That was a rough read, not really sure I understood the authors point. It was kind of all over the place, bad because AI, bad because not really open-source, bad because doge...
Only thing I really left with was the author doesn't like the word gum. Seems like a hit piece on Sahil? Pretty sure the open-source part of Gumroad has been in the works for a while.
Right. Somewhat burred the lede. My take was that the value that services like Gumroad can bring is precisely the value-add they provide over what a create could do themselves. So if the CEO has chosen to essentially automate the entire business by replacing staff with AI, then what value-add is left exactly?
Better then to watch out for middlemen that "extract value rather than add it" and empower creators to host things themselves. Thought that was a nice observation.
Ironically, I always thought that was somewhat the point of Gumroad (short of self-hosting). Are they on to enshittification Stage II?
So what are the alternatives to gumroad? I’d been thinking of using them to sell the PDF version of a book, but after reading about the doge thing, I feel like I need to look elsewhere.
I sell templates for a living and have used several of these providers.
The main options are
Gumroad - high fees and ugly design, solid system never had issues does most what I need.
Lemon Squeezy - it was very popular until being acquired by stripe. Full of serious bugs, bad support. Lovely design, slightly better fees than Gumroad, but many hidden. Would still use over Gumroad just cause the Gumroad checkout design is so bad it loses sales imo.
Paddle - haven’t used it but I think it’s probably as good as Gumroad or Lemon.
Polar.sh - the trendy new option, most creators abandoning Lemon Squeezy are moving there. Has lots of innovation in features beyond payments such as selling private GitHub access.
All of these platforms are MOR as far as I know, all provide the checkout UI etc. all handle digital asset file delivery. They are perfect for creators selling digital products that want a turn key solution and don’t want to do any development work.
I use Shopify and it’s pretty dang nice, especially the shipping discounts you get as a smaller business. I’m not sure of many alternatives though, I just knew it by name so I chose it - there might be better ones out there.
They announced the MOR feature in December 2024, so I wouldn't really say that's a big selling point for them just yet, they have been around for over a decade.
Plenty of options.
I use sytescope.com with a funnel to sell subscriptions. You can sell digital content on there too and hook it up with lots of payment systems.
Open the article, press Ctrl-F, and type "DOGE" to get your answer.
(TL;DR: DOGE is the name of a new US government agency devoted to gutting other government agencies, and the founder of Gumroad is giving it pro-bono help.)
Ah yes. For the last two or three weeks, or maybe ditto months, in some of my free time, that I dedicate for reading world news, I've been doing practically nothing but reading about the shenanigans of the Frump and his sidekick the Tusk / the Fsck, so I guess it makes sense that I didn't know what the DOGE was. end of /s
:)
after the /s, thanks for your answer. the /s is dedicated to the HN people I mention below, not to you.
actually by the "doge thing", I meant sahil's interaction with it, which I knew would be in the article, or in a linked one, but was a bit lazy to read.
and I continue to marvel at the brilliance of the knee jerk, trigger happy HN downvoters who can't even imagine that there can be a different interpretation of a phrase like "the doge thing" from what they can think of or know.
>Someone recently made the point to me that the recent rise in low-code and AI-based tooling is likely going to separate out the platforms that solve tough problems
Former design assets marketplace CEO here. Wrong ^. Low-code gives you the tools to create a website. Great. Distribution is what disrupts. Platforms won because they aggregate traffic. When you break up the platform, you diffuse the traffic along with it.
The exception is sometimes there are whales: dominant content creators that win most of the clicks. If you're interested in a lot of people winning, I'm not sure that's really all that better or different from a platform.
A few months ago, I caught Gumroad trying to roll out MOR (Merchant Operator of Record) on Twitter and immediately called them out on it. They were attempting to launch this feature before it was even completed.
They were internally rolling it out globally, even for parts of the world without a taxation system to collect on. Nevertheless, Gumroad was still planning to apply these charges. This was despite the fact that there are countless existing and affordable platforms, 100,000 times more developed—that could seamlessly integrate with Gumroad and already have this system in place. However, they decided to build it themselves.
Why? I’m not entirely sure, but I’m willing to bet it has something to do with Sahil taking a position at DOGE and perhaps an effort to obscure payment activity.
Why else? All the other scaled and fully built systems are likely to face heavy scrutiny over the next 24 months. And if a system is "still being built" or "unfinished," I guess it’s much harder to comply with regulators or provide data in response to FOIA requests, isn’t it?
How would "provide data in response to FOIA requests" impact Gumroad? FOIA requests are for information about the workings of government agencies, not companies.
when was the last time you saw anything inside the government work as intended? any paperwork submitted to a federal agency can be FOIA'd so that would be... the IRS
> Why? I’m not entirely sure, but I’m willing to bet it has something to do with Sahil taking a position at DOGE and perhaps an effort to obscure payment activity.
Maybe they felt competitive pressure to offer a feature other payment providers have? Or, it could be a conspiracy theory involving DOGE.
