by sahillavingia on 1/7/21, 4:41 PM with 517 comments
by philipkiely on 1/7/21, 5:51 PM
Sometimes, I read things by CEOs about how a company works on the inside and I wonder if it really looks like that, or if it is a view from the top that doesn't reflect what it's really like.
This article, with its discussions of the upsides and downsides, is accurate to my experience and my understanding of other people's experiences. For many people, Gumroad wouldn't be a great place to work, but for those of us who want to work like this, it is exactly what we need. Very glad to be working at Gumroad and working in the ways the article describes.
Edit: Following up with a few FAQs from posts in the thread:
* Health Insurance: I'm personally lucky enough to still be covered on my dad's health insurance until I turn 26, thanks to the ACA, though for supplementary (vision, dental) I make more than enough to afford proper health insurance on the open market. Everyone at Gumroad is paid very well and should be able to afford the same.
* Regarding overtime, benefits, etc: we make very competitive rates as contractors. I sincerely appreciate your concern, though.
* On the shift from full-time employees to contractors, the company declined and was rebuilt over a period of five years. I'm a relatively recent addition, so I only know Gumroad as it is now, I cannot comment on how it was. All I can say is that it's not like Sahil went out and fired everyone and then the next day it was a bunch of contractors.
by paxys on 1/7/21, 6:01 PM
The problem with this model is that you are coasting on the work done by your full time staff in the initial few years, whom you fired and replaced with part time contractors who get no benefits. Even putting the ethical issues with this aside, if a competitor takes interest in your space and has a large war chest, you'd be powerless to compete with them. And when your tech is dated and current/new customers want innovation, your low-price contracting firms working a few hours per week certainly aren't going to be able to offer that.
So while I'm happy things are working in this case, no new company that starts with the environment you are describing is going to be successful.
by philmcp on 1/7/21, 6:05 PM
It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week...
So much so, I'm about to launch a website listing remote software jobs with a 4 day work week:
by sahillavingia on 1/7/21, 5:54 PM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733
Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!
by spoonjim on 1/8/21, 12:27 AM
by simpixelated on 1/7/21, 7:14 PM
by solatic on 1/7/21, 9:23 PM
Quite frankly, this doesn't seem sustainable. There's only so much high-visibility/high-value work. When your headcount is large relative to "desirable" work, people will compete for the "desirable" work. They will lie about the 60 hours of work they did last week, and tell you that it's the culturally-normative 20 hours of work, because it makes them look like 3x engineers.
> expecting responses within 24 hours... we can compete–and win–on flexibility
Including in SRE / ops roles, where people need to be on-call?
Let's be clear about something here. You have a headcount of 25, and ostensibly nobody is full-time. It's certainly possible to avoid internal competition at that size, with the right culture. But can you really avoid adding headcount? Can you really protect your culture from the opportunists, the cutthroats, the workaholics? How large can the kibbutz grow before the workers' paradise is no longer so sunny?
by ilovegumroad on 1/7/21, 10:14 PM
Most companies end up having to work tirelessly to grow because they have baggage of money that needs return. If you can get rid of that baggage it's relatively easy to just slow down and reap the rewards. FANG could all probably afford to pay 10x what you do for 1 hour of work a month if they stopped trying to grow.
If this post is saying "Hey I got this $X0M company for free come hang out with me and I'll give you some of the insane money we are making. You don't even need to work much, the people before you already did most of work but I'm not giving them anything. By writing stuff like this we will get people to buy our coolaid and more of our content, by telling them they can also get the same life. More money for us." Then that's amazing and more power to you. It really is a pretty good deal for the 25 people at gumroad.
Genuinely curious if gumroad was started again from scratch with no investment if it could get to any kind of scale with the kind of work and pay structure referred to in the post.
by jvns on 1/7/21, 7:56 PM
The fact that employees are using their personal email address to do Gumroad business makes me feel a bit uncertain about how securely my information / my customers' information is being stored.
by BoysenberryPi on 1/7/21, 5:38 PM
by thesausageking on 1/7/21, 5:53 PM
That's amazing. For Sahil. Not so great if you were one of his investors or former employees who had options.
by lrossi on 1/7/21, 6:15 PM
That’s okay, becoming a billion dollar company doesn’t have to be your goal.
