I started Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we reached a peak of 23 full-time employees. In 2016, after failing to raise more money, I ended up back where I began: a one-person company.
Today, when I’m asked how many people work at Gumroad, I respond with “ten or so.” That’s how I convert the number of people we have into what others expect. But the truth is more complicated:
If we include everyone who works on Gumroad, it’s 25.
If we include full-time employees, it’s none. Not even me.
We have no meetings, and no deadlines either.
And it’s working: our creators earn over $175 million a year, and we generate $11 million in annualized revenue, growing 85% year-over-year.
That said, I don’t expect anyone to copy our way of working wholesale. We got here on accident, not some grand plan.
However, I do think there are pieces of our story and the way we work that could benefit other companies, their people, and–most importantly–their customers.
After the layoffs in 2015, even though the team shrunk, Gumroad itself continued to grow.
But hiring people full-time and leasing a new office in San Francisco to work out of was untenable. Instead, I found an Indian firm called BigBinary and hired a few engineers as contractors.
These contractors saved the company. They fixed bugs and maintained the site while I answered support tickets, designed features, and wrote about new initatives.
Eventually, I hired back the same customer support person we had from before the layoffs, this time via an hourly contracting agreement too.
Meanwhile, I moved to Utah and attempted to become a full-time creator.
While Gumroad was no longer on track to become a billion-dollar company, I acquired a new asset: time. I used that time to take classes on writing and painting.
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.
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:
Note: We‘ll be hiring for more positions soon! Follow me on Twitter for updates.
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.