Had to skip to basically the end to find out the reason:
tl;dr:
> On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.
> Who’s Sahil Lavingia, you might ask? Why, the founder and CEO of Gumroad! It’s not even the central point of the piece, but the fact is, if you’re supporting Gumroad—a tool that, notably, has survived as long as it did because of a high-profile crowdfunding campaign—you’re allowing its CEO the financial freedom to work in the Department of Veterans Affairs, at the behest of DOGE, for free.
> To me, I think that there is a real opportunity to take away the reins from middlemen who extract value rather than add it by leaning into things we host ourselves. Creators, for too long, have given too much power away to the company that made our lives mildly more convenient. If they’re trying to optimize to the nubs, destroying quality of service in the process, why even bother letting them have a lane in the middle?
I would love to support creators directly, but there are some hard problems that creators need to solve before they begin direct-to-consumer sales:
1. Discoverability
2. Payments
3. Shipping
While it is theoretically possible to handle all of these without a middle-man, the middlemen running the marketplaces have thus far done a much better job than individuals could ever hope to.
Personally I've never discovered anything on Gumroad itself. It's always been from some other source (here on HN, reddit, social media) and then followed a link to Gumroad.
Payments and shipping are precisely the kinds of things that could act as services directly to the creator itself. I thought that was somewhat the point of his conclusion - put these services directly in the hands of the creator.
Otherwise Gumroad is just acting as a payment + shipping wrapper. And if they're replacing what service they had left with AI, what value-add is left exactly?
Great... we've been complaining about useless AI being forced upon us in the commercial sector and now YC alums are going to implement it in veteran healthcare through a backdoor?
I've been pretty neutral about the whole thing to date, but it's starting to seem like YC's AI blindness is actually explained by true evil capitalist intentions.
I'm seriously considering writing a custom creator platform.
(I use Gumroad too, but my platform of choice just pulled the rug out from under me. I pay a substantial amount for "unlimited courses". Yet a month or so ago they informed me that while courses were unlimited, video uploads were not. They suggested I delete courses if I want to make new ones. I use this platform for public facing courses as well as private courses that I offer my clients. The support staff, while not a chatgpt, was not particularly helpful.)
Extremely sad to see Sahil is working with DOGE in basically firing hundreds of thousands of Americans (that too disproportionately veterans) in the manner they have been doing it.
I have always liked reading his honest takes on running a company, their unique way of working with non-full-time employees, etc.
I wonder if he has posted about his work in this regard himself?
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.“
Where "wasting the labours of the people" seems in reality to mean "subsidizing rural schools so they have the same education standards as urban schools".
Of course the guy you're misquoting also had slaves, so I'm not sure if I give a shit about his predictions for American's happiness.
Governments are public works projects basically to keep citizens employed, which is why they disproportionately hire veterans, for example.
Running a government as lean as X would also inspire corruption amongst a myriad of other things. This is one reason government jobs are so "cushy", to disincentivize corruption. If the pitch given to Sahil was "Run the government like X" I'm even more ashamed he accepted the premise.
Sahil seemed to join the tech startup sphere around the time I did, back in ~2009 when he was making iPhone apps. I remember beta-testing one of his apps on my first iPhone at the age of 17, I can't imagine he was much older.
He's always been a hustler, and I don't mean that in an entirely negative or positive way. He exemplifies startup hustle culture in a way that I sometimes envy for his ability to move quickly and churn out new things, but that comes at a cost. The cost is integrity, morals, resolution, whatever you want to call it. He's a mercenary with no particular loyalty.
Gumroad has a scandal every year or two, and they're always based on jumping on the latest bandwagon. The company itself was formed in the creator hype phase that birthed Patreon and Kickstarter, it has seemingly had a full reset (i.e. layoffs back to just Sahil) twice, once when they failed to make it big, once again when layoffs were cool. That he is on the LLM hype, in a hype-driven way rather than an actually effective way, is no surprise. And lastly that he has "open-sourced" the codebase again comes across as a cynical move rather than one done for the right reasons.
All this is to say that Sahil joining DOGE is entirely on brand, both in the sense of DOGE being the epitome of the worst of startup hustle culture (we can solve every problem from first principles with some shitty code, screw actual experience!), and in the sense that this is the next bandwagon that will make him cool. Like Zuckerberg, I think Sahil is just another insecure nerd who prioritises addressing that insecurity over standing up for themselves and their beliefs.
I also started following Sahil when I joined the startup world. His name seemed to be all over Twitter and HN. It was through him that I also started following Austen Allred. Sahil was the first guest on Austen’s podcast and the two of them showed up in a lot of articles together.
Both of them seemed like startup superheroes at the time. I remember being amazed when startup sphere heroes would Tweet praise about Sahil or when Paul Graham wrote one of his rare articles defending Austen Allred, of all topics.
