I discovered Gumroad in February 2020 while seeking a platform to expand my ebook sales beyond my website. While I had success selling thousands of books on Amazon and other platforms, Gumroad stood out by offering the option to bundle my products, a key reason for choosing this platform.

After three years on Gumroad and generating $20,000 in ebook sales, I'm sharing my experience in this review. I'll discuss how I achieved this and offer insights for anyone interested in earning from digital product sales on Gumroad.

If you're seeking an uncomplicated e-commerce platform without concerns about design, client usability, or yielding a significant portion of profits (as with Amazon), Gumroad could be the ideal solution.

What Is Gumroad?

Gumroad is an online digital marketplace designed for self-publishing where users can buy and sell a wide array of products and services. Think of it as the Walmart equivalent for digital goods.

Sahil Lavingia, a former Pinterest designer, initially created Gumroad to sell his photorealistic icon. Unexpectedly, the platform evolved into much more than intended.

The platform simplifies the process for digital creators to showcase and sell their content. Their user page boldly states, 'Zero to $1 - with Gumroad, anyone can earn their first dollar online. Just start with what you know, experiment, and get paid effortlessly.' A quick scroll down reveals that last week alone, Gumroad's digital entrepreneurs collectively earned $3,447,908.

Ready to kickstart your sales journey on Gumroad? Get started by following this link: www.gumroad.com

Setting Up Your Gumroad Store

1. Profile Creation:

• Initiating your income journey begins with setting up your profile. This involves adding a photo, bio, and username to kickstart your presence. Here's an example of my profile: www.gumroad.com/indialindsey

Gumroad’s profiles are user-friendly and easily navigable on both mobile and desktop devices. The layout allows you to segment your content, enhancing visibility for potential buyers.

2. Settings Customization:

• Dedicate a few minutes to customize your user settings. Choose the category your products belong to; mine fall under Books and Writing. Additionally, add relevant tags to your products, such as marketing, self-publishing, or entrepreneurship. These tags aid Gumroad users in discovering your offerings.3. Payment Information Completion:

• Initially, Gumroad offered payouts solely through PayPal or biweekly bank transfers. Now, they've integrated Stripe as an option. Evaluate what suits your financial preferences best. Gumroad retains a 10% cut from all sales. If you opt for PayPal, expect an additional processing fee of 2.9% plus a 30-cent PayPal fee. These fees can accumulate, so it's wise to choose based on your needs. While most consumers prefer PayPal, it’s crucial to weigh the associated costs.

How I sell my ebooks on Gumroad

I ventured into online book sales back in September 2015. Over time, I've published 43 books on Amazon and 20 on various other digital platforms.

The genesis of my first book 'How to Start Your First Business Online' stemmed from numerous inquiries about starting a business. Instead of repeatedly fielding the same questions, I compiled my expertise into an ebook priced at $4.99 on Amazon.

Upon discovering Gumroad, I realized it offered a unique advantage: the ability to deliver ebooks to consumers while retaining access to my customer base for future marketing endeavors. What's more, the platform allowed me to retain a larger portion of the sales revenue.

My first Gumroad sale was for my ebook '10K in 30 Days' priced at $29.99 and then eventually $39.99 —a significant leap from my initial Amazon book pricing. This resulted in over 80 copies sold, a considerable increase from my previous sales.

I sold the first bult of copies to a coaching community I nurtured called Marketing Mayhem. Those in the program received the book for a discount at $29.99 and then on release day, the book sold for $39.99.

Maximizing Your Sales on Gumroad

One way to maximize your sales is by bundling your products. At first, I used to sell one ebook for $27-$47, however, when I put 2-3 books in a bundle and sold them for $27-$47, I saw a huge increase in sales. Your customer feels like they’re getting a deal. I first sold my Boss Up ebook bundle for $69. At the time, I sold 6 books for $69. Overall the years, I’ve experimented with several bundles, running different sales and campaigns on my ebooks.

I’ve bundled ebooks with other ebooks.

I’ve bundled ebooks with courses.

I’ve bundled ebooks with other digital products such as journals, ebook templates, or affirmation cards.