我在 2011 年开始做 Gumorad 这个创业项目，2015年，我们有了 23 个全职员工，2016年，融资失败后，我回到了最初的境地：独身一人。
今天，当有人问我， Gumroad 有多少员工时，我会回答「十多个吧」，这是一个他们可以理解并接受的回答，但实际情况复杂的多：
如果把所有为 Gumroad 工作的人算进来，一共是25人
如果只算全职员工，答案是 0 ，甚至连我也不是
我们不开会，也不给任务设置任何 deadline
但效果其实并不差：我们平台的创作者过去一年赚了 1.75 亿美元，我们的利润是 1100 万美元，和去年相比增长了 85%
坦白说，我并不觉得任何人都可以效仿我们的做法，我们之所以使用这种方式，其实也挺偶然的，并不是有意为之。
即便如此，我依然认为，我们的故事和工作方式可能可以给你带来一点启发，从而帮助到你的公司，你的员工，以及最重要的，你的客户。
2015年我优化团队之后，虽然人数大量减少，但 Gumroad 的增长丝毫没有停滞
对我来说，在旧金山租下一座办公室，再雇几个全职员工，是很难负担的开销，所以我从印度一家叫做 BigBinary 的外包公司找了几个人来做开发。
这家外包公司拯救了我的公司，他们修复了很多bug，维护了网站的运行，与此同时，我负责客服，设计，产品以及一些拉新工作。
最后我还把之前的客服重新招了回来，不过不再是全职，而是按小时付费。
与此同时，我搬到了犹他州，准备成为一名全职的创作者。
当 Gumroad 不再有望成为一家市值达十亿美元的公司时，我获得了一项新资产：时间，我用那段时间上写作和绘画课。
之前打鸡血的那种创业让我精疲力尽，现在我想在工作和生活中找到平衡，所以我尝试打造一种「不开会，没有deadline」的企业文化。
对我来说，不再是「一切为了增长」，而变成了「一切为了自由」
这个时候， Gumroad 开始有了一些盈利，我有了更多自己的时间，可以用来发展我的爱好，并缓慢而稳定的改进产品。
现在在 Gumroad 工作很像参与一个 Rails 之类的非盈利开源项目，只不过既不开源，也能赚钱。
我们把「开会」换成了在 GitHub，Notion ，Slack（偶尔）上面直接传达信息，并在 24 小时内获得回复。因为没有「站立会」或者「同步交流会」，所以一些项目需要来回碰更多次才能达成一致，这样的工作方式要求每个人都表达清晰，逻辑准确。
每个人都要能表达好自己的想法， 并且需要经常表达。
我们同样也没有 Deadline，我们慢慢开发，等更优的东西做出来，就自然而然的去替换掉老的版本，也有例外的时候，比如缴税这件事还是有 deadline，但是我们会把这个作为默认的规定，我尽量不下达任务，也不摧时间。当新成员加入时，他立刻就可以跟老员工做同样的事情：看我们的文档，任务板，挑自己感兴趣的任务，做任务，需要交流的时候问问别人。
不设置季度目标或用 OKR 之类的指标，我们的努力目标只有一个：让创作者赚更多钱，这个目标简单又有意义，公司里每个人都可以以此来衡量做新功能或优化现有的某个功能值不值得做。
当然，也不是绝对如此。
大家也会做一些有趣或者没有太大原因他们就是喜欢的东西，但只要我们保持盈利，能够一直存活下去，我们就一定能找到最重要的东西，我们公开信息，保证创作者们能够随时督促我们走在正确的道路上。
即便是对较大的需求我们也是这么来的。
2020 年 11 月，我们上线了 gumroad 社群功能，我们花了一年时间来做这个，现在则被数百名创作者使用，每月给他们增收 150 万美元
我还录了一个一小时的视频，来展示我们是如何推进像是社群这种复杂的大需求的。
负责开发 gumroad 社群功能的工程师 海伦伍德说，这是我职业生涯中最复杂的任务之一，我们居然在一次会都没开，一个电话都没打的情况下完成了。我也曾经在一家典型的创业公司工作过：很多白板，开放会议，站立会，下班后喝啤酒；我也曾经在远程团队工作过：沟通很少，自己做自己的事；gumroad 的方式对我来说是最理想的，我可以最大效率的利用工作时间，也可以在达到极限的时候去放松一下。
关于工作方式，我还写过几篇更具体的文章：
“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.”
我的同事克里斯马克西姆说：这种工作方式是我所经历过的最有效率的工作方式，专注于有价值的工作让公司和员工能处在一个正反馈中，并都从中受益：1.公司不需要大价钱让工程师们整天坐着开会，2.工程师可以做更多事情，也能学到很多事情，从更长远的目光来看，这无疑是大有裨益的。
其实并不仅仅是工程师。
贾斯汀米克雅是 Gumroad 的一名运营，负责更新「创作者聚光灯」这个官方推荐栏目，每期都需要找 3 个人来访谈。