It was a learning experience for me to watch as Gumroad laid off all of the engineers who built the site and then investors gifted the company to Sahil, leaving him to operate it as a profitable enterprise for himself while the early engineers saw their equity wiped out (though supposedly he helped some of them to unspecified degrees). It was further eye opening to see the collapse of Austen Allred’s Lambda School after watching Paul Graham and others sing its praises in ways that were at odds of the realities of their students.
I suppose it was all a valuable lesson in learning how to separate the hustler marketing from the reality.
I, too, have followed with interest as Sahil jumped from trend to trend. Pivoting hard into LLM assistants (including the flash-in-the-pan Devin AI coding tool which disappeared as quickly as it entered the scene) and now into DOGE isn’t too surprising. Meanwhile Austen Allred is off on a new pseudo bootcamp, pumping his Gauntlet AI bootcamp via Tweets about how their students are creating SaaS companies in weeks or something, nearly repeating the same marketing he was doing years ago about his bootcamp grads landing high paying jobs (including the famous sample size of 1 debacle).
Austen also swung hard right on his Tweets to the point of hurling expletives at people critical of Trump’s policies lately, which finally prompted me to give up on my curiousity follow. Seeing Sahil lean hard into DOGE is equally on brand.
It’s like these guys have such a deep drive to align with tech industry trends that they sense them coming, go all-in, and do the most status-seeking moves they can make to be seen as on top of those trends. I also don’t know what to say about it other than it’s been interesting to observe.
Generally Gumroad itself is an amazing idea. It's challenging to push out products, and any platform that helps empower people to just try is a win.
I'm not sure about how the open-source element of this is supposed to work, but if it ends up with more people building things, creating and contributing, while making a dollar, that's a good thing.
This may also have an engineering explanation - much easier to move fast and break things if your main code base is open source and accessible to LLMs and coworkers.
Avoid Gumroad's service and using the open source code.
The Gumroad CEO has been using Devin for vibe coding their codebase which adds more risk of untested code and risks of more bugs since there are less vetted engineers in the company.
As with most tech / influencers overhyping technology, I'm assuming he has invested in Devin and other AI tools and has not disclosed it.
On top of the fact that Sahil has been working for DOGE is also another reason to avoid Gumroad.
You should just use Patreon, Stripe, BuyMeACoffee, Ko-fi, etc.
It would be great if there is a migration guide for creators such to move away from Gumroad as soon as possible.
>When submitted a list of questions about his work for DOGE, Lavingia told Wired: “Sorry, I’m not going to answer these, besides to say I’m unpaid. And a fan of your work!”
Crazy to me that people have actually been convinced that a bunch of billionaires and millionaires have suddenly decided to work for the good of the American people free of charge.
I know nothing about Gumroad's story or the CEO or any drama around it but I will say this.
I had someone once give me an affiliate link for Gumroad and I got credited a sale.
Gumroad wouldn't let me accept payment for it in a way that was reasonable for $17.
It first asked me for basic information like my name. Then it asked me for my address. Then it asked me for the last 4 of my social security number. Then it asked me for my full social security number along with uploading my driver's license or passport. All through out this process is was slowly collecting my personal information 1 form at a time and it was positioned where it didn't seem like it ever needed more than the single piece of info it asked for. Every time I submit 1 piece of information it said it failed to verify my account but never said why then asked for more.
I asked them for documentation or compliance reports on how my data was going to be stored and they ignored my support request.
I waited over 2 weeks for a response while asking following ups and got no reply. I stopped providing information after the last 4 of my social.
I decided to take a shot and emailed the CEO. In a few hours he personally Zelle'd me the amount with no questions asked and adjusted my account on Gumroad to reflect that. I don't know what to make of this, but it was disappointing I had to email the CEO to get $17 but he was very reasonable about it.
I believe Gumroad uses Stripe to process payments, so I'd guess this entire validation process is coming from Stripe. When the CEO paid you via Zelle, he probably just wanted to help you out with the hope that you would continue using Gumroad and have a positive experience with the company. I wouldn't look at any of this as a negative reflection of the company.
(I've personally never used Gumroad, so this opinion is only based on your comment and my experience with Stripe)
That could be the case but Gumroad knows the requirements to become verified.
Gumroad chose to gather the minimum amount of info and requested more with dark pattern forms to maximize collecting personal information without providing value.
If they said up front everything that was needed and it was a requirement of their payment processor then it would have cleared everything up.
There's a fairly interesting story in here, and I almost didn't bother reading it because of the opening where the author just talks about their pathological aversion to gum and how they dislike Gumroad because it has "gum" in the name.
> The story is about DOGE, but it points out something curious:
> > On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.
> Who’s Sahil Lavingia, you might ask? Why, the founder and CEO of Gumroad!
The rest of TFA is a frame around this single paragraph from the original Wired story [0] and doesn't really add anything meaningful to it. The connection to the not-really-Open-Source release is tenuous at best, the heart of it is just "turns out Sahil is in DOGE, DOGE is bad, so boycott Gumroad".
