Gumroad is the brainchild of Sahil Lavingia, a 19 year old college dropout, who has worked on some amazingly creative projects in the past. With Gumroad he envisages a simple solution to sell all virtual goods by just sharing a link. The process is simple: Upload your product / point to the location where you have a product online, enter your PayPal account information , decide on a price that you want to charge for your product and Gumroad provides you a link that you can share anywhere, clicking on which enables a buyer to purchase your product using their credit card.

There is no monthly fee, no bandwidth charges and no limit on the number of products, size of the product, but they retain 5%+ $0.3 of each transaction. You are paid into your PayPal account at the end of every month.

Previously  Sahil has been a co-founder of Pinterest, developed the Turntable app for the iPhone etc. To get more information on all the projects that Sahil has worked on, you can visit his personal website. Checkout Sahil's interview below:

Sahil, please introduce yourself to our readers and tell us something about Gumroad.

Hi, my name's Sahil. I am a designer and coder working on a project called Gumroad. The goal is to democratize the ability to sell stuff online. We do this by making selling stuff as easy as sharing stuff.


What is the concept behind Gumroad and what inspired you to create this application?

You can think of it like bit.ly but for paid things. There is all this amazing content all over the web and on everyone's computer, but it is incredibly hard to sell any of it. Gumroad works by allowing any piece of content to be 'wrapped' in a Gumroad link that allows you to charge a price for it. I was inspired to create it because I wanted to sell an icon I designed to my Twitter followers, and there was no easy and simple way to do it. I thought there should be, so I built Gumroad.


Is there a limit on the number of products/size of a file that user’s can sell using Gumroad?

No, we think that as long as you have things to sell, you should be able to sell them.


As a Start-Up what was the biggest difficulty you faced from the point that you conceived this idea to having it fully functional?

Luckily there haven't been many problems. People have been enthusiastic (so far) about the problem and the solution we're providing. Though I am sure problems will arise as we start to grow.


What differentiates Gumroad from so many other shopping cart providers? How do you plan to promote your application?

We don't think of ourselves as a shopping cart. We think that you have a lot of content, and the ability to talk to a lot of the people that already want that content. All they want is a way to pay you for it. There's no need for a storefront, or a shopping cart. I just want the online equivalent of handing you a dollar in person!



I saw that you have the option to add your PayPal account information into an account. So is having a PayPal account mandatory to sell with Gumroad?  If not how is the money transferred into a user’s account?

For now, yes. We will support other options to get paid out in the near future.


Apart from working on creating applications like Gumroad, what else do you enjoy doing in your free time? What is that one book/movie/song/blog that you find yourself going back to for inspiration?

I have recently gotten into reading. You learn a lot from other people's words and lives and perspectives. It helps keep me open-minded, I think. There isn't one specific thing, I enjoy new things every day — which is part of the reason I'm building Gumroad: so I can be exposed to more and more great content!


What future enhancements have you planned for your application? Besides Gumroad are you working on any other killer projects?

Gumroad is my sole focus; I think it deserves all of my time. I think there are a lot of things that we can add on to the product in the future, but the priority will be determined by what our users want. That is always the most important thing.


What advice would you like to offer for budding developers and entrepreneurs?  

Build things that you think should exist; that will make the world a better place to live. And give it a fair shot. If it's a really great idea, you'll get shot down a million and one times. Keep at it.

Thank you taking the time for this interview Sahil, we wish you the very best for the future. 


You can also checkout the recent video discussion about Gumroad with Sahil on Techcrunch: