Founder's Journal
A $20m Business with No Meetings, Deadlines or Full-Time Employees
Jan 1, 2024
A $20m business called Gumroad is run without meetings, deadlines, or full-time employees. The CEO discusses running the company like an open source project, turning customer ideas into product features, the future of remote work and the gig economy, and transitioning to a new business model.
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Quick takeaways
- Running a business with no meetings, deadlines, and full-time employees can be highly efficient and productive.
- Incentivizing contractors with equity can create a sense of ownership and accountability, leading to high-quality output.
Deep dives
Unconventional Way of Running a $20 Million Business
In this podcast episode, Sahil Lavingia, the founder and CEO of Gumroad, discusses the unconventional way in which he runs his nearly $20 million a year business. Gumroad has no meetings, no deadlines, and no full-time employees. Sahil treats Gumroad like an open-source project, where contractors and freelancers work asynchronously via platforms like GitHub, Notion, Slack, and Figma. He manages everything through a kanban board in Notion. Despite the unconventional approach, Gumroad generates $8-9 million in net income and offers equity to its contractors. Sahil aims to push this model to see how far it can go.
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