I think the real story is a guy who replaced all his customer service with chatbots is now pushing code at the Department of Veterans Affairs, a place with actual life or death stakes if a customer can’t get the answers they need because they’re stuck in chatbot hell.
Several months ago there was a strange story from a startup founder who was lost and looking for his next step.
He described how he got recruited into DOGE (or what was to become of it) via a series of online conversations that served as interviews. It was light on details but gave the impression that he basically got vibe-checked by a couple informal chats until he was into DOGE.
He left quickly afterward, not giving many details. He meant it as a side note to his story but I thought it was telling that people with zero experience in auditing or managing large government systems were being vibe-checked with online chats straight into DOGE, which was then given massively destructive powers to cut government spending.
So I suppose I’m not too surprised to see another startup founder mysteriously appear in DOGE, doing mysterious things to our nation’s infrastructure.
> Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups.
Major government decisions being made by a cabal of people recruited on a whim to work out of Signal groups, outside the reach of record keeping and transparency attempts.
Yeah, scroll past the screenshot of the github repo to almost get to the meat of the story... tedium.co indeed.
It seems the actual meat is a link to a Wired article the author read and decided to write a long-ass blog post about, to promote his newsletter and project on ko-fi...
The Wired article should be an HN post, though it has some of the same problem with distracting from the lede with detail that makes people's eyes glaze over and miss/forget the important parts.
Myself, I've explicitly stuck to KDE instead of Gnome for many years, because the logo of the latter - a foot - was viscerally disgusting and repulsive to me.
> It is actively off-putting and unappealing to at least some folks including much of the GNOME design team, newer contributors, people outside the open source bubble—and apparently potentially entire cultures (which has been raised multiple times over the past 20+ years).
Yes thanks for calling it out. I've been troubled with a lot of these startups calling themselves open-source, which might be correct but misses the ethos of open source by a mile. For example editors like Zed are actively getting better because of open source contributions and yet the enterprise value is directly going to the founders and none to the contributors. There is something really rotten about this and Gumroad might be the lowest level of hell on this gradient.
There is a lot to complain about but complaining that a for profit company's enterprise tier profits isn't going to contributors of an open source project is one bridge too far. Contributing to open source isn't about getting paid if for profit companies using open source make money.
Open source code is the payment. No one has to work on someone elses open source project but many do because they use the project and have modified it and now want those changes part of the project for everyone because it means you don't have to maintain two versions. Some do it for street cred. Some convenience others to sponsor them because their company uses the project and wants to shape it. Some do it to give an option over for profit companies in the same space. Some want to make the impossible possible (printer drivers on linux for a specific model)
But no one should help expecting to get paid if someone else makes money from it. This includes the creator (looking at you wordpress).
Probably a fine article, but I got halfway through and still had no idea what Gumroad is, or what the “creator economy” is aside from people online making money… somehow
That was a rough read, not really sure I understood the authors point. It was kind of all over the place, bad because AI, bad because not really open-source, bad because doge...
Only thing I really left with was the author doesn't like the word gum. Seems like a hit piece on Sahil? Pretty sure the open-source part of Gumroad has been in the works for a while.
Right. Somewhat burred the lede. My take was that the value that services like Gumroad can bring is precisely the value-add they provide over what a create could do themselves. So if the CEO has chosen to essentially automate the entire business by replacing staff with AI, then what value-add is left exactly?
Better then to watch out for middlemen that "extract value rather than add it" and empower creators to host things themselves. Thought that was a nice observation.
Ironically, I always thought that was somewhat the point of Gumroad (short of self-hosting). Are they on to enshittification Stage II?
I like that you were able to succinctly summarize the issues raised here in one sentence and then not understand them in the next sentence
It is like “the author wrote about Athos, Porthos, and Aramis… what I got from this is the book is about hats?”
Porthos was well known for wearing magnificent hats, though.
So what are the alternatives to gumroad? I’d been thinking of using them to sell the PDF version of a book, but after reading about the doge thing, I feel like I need to look elsewhere.
I sell templates for a living and have used several of these providers.
The main options are Gumroad - high fees and ugly design, solid system never had issues does most what I need.
Lemon Squeezy - it was very popular until being acquired by stripe. Full of serious bugs, bad support. Lovely design, slightly better fees than Gumroad, but many hidden. Would still use over Gumroad just cause the Gumroad checkout design is so bad it loses sales imo.
Paddle - haven’t used it but I think it’s probably as good as Gumroad or Lemon.
Polar.sh - the trendy new option, most creators abandoning Lemon Squeezy are moving there. Has lots of innovation in features beyond payments such as selling private GitHub access.
All of these platforms are MOR as far as I know, all provide the checkout UI etc. all handle digital asset file delivery. They are perfect for creators selling digital products that want a turn key solution and don’t want to do any development work.