所有事情都是这样处理的：客服，风控，内容，增长，产品优化，董事会，设计等等等等
这样的工作方式并不适合大多数人
晋升通道，完善的福利，每天和足够多的人社交，这些大企业拥有的，我们无法提供。
但我们可以在灵活和自由上面取胜。
西德亚达夫，Teachable 的前产品副总裁，在 2018 年加入 Gumroad 。
用他的话来说「我原本只有两个选择：要么在大厂累死累活的打工，要么冒巨大的风险去自己创业，Gumroad 给了我第三种：我只需要每周工作 20-35 个小时，一周也就几天，剩余的时间则可以去干我想做的事情」
2020 年，西德和另外一名叫鲁迪桑蒂诺的同事一起离开了 Gumroad ，去做了他们自己的创业项目：Circle
Gumroad 并不要求每个人必须全心投入。
许多同事在 Gumroad 每天工作几小时，就足够赚到生活所需的收入，他们会把剩余的时间花在他们更在意的事情上面：自己的独立项目，家人，或者其他任何事。
Gumroad 工程师老陈说：“我为自己的时间创造的价值比我在职业生涯中的任何其他公司都要多，而且我还能充分参与育儿并观察孩子的成长。”
对我来说，也是这样。
从 2011 年到 2016 年，做 Gumroad 是我人生中的重心。但是今天，这只是我生活的一部分，就像是业余爱好一样，例如我喜欢的画画，我时不时还能卖出一幅。
有一天，我突然收到了丹尼尔·瓦萨洛的电子邮件。我认识丹尼尔：他是一位创作者，过去一年在 Gumroad 赚了超过 25 万美元
他是 Gumroad 的深度用户，知道 Gumroad 接下来的发展规划，并且有很多好的想法，他这么写的：
我爱 Gumroad （而且我靠它生活），我喜欢做产品，我觉得我可以当你们的产品经理，我每天能花在这件事上面的时间差不多是 2 个小时，但是我可以保证每天。不知道行不行，但我觉得如果我能找个像这样的工作，那只能是在 gumroad :)
这当然行，太行了，丹尼尔顺理成章的成为了我们新的产品负责人。
这其实是 Gumroad 赚到了，因为在丹尼尔从亚马逊辞职之前，他的年薪是 40 万美元，而我们一年只付给他12 万美元。
为什么？因为他一周只工作 10 个小时。
在实践中，我们根据每个人的角色按小时支付薪水。每小时的费用从50美元（客户支持）到 250 美元（产品负责人）不等。
最近，我在全球范围内对整个工作流程进行了标准化：
1.填写申请表单
2.做一项无偿的，数小时的挑战，类似于我们在 Gumroad 所做的事情，包括拆分需求，做产品设计，写文档说明等等
3.一个有偿的，为期几周的试用期，类似于我们在Gumroad进行的日常工作。这可能包括修复错误，发布功能或回答支持通知单
在公司内部，我们保留一份文件，列出每个人的薪水以及他们的平均工作时间。这样一来，团队在制定薪酬决策时就可以获得与我一样多的信息。
我们还规定了「最长工作时间」：一周最长 20 小时，超过了之后时薪就会降低到原标准的 50%。这可以让我们在有限的时间内进行最高效率的工作，同时如果某些人如果实在想工作，也可以多干一些时间。
除了这样的灵活度和工资外，我们没有其他任何福利。
需要明确的是，我们也不提供医疗保健(译者注：美国为非必需)，在 Gumroad 工作的每个人都应对自己的医疗保健和福利负责。每个人还为自己的电话，笔记本电脑，宽带以及他们需要的所有其他东西付费。
这可能也是我们这套工作方式的另一个弊端：大家会扣每一个小时。有些人会固定说自己每周工作了20小时，不管真实情况是超过20小时还是没到20小时。还有一些人会精确到15分钟，并且每周写一个详细的周报。
自丹尼尔担任兼职的产品负责人以来，我们还有兰德·卡纳做兼职的运营主管，菲利普·凯利担任兼职的市场主管。他们统一的另一个身份是靠 Gumroad 赚了不少钱的创作者。
仔细想想，很多时候，创作者要搞创作必须要有钱，那么， Gumroad 自己的工作模式为什么不直接参考这种方式呢？
这就是在创作者经济中工作的感觉。
前段时间，我试图让大家转全职工作，因为我们的体量其实已经不小了，这种情况下没一个全职的员工，感觉怪怪的。
但没人接受我的提议。
这个时候我意识到，我其实是想解决一个根本不存在的问题：「看上去正常一点」，但其实这根本不是问题，只是让我自我感觉良好而已。
事实是，最重要的是什么，很早之前我们就已经摆出来了：自由胜于增长，可持续发展胜于速度，生活胜于工作。
Gumroad 网站上很很清楚的写出了它对创作者的价值：“逃离朝九晚五的工作，脱下西装领带，结束挤地铁的日子，用手艺赚钱。”
尽管可能有点陈词滥调，但我们正在努力成为一家「创作者公司」，为创作者服务。
来看看 Gumroad 团队：
互联网带来了很多新的工作方式，但我们才刚刚开始看到它们真正发展起来。有很多不同的方法可以使工作正常进行。我们的只是其中之一。