“What is Gumroad?”

Well…

In April 2011:

“Over this past weekend I had the idea to build a sort of link shortener but with a payment system built-in. There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link — on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends — but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store.”

In April 2012:

With Gumroad, we want to make accepting payments for digital goods extremely simple. Put simply, it’s an astonishingly simple payment system based purely on URLs. If you want, you can think of it like a URL shortener with a pay-wall built into it, but it’s much more than that.

In April 2013:

Gumroad serves to democratize the ability to sell stuff online. You’re a creative person; you create a lot of content. But most of it sits, archived, on some computer somewhere for the rest of time. It’s either too hard, or too time-consuming, or it doesn’t even make sense to put in a store! Gumroad lets you easily sell the stuff you haven’t been able to, yet.

In April 2014:

Gumroad enables creatives to sell directly to their audience — so that they can make a living doing what they love.

Writers, designers, game developers, musicians, artists, and filmmakers use Gumroad to earn their livings.

In December 2015:

Gumroad helps all types of creators earn a living selling what they make directly to their audiences.

In December 2019:

Super-simple e-commerce for creators. Gumroad helps artists, designers, educators, writers, and podcasters do more of what they love.

Why publish this?

Someone asked me if we’d pivoted. I didn’t really think about it much until then, so I didn’t have a good answer. Still don’t, but I made this in the process.

Originally published in December 2015, this article was updated in December 2019. The information was compiled using Archive.org