Polar.sh looks great. Do they accept PayPal payments? Probably half of my sales on Gumroad come from PP.
https://docs.polar.sh/merchant-of-record/fees >Polar is currently built on Stripe
Stripe supports paypal only in Europe, Switzerland, United Kingdom
Honor System + a paypal donate link at the bottom of your page.
Itch has no mandatory cut at all.
Theirs an argument that taking any payment at all is more trouble than it’s worth.
Say you sell 15 copies of the book per month for 10$ each. After taxes and merchant fees , and the occasional chargeback, you’ll be lucky to net half.
Is 75$ a month really worth the stress ?
This is a part of why I’m going FOSS for my side projects. Even trying to collect a single legit dollar gives people a right to complain.
Of course you can complain on GitHub anyway when it doesn’t work right, but it’s MIT, fork , send a PR or leave me alone.
I use Shopify and it’s pretty dang nice, especially the shipping discounts you get as a smaller business. I’m not sure of many alternatives though, I just knew it by name so I chose it - there might be better ones out there.
There's also Paddle (who's a Merchant of Record)
Stripe can likely do it with link.com, assuming you don’t need help with distribution
Lemon Squeezy (recently acquired by Stripe) has a native digital product solution (https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/ecommerce/digital-products)
The major benefit of a service like Gumroad is they are the merchant of record and handle worldwide taxes for you. Stripe does not do that (yet?)
They announced the MOR feature in December 2024, so I wouldn't really say that's a big selling point for them just yet, they have been around for over a decade.
>taxes for you.
including EU VAT, last I checked.
Plenty of options. I use sytescope.com with a funnel to sell subscriptions. You can sell digital content on there too and hook it up with lots of payment systems.
This one is top, using it for ages: https://getdpd.com
Paddle works OK and supports a bunch of payment providers
Lemon Squeezy is excellent
what is the doge thing?
Open the article, press Ctrl-F, and type "DOGE" to get your answer.
(TL;DR: DOGE is the name of a new US government agency devoted to gutting other government agencies, and the founder of Gumroad is giving it pro-bono help.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service
Ah yes. For the last two or three weeks, or maybe ditto months, in some of my free time, that I dedicate for reading world news, I've been doing practically nothing but reading about the shenanigans of the Frump and his sidekick the Tusk / the Fsck, so I guess it makes sense that I didn't know what the DOGE was. end of /s
:)
after the /s, thanks for your answer. the /s is dedicated to the HN people I mention below, not to you.
actually by the "doge thing", I meant sahil's interaction with it, which I knew would be in the article, or in a linked one, but was a bit lazy to read.
and I continue to marvel at the brilliance of the knee jerk, trigger happy HN downvoters who can't even imagine that there can be a different interpretation of a phrase like "the doge thing" from what they can think of or know.
DOGE is the right place for those jokers.
Alternatively, you posted a 5 word question that was maddeningly vague and was almost destined to be misunderstood.
>Someone recently made the point to me that the recent rise in low-code and AI-based tooling is likely going to separate out the platforms that solve tough problems
Former design assets marketplace CEO here. Wrong ^. Low-code gives you the tools to create a website. Great. Distribution is what disrupts. Platforms won because they aggregate traffic. When you break up the platform, you diffuse the traffic along with it.
The exception is sometimes there are whales: dominant content creators that win most of the clicks. If you're interested in a lot of people winning, I'm not sure that's really all that better or different from a platform.
A few months ago, I caught Gumroad trying to roll out MOR (Merchant Operator of Record) on Twitter and immediately called them out on it. They were attempting to launch this feature before it was even completed.
They were internally rolling it out globally, even for parts of the world without a taxation system to collect on. Nevertheless, Gumroad was still planning to apply these charges. This was despite the fact that there are countless existing and affordable platforms, 100,000 times more developed—that could seamlessly integrate with Gumroad and already have this system in place. However, they decided to build it themselves.
Why? I’m not entirely sure, but I’m willing to bet it has something to do with Sahil taking a position at DOGE and perhaps an effort to obscure payment activity.
Why else? All the other scaled and fully built systems are likely to face heavy scrutiny over the next 24 months. And if a system is "still being built" or "unfinished," I guess it’s much harder to comply with regulators or provide data in response to FOIA requests, isn’t it?
things that make you go hmmmmm.
How would "provide data in response to FOIA requests" impact Gumroad? FOIA requests are for information about the workings of government agencies, not companies.
when was the last time you saw anything inside the government work as intended? any paperwork submitted to a federal agency can be FOIA'd so that would be... the IRS
> Why? I’m not entirely sure, but I’m willing to bet it has something to do with Sahil taking a position at DOGE and perhaps an effort to obscure payment activity.
Maybe they felt competitive pressure to offer a feature other payment providers have? Or, it could be a conspiracy theory involving DOGE.
Had to skip to basically the end to find out the reason:
tl;dr:
> On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.
