Gumroad
Gumroad is a self-publishing digital marketplace platform to sell digital services such as books, memberships, courses and other digital services. History. Sahil Lavingia built the first iteration of Gumroad over a single weekend in 2011. Sahil is a self-taught developer who has said in an interview that he learned coding by searching through each problem he hit on Google. Lavingia, who was previously the first designer hired at Pinterest and the designer of Turntable.fm, was 19 years old at the time. The idea for Gumroad came to Lavingia when he wanted to sell a photorealistic icon he  had created and realized that the amount of effort it took to sell an item directly to consumers was considerable. He decided to build a service that would make the process as easy as sharing web content. In February 2012, while still the sole member of Gumroad, Lavingia announced a $1.1 million seed round from a notable group of investors including Accel, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Naval Ravikant and Danny Rimer. Three months later, it was announced that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers had led a $7 million Series A round for Gumroad . The investment was the first made by former Twitter engineering head Michael Abbott as a KPCB partner. On September 8, 2014, Twitter announced its first commerce product, the "Buy Now" button, in partnership with Gumroad, the "Buy Now" and Gumroad partnership was discontinued on January 7, 2017. On September 30, 2014, Gumroad released its first mobile product, a utility iPhone app that acts as a mobile library for content purchased via Gumroad. Creators on Gumroad. Many major and independent musicians have sold products via Gumroad, including Eminem, Bon Jovi, Garth Brooks, David Banner, Ryan Leslie and others.. Magnolia Pictures distributes  a curated selection of films via Gumroad. Landmark Theatres also curates a selection of films distributed via Gumroad, including "Jiro Dreams of Sushi", "Man on Wire", "", "", and "Jesus Camp". Best-selling authors like Tim Ferriss, Chris Guillebeau, and John Green also publish their books on Gumroad. Payment method. Gumroad uses Stripe payment services to handle pay-ins via credit card and pay-outs via debit cards and bank accounts. Controversies. NFTs. On February 5, 2022, cartoonist Box Brown replied on a now deleted tweet from CEO Sahil Lavingia about a project that uses Non-fungible tokens. Brown was concerned if  such plans were true. Gumroad announced via Twitter that it did not currently have plans to implement NFTs on the platform. In response to the controversy related to NFTs, Gumroad's competitors such as Itch.io and Ko-Fi, confirmed that they do not have plans to use NFTs.