Staying smaller might be good not just for your work-life balance, but also for the user experience. Some prefer the stability it brings: you don’t have to worry that features or projects get canceled because they are not growing fast enough; that the app gets sold to some social network that starts spying on users or an AI is blocking accounts inexplicably etc.
by tosh on 1/7/21, 4:56 PM
> 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.
by boo-ga-ga on 1/7/21, 8:48 PM
by didibus on 1/7/21, 9:56 PM
I like this. I've always wanted internal metrics to be this (or something similar). Like just measure company revenue and target increasing it. Goals and OKRs seem like distraction sometimes. Relying on people intuition of just how to make the product better, not with a specific targeted goal, just overall. It's that kind of intangible thing, that's hard to reduce sometimes to an OKR or a goal. Which means you can meet all OKRs and Goals and yet fail to have made the product better. I think it's because OKR and Goals miss on the little details that add up, by having you focus exclusively on the big obvious things. Yes this is good in some way, get that 80% done, and initially it'll mean success, but once competition shows up, it'll be the little details and that extra 20% that you couldn't capture in a goal or OKR that'll make the difference.
by gricardo99 on 1/7/21, 7:40 PM
But we can compete–and win–on flexibility.
In 2020, Sid left Gumroad to start his own creator economy
company, Circle, together with former Gumroad coworker Rudy
Santino
by jedberg on 1/7/21, 6:17 PM
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 they spend more than your budget it just comes out of their paycheck, so you could theoretically set the budget to $0 and at least let them have tax free health care payments.
by tinyhouse on 1/7/21, 6:07 PM
by juskrey on 1/7/21, 8:10 PM
Also, from the worker's standpoint, having two half jobs does not equal one full job. It is either much less (with less compensation) or much more of what can be comfortable for healthy human.
by olah_1 on 1/7/21, 7:32 PM
I cannot stand tracking hours. No thanks.
by eloff on 1/7/21, 9:01 PM
I think this kind of thing, where your job doesn't dominate your life should be the future. It's just so much more humane.
by ftruzzi on 1/7/21, 7:21 PM
Really hope more companies start to adopt this.
by lr4444lr on 1/7/21, 6:15 PM
by k__ on 1/7/21, 8:33 PM
Would just be nicer if he had it before he had to let down people who trusted him.
by martincmartin on 1/7/21, 5:56 PM
Do people still think of big, successful open source projects as unpaid? Rails, for example, was created at Basecamp/37Signals. Most Linux contributions come from companies like IBM. Or am I the one who's out of touch?
by jennyyang on 1/7/21, 5:53 PM
I'm not HR but I'm pretty sure the anti-overtime provision is completely illegal at least in countries like the US and Canada. I would outlaw overtime instead of pay people less for overtime.
by underseacables on 1/7/21, 5:58 PM
by smaslennikov on 1/8/21, 5:51 AM
[1]: https://smaslennikov.com/posts/industry-and-workers/ [2]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R4djofDLGRsYx5wqf/industry-a...
by yowlingcat on 1/8/21, 2:33 PM
by Ericson2314 on 1/8/21, 2:49 AM
When I heard "creators" I was worried this was some sort of platform where we had tiny aristocracy living off rents. But I gather it's turn-key software one runs on their website? That's great!
No platform means it's a lot harder to extort your customers. Meaning this is much more likely to be "the real deal".
by jkuria on 1/7/21, 5:59 PM
https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/2987051/Candid-...
by thordenmark on 1/7/21, 9:05 PM
Sahil Lavingia is so much more respectful of creators than Jack Conte.
by spoonjim on 1/7/21, 5:41 PM
by happyweasel on 1/7/21, 8:34 PM
by habosa on 1/8/21, 10:56 AM
by tekstar on 1/7/21, 7:21 PM
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.
by rgbrgb on 1/7/21, 7:47 PM
The thing I don't see talked about here or in the post is equity ownership stakes. Distributing equity to give employees real money incentive to improve company performance has been a hallmark of tech companies at least since Fairchild Semiconductor and the traitorous eight. On the other hand, I've seen small companies in other industries thrive with very concentrated ownership and no employee equity system.
Do Gumroad employees get equity? Who owns Gumroad and would profit from a change of ownership? Are there ramifications there in terms of work output and team dynamic?
by xyzelement on 1/7/21, 6:25 PM
So if you're a housewife with a few free hours while the kids are at school, or a bored retiree, by all means drive Uber/work for this place.
If you're someone in their prime and have to be self-reliant then this is as bad a deal as "I'll drive Uber for now" as a life plan. You're going to be down the road with no benefits, no growth, no title, and nothing to build the rest of your career on.
by ChrisMarshallNY on 1/7/21, 11:28 PM
I like that. I'm not a fan of any IM system. I will use iMessage, from time to time, but it's usually email and Git Issues.