> Who’s Sahil Lavingia, you might ask? Why, the founder and CEO of Gumroad! It’s not even the central point of the piece, but the fact is, if you’re supporting Gumroad—a tool that, notably, has survived as long as it did because of a high-profile crowdfunding campaign—you’re allowing its CEO the financial freedom to work in the Department of Veterans Affairs, at the behest of DOGE, for free.
Same. But a nice observation in conclusion
> To me, I think that there is a real opportunity to take away the reins from middlemen who extract value rather than add it by leaning into things we host ourselves. Creators, for too long, have given too much power away to the company that made our lives mildly more convenient. If they’re trying to optimize to the nubs, destroying quality of service in the process, why even bother letting them have a lane in the middle?
I would love to support creators directly, but there are some hard problems that creators need to solve before they begin direct-to-consumer sales:
1. Discoverability
2. Payments
3. Shipping
While it is theoretically possible to handle all of these without a middle-man, the middlemen running the marketplaces have thus far done a much better job than individuals could ever hope to.
Personally I've never discovered anything on Gumroad itself. It's always been from some other source (here on HN, reddit, social media) and then followed a link to Gumroad.
Payments and shipping are precisely the kinds of things that could act as services directly to the creator itself. I thought that was somewhat the point of his conclusion - put these services directly in the hands of the creator.
Otherwise Gumroad is just acting as a payment + shipping wrapper. And if they're replacing what service they had left with AI, what value-add is left exactly?
Great... we've been complaining about useless AI being forced upon us in the commercial sector and now YC alums are going to implement it in veteran healthcare through a backdoor?
I've been pretty neutral about the whole thing to date, but it's starting to seem like YC's AI blindness is actually explained by true evil capitalist intentions.
Something was off when gumroad's founder kept saying "AI now at junior dev level", "AI now at mid dev level" on twitter
Man, I never had anything but positive feelings about Gumroad… But this is something I truly cannot support.
I'm seriously considering writing a custom creator platform.
(I use Gumroad too, but my platform of choice just pulled the rug out from under me. I pay a substantial amount for "unlimited courses". Yet a month or so ago they informed me that while courses were unlimited, video uploads were not. They suggested I delete courses if I want to make new ones. I use this platform for public facing courses as well as private courses that I offer my clients. The support staff, while not a chatgpt, was not particularly helpful.)
Extremely sad to see Sahil is working with DOGE in basically firing hundreds of thousands of Americans (that too disproportionately veterans) in the manner they have been doing it.
I have always liked reading his honest takes on running a company, their unique way of working with non-full-time employees, etc.
I wonder if he has posted about his work in this regard himself?
HN: "Why so many people to do X? This should be like a 20 person startup!"
Also HN: "No....!!! You can't downsize!!!"
Ah yes, running the US Federal Government and running Twitter are two completely comparable endeavours.
Which one is more efficient?
Efficiency isn't the primary mandate of the government.
Given the government does everything, everywhere, and twitter can barely serve me tweets correctly,I’d say the answer is obvious.
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.“
Where "wasting the labours of the people" seems in reality to mean "subsidizing rural schools so they have the same education standards as urban schools".
Of course the guy you're misquoting also had slaves, so I'm not sure if I give a shit about his predictions for American's happiness.
Governments are public works projects basically to keep citizens employed, which is why they disproportionately hire veterans, for example.
Running a government as lean as X would also inspire corruption amongst a myriad of other things. This is one reason government jobs are so "cushy", to disincentivize corruption. If the pitch given to Sahil was "Run the government like X" I'm even more ashamed he accepted the premise.
Sahil seemed to join the tech startup sphere around the time I did, back in ~2009 when he was making iPhone apps. I remember beta-testing one of his apps on my first iPhone at the age of 17, I can't imagine he was much older.
He's always been a hustler, and I don't mean that in an entirely negative or positive way. He exemplifies startup hustle culture in a way that I sometimes envy for his ability to move quickly and churn out new things, but that comes at a cost. The cost is integrity, morals, resolution, whatever you want to call it. He's a mercenary with no particular loyalty.
Gumroad has a scandal every year or two, and they're always based on jumping on the latest bandwagon. The company itself was formed in the creator hype phase that birthed Patreon and Kickstarter, it has seemingly had a full reset (i.e. layoffs back to just Sahil) twice, once when they failed to make it big, once again when layoffs were cool. That he is on the LLM hype, in a hype-driven way rather than an actually effective way, is no surprise. And lastly that he has "open-sourced" the codebase again comes across as a cynical move rather than one done for the right reasons.
All this is to say that Sahil joining DOGE is entirely on brand, both in the sense of DOGE being the epitome of the worst of startup hustle culture (we can solve every problem from first principles with some shitty code, screw actual experience!), and in the sense that this is the next bandwagon that will make him cool. Like Zuckerberg, I think Sahil is just another insecure nerd who prioritises addressing that insecurity over standing up for themselves and their beliefs.
