员工并在旧金山租用新办公室来工作是站不住脚的。相反，我找到了一家名为 BigBinary 的印度公司，并聘请了几位工程师作为承包商。
这些承包商拯救了公司。他们修复了错误并维护了网站，而我回答了支持票证，设计了功能，并撰写了有关新启动的内容。
最终，我又聘请了裁员前的同一位客户支持人员，这次也是通过每小时的合同协议。
与此同时，我搬到了犹他州，并试图成为一名全职创作者。
虽然 Gumroad 不再有望成为一家价值数十亿美元的公司，但我收购了一项新资产：时间。我利用那段时间上了写作和绘画课。
因为我精疲力竭，不想再考虑工作，所以我建立了一种不开会，没有截止日期的文化。
对我来说，这不再是不惜一切代价的增长，而是 “不惜一切代价的自由”。
通过这种方式，Gumroad 保持盈利，我可以休息一下来探索我的爱好，并且产品随着时间的推移不断改进。
Today, working at Gumroad resembles working on an open source project like Rails. Except it’s neither open source, nor unpaid.
Instead of having meetings, people “talk” to each other via GitHub, Notion, and (occasionally) Slack, expecting responses within 24 hours. Because there are no standups or “syncs” and some projects can involve expensive feedback loops to collaborate, working this way requires clear and thoughtful communication.
Everyone writes well, and writes a lot.
There are no deadlines either. We ship incrementally, and launch things whenever the stuff in development is better than what’s currently in production. The occasional exception does exist, such as a tax deadline, but as a rule, I try not to tell anyone what to do or how fast to do it. When someone new joins the company, they do what everyone else does: go into our Notion queue, pick a task, and get to work, asking for clarification when needed.
Instead of setting quarterly goals or using OKRs, we move towards a single north star: maximizing how much money creators earn. It’s simple and measurable, allowing anyone in the company to do the math on how much a feature or bug-fix might be worth.
But we don’t prioritize ruthlessly.
People can work on what’s fun or rely on their intuition, because as long as we remain profitable and keep shipping, we tend to get to the important stuff eventually. Our public roadmap helps Gumroad’s creators hold us accountable.
We ship big things this way too.
In November 2020, we shipped Gumroad Memberships, a year in the works and now used by hundreds of creators to earn over $1,500,000 per month.
This is a screenshot from our roadmap to show what it looks like in practice:
For more, I recorded an hour-long video about how we ship something as large as Gumroad Memberships.
Gumroad engineer Helen Hood, who shipped Memberships, says, “it’s one of the biggest product launches of my career, and we shipped it without a single meeting or video call. I’ve worked at your typical startup, with an open floor plan, lots of whiteboards, standups and sprint planning, beers after work. I’ve also worked on a remote team with little communication and engineers largely siloed on their own projects. The way we work at Gumroad is ideal for me. It lets me maximize my productive hours, and clock out when I’ve hit my limit.”
Those are the broad strokes, but we’ve published more specific documentation about the way we work:
“At the end of the day there’s a lot of emotion that goes into Gumroad, that’s not dissimilar from an art project. We sometimes pick what’s fun and feels good to work on! We love listening to creators! We don’t do tons of data analysis to decide what’s worth working on.”
“Turn off all notifications from your phone!”
“We ship incrementally, iteratively, and have one massive tentpole launch a year. Every month we see how much creators got paid, then we move on. The journey is the fun part, we’re not waiting to arrive at some destination.”
“There’s not a lot of room for growth. We’re staying profitable, and not planning to double the team every year. While there will likely be a few leadership roles, there aren’t plenty of them and they aren’t built into the career path of working at Gumroad.”
Gumroad’s Chris Maximin says, “this way to work is responsible for the highest level of productivity I’ve ever experienced. The ability to focus on actual work creates a virtuous circle benefiting both the company and the workers: 1) the company does not have to pay expensive engineers to sit around in endless, useless meetings, and 2) the engineers get to do more and learn more, which benefits them in the long term.”
This isn’t just for engineers.
Justin Mikolay, a writer at Gumroad, ships each of our Creator Spotlights this way, even though each one requires at least three people–plus the creator.
Everything is handled this way: support, risk, content, growth, product prioritization, board decks, design feedback, and more.
This way of working isn’t for everyone.
There are no retreats planned, and no social channels in Slack. There are limited opportunities for growth. And we can’t compete with the comp packages that big tech companies can provide.