I use Slack as a "store and forward" system, like email; only checking it occasionally.
But I have the luxury of being the only tech person on one team; doing 100% of the coding, and being nothing more than a "hands off peanut gallery" on another. The designer for the first project uses Figma.
by maxehmookau on 1/8/21, 4:03 PM
As with other gig economy jobs, it's sold by virtue of its "flexibility", but you can still offer flexibility and health insurance.
You can also pay for employee benefits, have them work fewer hours, have no meetings and no deadlines.
by b0rsuk on 1/8/21, 8:33 AM
>“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.”
Interesting how he equates growth with raising in hierarchy. I suppose if you're a programmer seeking to improve skills, sharpen your tools and increase knowledge, you're automatically a loser for many people.
by amoorthy on 1/7/21, 9:34 PM
His insights on how to live and work better and making me think if my little startup can follow some of these ideas.
by XCSme on 1/7/21, 11:25 PM
by pietrovismara on 1/7/21, 6:37 PM
This is both a confirmation that you can work on big projects without necessarily grinding away all of your time and energy, and that perpetual growth isn't a necessity.
by simonbarker87 on 1/7/21, 5:45 PM
by marcinzm on 1/7/21, 8:18 PM
by Pulcinella on 1/7/21, 5:45 PM
The article is a nice way of saying that the founder largely just collects rent while putting minimal resources into the business.
by coldcode on 1/7/21, 6:18 PM
by alberth on 1/7/21, 9:00 PM
Are they banking ~$10M/yearly in profit and have 95%+ margins?
by fao_ on 1/8/21, 6:13 AM
Hmmmm. Sounds weird that there were layoffs given that you could clearly afford to keep the employees? The company itself was raking in more each year.
by jdthedisciple on 1/8/21, 10:43 AM
by tmilard on 1/8/21, 5:40 AM
I also find that in various development project I do people mater just more than the frame.
by marsdepinski on 1/8/21, 5:25 AM
by peter_d_sherman on 1/8/21, 4:57 AM
Because I was burned out and didn’t want to think about working any more than I needed to, I instituted a no-meeting, no-deadline culture.
For me, it was no longer about growth at all costs, but “freedom at all costs.”
This way, Gumroad stayed profitable, I could take a much-needed break to explore my hobbies, and the product continued to improve over time."
[...]
>"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."
by dutchbrit on 1/7/21, 7:09 PM
by p0larboy on 1/8/21, 4:56 AM
by simonebrunozzi on 1/7/21, 10:05 PM
Of course it isn't for everyone. But I bet that most "online" companies should learn a thing or two from Gumroad.
by alkonaut on 1/7/21, 11:30 PM
by systemvoltage on 1/7/21, 5:46 PM
What are the downsides? I think immediate feedback, and fast back and forth in voice communication is what I miss the most. And ofcourse, bonding with people.
by bawolff on 1/8/21, 2:52 AM
by abinaya_rl on 1/7/21, 6:25 PM
by orasis on 1/7/21, 8:35 PM
I also run a successful zero FTE company and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
by systematical on 1/8/21, 4:45 AM
by epa on 1/7/21, 8:30 PM
by aprdm on 1/7/21, 11:03 PM
by didip on 1/7/21, 6:17 PM
by samwestdev on 1/8/21, 12:53 AM
by saddington on 1/8/21, 4:31 PM
by vicary on 1/7/21, 7:18 PM
by Milank on 1/7/21, 11:43 PM
Problem is - it doesn't work in the long term. It can work for a while, until your money runs out or someone more competitive comes along and blows you away.
by draw_down on 1/7/21, 5:36 PM
My only question is around health insurance for the US based folks (I’m guessing the answer is “take the money we pay you and go buy some” which is unfortunately not a good solution) but otherwise yes, sounds ideal.
by antattack on 1/7/21, 6:10 PM
It seems to me that company operates like Uber or Lyft, and their product is exploiting wage inequalities.
by realDjangoB on 1/7/21, 7:07 PM
by staunch on 1/7/21, 5:49 PM
by jimbob45 on 1/7/21, 6:55 PM
> Since its inception in 2011 BigBinary has been remote and all 100+ team members are spread all over India.
So you outsourced development to take advantage of Indians so desperate for a job that they’d accept lower pay and pocketed the profit for yourself? I don’t understand how outsourcing is still legal when we have scumbags like you who show us problems with it.