I also started following Sahil when I joined the startup world. His name seemed to be all over Twitter and HN. It was through him that I also started following Austen Allred. Sahil was the first guest on Austen’s podcast and the two of them showed up in a lot of articles together.
Both of them seemed like startup superheroes at the time. I remember being amazed when startup sphere heroes would Tweet praise about Sahil or when Paul Graham wrote one of his rare articles defending Austen Allred, of all topics.
It was a learning experience for me to watch as Gumroad laid off all of the engineers who built the site and then investors gifted the company to Sahil, leaving him to operate it as a profitable enterprise for himself while the early engineers saw their equity wiped out (though supposedly he helped some of them to unspecified degrees). It was further eye opening to see the collapse of Austen Allred’s Lambda School after watching Paul Graham and others sing its praises in ways that were at odds of the realities of their students.
I suppose it was all a valuable lesson in learning how to separate the hustler marketing from the reality.
I, too, have followed with interest as Sahil jumped from trend to trend. Pivoting hard into LLM assistants (including the flash-in-the-pan Devin AI coding tool which disappeared as quickly as it entered the scene) and now into DOGE isn’t too surprising. Meanwhile Austen Allred is off on a new pseudo bootcamp, pumping his Gauntlet AI bootcamp via Tweets about how their students are creating SaaS companies in weeks or something, nearly repeating the same marketing he was doing years ago about his bootcamp grads landing high paying jobs (including the famous sample size of 1 debacle).
Austen also swung hard right on his Tweets to the point of hurling expletives at people critical of Trump’s policies lately, which finally prompted me to give up on my curiousity follow. Seeing Sahil lean hard into DOGE is equally on brand.
It’s like these guys have such a deep drive to align with tech industry trends that they sense them coming, go all-in, and do the most status-seeking moves they can make to be seen as on top of those trends. I also don’t know what to say about it other than it’s been interesting to observe.
Generally Gumroad itself is an amazing idea. It's challenging to push out products, and any platform that helps empower people to just try is a win.
I'm not sure about how the open-source element of this is supposed to work, but if it ends up with more people building things, creating and contributing, while making a dollar, that's a good thing.
Remember when the Gumroad account on Twitter doxed someone to win an argument?
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
I don't remember this, but I believe it, based on what I have seen of Sahil.
It's hard to find any documentation on it since the posts were deleted and Twitter isn't what it once was.
This is the best I could find: https://old.reddit.com/r/CorporateFacepalm/comments/sliby8/g...
This may also have an engineering explanation - much easier to move fast and break things if your main code base is open source and accessible to LLMs and coworkers.
Can anyone explain what is meant by the Wikipedia page for Gumroad saying, “Number of locations: 11,894 (2023)”?
I thought Gumroad has 0 locations.
Good question. Here is the 2023 revision that added it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gumroad&diff=prev... No notes about sources or meaning. It survived an edit war last August.
Avoid Gumroad's service and using the open source code.
The Gumroad CEO has been using Devin for vibe coding their codebase which adds more risk of untested code and risks of more bugs since there are less vetted engineers in the company.
As with most tech / influencers overhyping technology, I'm assuming he has invested in Devin and other AI tools and has not disclosed it.
On top of the fact that Sahil has been working for DOGE is also another reason to avoid Gumroad.
You should just use Patreon, Stripe, BuyMeACoffee, Ko-fi, etc.
It would be great if there is a migration guide for creators such to move away from Gumroad as soon as possible.
>When submitted a list of questions about his work for DOGE, Lavingia told Wired: “Sorry, I’m not going to answer these, besides to say I’m unpaid. And a fan of your work!”
Crazy to me that people have actually been convinced that a bunch of billionaires and millionaires have suddenly decided to work for the good of the American people free of charge.
I know nothing about Gumroad's story or the CEO or any drama around it but I will say this.
I had someone once give me an affiliate link for Gumroad and I got credited a sale.
Gumroad wouldn't let me accept payment for it in a way that was reasonable for $17.
It first asked me for basic information like my name. Then it asked me for my address. Then it asked me for the last 4 of my social security number. Then it asked me for my full social security number along with uploading my driver's license or passport. All through out this process is was slowly collecting my personal information 1 form at a time and it was positioned where it didn't seem like it ever needed more than the single piece of info it asked for. Every time I submit 1 piece of information it said it failed to verify my account but never said why then asked for more.
I asked them for documentation or compliance reports on how my data was going to be stored and they ignored my support request.
I waited over 2 weeks for a response while asking following ups and got no reply. I stopped providing information after the last 4 of my social.
I decided to take a shot and emailed the CEO. In a few hours he personally Zelle'd me the amount with no questions asked and adjusted my account on Gumroad to reflect that. I don't know what to make of this, but it was disappointing I had to email the CEO to get $17 but he was very reasonable about it.