But we can compete–and win–on flexibility.
Sid Yadav, former VP of Product at Teachable, joined Gumroad in 2018.
In his words, “most entrepreneurs have two options: work a full-time job and hustle nights/weekends, or leave your job and risk everything to start the company. Gumroad provided a third way: I could contract 20–35 hours a week, and for a couple days a week, incubate ideas and work on my next thing.”
In 2020, Sid left Gumroad to start his own creator economy company, Circle, together with former Gumroad coworker Rudy Santino:
Working on Gumroad isn’t a majority of anyone’s identity.
People work at Gumroad as little as they need to sustain the other parts of their lives they prefer to spend their time and energy on: a creative side-hustle, their family, or anything else.
Gumroad engineer Nathan Chan says, “I produce more value for my time than at any other company in my career, and I’m able to fully participate in parenting and watching my kiddo grow up.”
That includes me.
From 2011 to 2016, building Gumroad was my singular focus in life. But today, it is just a part of my life, like a hobby might be. For example, I paint for fun, and every once in a while, I sell a painting.
One day, out of the blue, I received an email from Daniel Vassallo. I knew Daniel; he was a creator who had made over $250,000 on Gumroad in less than a year.
He was already using the product–so he understood what problems Gumroad ought to solve next–and he had some ideas for how he could help out:
I love Gumroad (and I’m living off it!), I enjoy product scoping and strategy, and I think I can take over your PM tasks. I would only be able to dedicate around 2hrs/day on average, but I’d be available daily. Don’t know if this is the type of commitment you had in mind, but I figured if there’s a place where this arrangement can work, it’s Gumroad :)
It was a perfect fit. Daniel became our new Head of Product.
It can be a great deal for Gumroad too. Before Daniel quit his job at Amazon, he was making over $400,000 a year. We pay him $120,000 a year.
How? He works ten hours a week for us. In his words:
In practice, we pay everyone hourly based on their role. The range varies from $50 (customer support) to $250 (Head of Product) an hour.
Recently I standardized our rates world-wide:
This rate is agreed upon during our interview process:
- Apply via a form.
- An unpaid, few-hour challenge, that resembles the high-level work we do at Gumroad. This may include breaking down a large shipment (like Gumroad Memberships) into its atomic parts, planning the schema associated with a new feature, or writing up a Help Center article.
- A paid, few-week trial period, that resembles the day-to-day work we do at Gumroad. This may include fixing bugs, shipping a feature, or answering support tickets.
Within the company, we keep a document that lists how much everyone is paid, along with their average working hours. This allows the team to have as much information as I do when making compensation decisions.
We also have an “anti-overtime” rate: past twenty hours a week, people can continue to work at an hourly rate of 50 percent. This allows us to have a high hourly rate for the highest leverage work and also allows people to work more per week if they wish.
There are no perks of any kind, besides the flexibility and the cash.
To be clear, we don’t provide healthcare. Everyone who works at Gumroad is responsible for their own healthcare and benefits. Everyone also pays for their own phone, laptop, internet connection, and all the other things they need.
There is another downside to this system: people have to track their hours. Some people solve this by billing 20 hours a week, even though they may work a bit more or a bit less. Others track it diligently, in 15-minute increments, and send a detailed invoice every week.
Since Daniel joined as quarter-time Head of Product, we’ve had Randall Kanna join as quarter-time Head of Community and Philip Kiely join as quarter-time Head of Marketing. They’re successful Gumroad creators too.
At some point, it clicked: Creators make money so they can make stuff, instead of the other way around. Why not adopt this framing at Gumroad, too?
This is what working in the creator economy should feel like.
Recently, I pitched the whole company about going full-time, because it felt wrong to grow any larger without full-time staff.
Nobody accepted.
I realized then that I was trying to copy the status quo–to try and fix something that wasn’t broken–so that I could feel better about doing things the “normal” way.
But the deal we already had in place was better for what our people prioritize: freedom over growth, sustainability over speed, life over work.
Gumroad’s homepage is clear about its benefits to creators who use it: “Escape your 9-to-5 job. Take off your suit and tie. End your commute. Get paid for your craft.”
As cliché as it may be, we are trying to be a company of creators, for creators.
Meet the Gumroad team:
The internet has enabled new ways of working, but we’re just starting to see them unfold. There are a lot of different ways to make work work. Ours is just one.
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