Sahil Lavingia – Gumroad and the evolution of online creators

**Jay Clouse** (0:00)
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**Sahil Lavingia** (0:51)
It is kind of a paradox, right? Because it's like telling someone, the best way to make money is to stop thinking about making money. Like that's a very frustrating to hear if you're trying to make money, but it's true.

**Jay Clouse** (1:03)
Welcome to Creative Elements, a show where we talk to your favorite creators and learn what it takes to make a living from your art and creativity. I'm your host, Jay Clouse.
Let's start the show.
Hello, my friend, welcome back to another episode of Creative Elements. As I hear myself saying that, I'm wondering if I'm in danger of being too repetitive when I open these episodes. Real quick story, when I was in college, my accounting lectures were all online, and the professor opened every single one of his videos with the line, hi everyone, welcome back. If you went to Ohio State, you know exactly what I'm talking about, but he opened up every single one of his videos that way. And a couple years ago, someone actually uploaded a two-minute supercut of that line from all of his videos, and I would love to include it here, but unfortunately, it looks like it's been taken down. Anyway, welcome back to another hour here together with me. And speaking of online courses, today I'm speaking with a man who has helped tens of thousands of creators sell things online. Courses, MP3s, videos, all kinds of digital products. His name is Sahil Lavingia, and he's the founder of Gumroad. Gumroad is a super simple online platform that facilitates the sale of products by creators directly to consumers. It's literally as easy as embedding a button on your site or directing them to a specific Gumroad page.
It may seem simple to sell products online today, but that's largely due to the work that Sahil has pioneered. He was actually one of the very first employees at Pinterest back in the day, but he left in 2011 to build Gumroad.

**Sahil Lavingia** (2:51)
I wanted to sell a product myself. That's sort of why I wanted Gumroad to exist.

**Jay Clouse** (2:57)
Sahil wanted to sell an icon that he created, and he couldn't find a simple way to do it. Little did he know that in the process of building a way to sell that icon, he would stumble upon a whole new growing trend of people trying to sell digital products online.

**Sahil Lavingia** (3:11)
And this is before the word creator was even a thing.
We were some of the first people to use that word. Certainly in this context, I remember trying to figure out like what do we call these people, you know?

**Jay Clouse** (3:23)
As you'll hear in the interview, Sahil eventually landed on the term creator. And over the next few years, Sahil would have to come up with some more terminology to describe this new form of commerce.
Like what would he call the things that these creators sold? And how would you refer to the people that you were selling these products to?

**Sahil Lavingia** (3:40)
And audience is kind of another word that we struggled again to define this. Who do we call the people who, you know, are they your customer base or we came up with audience because it was the one that overlapped music and film specifically and it had more of like a real kind of like physical feel to it, like an audience of people.

**Jay Clouse** (3:58)
Today, Gumroad serves nearly 75,000 creators. In September of 2020, creators on Gumroad earned a total of nearly $13 million for the month. And 10 of them made more than $100,000 each for the month.
In this episode, we talk about the beginning of Gumroad, how the creator landscape has changed in the last decade, trends in audience building, and how honesty has been key in Sahil's work and the work of so many creators that he supports.