I believe Gumroad uses Stripe to process payments, so I'd guess this entire validation process is coming from Stripe. When the CEO paid you via Zelle, he probably just wanted to help you out with the hope that you would continue using Gumroad and have a positive experience with the company. I wouldn't look at any of this as a negative reflection of the company. (I've personally never used Gumroad, so this opinion is only based on your comment and my experience with Stripe)
That could be the case but Gumroad knows the requirements to become verified.
Gumroad chose to gather the minimum amount of info and requested more with dark pattern forms to maximize collecting personal information without providing value.
If they said up front everything that was needed and it was a requirement of their payment processor then it would have cleared everything up.
There's a fairly interesting story in here, and I almost didn't bother reading it because of the opening where the author just talks about their pathological aversion to gum and how they dislike Gumroad because it has "gum" in the name.
This is the story:
> The story is about DOGE, but it points out something curious:
> > On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.
> Who’s Sahil Lavingia, you might ask? Why, the founder and CEO of Gumroad!
The rest of TFA is a frame around this single paragraph from the original Wired story [0] and doesn't really add anything meaningful to it. The connection to the not-really-Open-Source release is tenuous at best, the heart of it is just "turns out Sahil is in DOGE, DOGE is bad, so boycott Gumroad".
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
I think the real story is a guy who replaced all his customer service with chatbots is now pushing code at the Department of Veterans Affairs, a place with actual life or death stakes if a customer can’t get the answers they need because they’re stuck in chatbot hell.
Several months ago there was a strange story from a startup founder who was lost and looking for his next step.
He described how he got recruited into DOGE (or what was to become of it) via a series of online conversations that served as interviews. It was light on details but gave the impression that he basically got vibe-checked by a couple informal chats until he was into DOGE.
He left quickly afterward, not giving many details. He meant it as a side note to his story but I thought it was telling that people with zero experience in auditing or managing large government systems were being vibe-checked with online chats straight into DOGE, which was then given massively destructive powers to cut government spending.
So I suppose I’m not too surprised to see another startup founder mysteriously appear in DOGE, doing mysterious things to our nation’s infrastructure.
Are you referring to the co-founder of Loom? https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-...
That’s it! Thanks for searching for it.
This is the part that stood out:
> Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups.
Major government decisions being made by a cabal of people recruited on a whim to work out of Signal groups, outside the reach of record keeping and transparency attempts.
An omen about what was to come.
It's honestly extremely depressing
Yeah, scroll past the screenshot of the github repo to almost get to the meat of the story... tedium.co indeed.
It seems the actual meat is a link to a Wired article the author read and decided to write a long-ass blog post about, to promote his newsletter and project on ko-fi...
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
The Wired article should be an HN post, though it has some of the same problem with distracting from the lede with detail that makes people's eyes glaze over and miss/forget the important parts.
Sounds like gum-related misophonia. Which I can empathize with, unfortunately.
So can I. People have their quirks.
Myself, I've explicitly stuck to KDE instead of Gnome for many years, because the logo of the latter - a foot - was viscerally disgusting and repulsive to me.
Interestingly this is a big topic
https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement(2f)FootAndCulturalIssue.ht...
https://cassidyjames.com/blog/gnome-foot-logo-rebrand/
> It is actively off-putting and unappealing to at least some folks including much of the GNOME design team, newer contributors, people outside the open source bubble—and apparently potentially entire cultures (which has been raised multiple times over the past 20+ years).
You are not alone
Moist
Crisp. Pleasure.
To be fair it is a dumb brand and they need to keep explaining what they do.
tldr:
1. Gumroad (the code) is freemium, not open source
2. Gumroad (the company) has reolaced customer support with lousy AI chatbots, without escalation to humans
3. Gumroad CEO volunteers for DOGE
Investors also just love it when founders do other things that use up all their time
Sahil bought out the investors and wholly owns the company now: https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting (search for "New beginnings")
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Yes thanks for calling it out. I've been troubled with a lot of these startups calling themselves open-source, which might be correct but misses the ethos of open source by a mile. For example editors like Zed are actively getting better because of open source contributions and yet the enterprise value is directly going to the founders and none to the contributors. There is something really rotten about this and Gumroad might be the lowest level of hell on this gradient.
There is a lot to complain about but complaining that a for profit company's enterprise tier profits isn't going to contributors of an open source project is one bridge too far. Contributing to open source isn't about getting paid if for profit companies using open source make money.
Open source code is the payment. No one has to work on someone elses open source project but many do because they use the project and have modified it and now want those changes part of the project for everyone because it means you don't have to maintain two versions. Some do it for street cred. Some convenience others to sponsor them because their company uses the project and wants to shape it. Some do it to give an option over for profit companies in the same space. Some want to make the impossible possible (printer drivers on linux for a specific model)
But no one should help expecting to get paid if someone else makes money from it. This includes the creator (looking at you wordpress).
Probably a fine article, but I got halfway through and still had no idea what Gumroad is, or what the “creator economy” is aside from people online making money… somehow