The key is to provide a substantial offering at an attractive price point, catering to your audience's interests and needs.

In my upcoming class, I’ll dive deeper into this topic but much of my success with Gumroad has come from bundling my products. My top-selling product is a bundle of 9 books that I sell into one bundle.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing stands as a pivotal strategy for creators aiming to sell digital products without the upfront costs of advertising. This approach involves individuals, known as affiliates, promoting your products and earning commissions for driving traffic and sales to your offerings. Gumroad simplifies this process by allowing you to allocate a commission ranging from 10% and beyond to your affiliates. The beauty of this approach lies in its cost-effectiveness: you pay nothing until a sale is made, and the commission is deducted directly from the sale and routed to the affiliate.

Gumroad's affiliate program, integrated into its platform, remains a coveted feature for creators. Here's how it works: Every purchaser of your digital product automatically becomes an affiliate. This system incentivizes and empowers your customer base to become advocates for your products, turning them into active promoters. As they bring in more customers, you reward them accordingly, fostering a symbiotic relationship where everyone benefits.

Managing affiliates within Gumroad is straightforward. From your dashboard, adding new affiliates via email is a breeze. Once added, they receive an email detailing how to become an affiliate, initiating their journey to promote and earn commissions for driving sales to your products.

As of January 4, 2024, I sold over 1,136 copies of my ebooks, making $20,290.36 in total.

As a marketer and writer, Gumroad has been an invaluable platform for selling knowledge-based content, pioneering this concept in digital marketplaces. In the upcoming year, I'm keen on exploring other avenues like Shopify, Stan Store, Kajabi, or SamCart to further optimize my sales potential through features like cross-selling, upselling, and down selling.

For anyone starting their online income journey, Gumroad offers a solid starting point!

Join me in an upcoming class 'How I Made Five Figures Selling Ebooks' where I'll delve into how I made over $20,000 selling ebooks on Gumroad and over $70,000 collectively through other platforms.

Secure your ticket by clicking this link.

Will Gumroad be your choice for making money in 2024? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Helo

This guy makes $40000 from just selling 2 digital products
 

This is one of the top viewed story on my site, so I wanted to share it here too.

Josef is a software engineer who wrote a Ebook and created a SaaS boilerplate and sold it on Gumroad. He recently crossed $40,000 in revenue from these 2 digital products and is kind enough to give us a peek into how he got this started.

Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

Hi, I am Josef. I am 34 years old full-stack software engineer, indie developer, and book author.

I wrote a book on web application deployment: Deployment from Scratch and built Business Class, a Rails SaaS starter template.I recently crossed $40,000 in revenue on Gumroad from these two products. I also write a blog and I am active in indie and Ruby communities.

 

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

I just quit leading a dev team at a small startup, and I needed a break. I had some pain in my leg (likely coming from my back) and felt I have to stop an give my body time to recover. I got a good offer to stay with the company so it wasn't an easy decision.

My dream was definitely to write my own Software as a Service application, but I thought to myself why not start with a single payment product first and see how this goes. I chose to write a technical book to stay close to my profession and have it at least as a reference of my skills in the worst case scenario of not selling many copies.

I didn't have a real following at the time so I was thinking I have to choose the book topic on my credentials rather than any topic I might like.

Since I worked as Linux packager at Red Hat and also finished some of their commercial certifications, I thought that's a good start. I then combined it with deployment since I believed there wasn't a book that really focused on Linux fundamentals when comes to deployment. There are pure Linux books or Ansible books, but nothing that shows you deploying applications without higher level tooling (which is good for learning and understanding what's going on).My original plan was 5-6 full months to have the first version, but it took me 3 years (around 1 year of billable time). I started selling an alpha version 2.5 years in to see if people are really ready to buy.

How did you get your first initial customers?

Once committed, I announced a start with a blog post.

The post goes over a few of the book’s main topics, and you can notice that my idea was to keep the book lighter and smaller. The feedback I gathered later from the mailing list made me build a vast resource of 500+ pages (yes, people wanted more, not less).I then posted an announcement to the Ruby subreddit, which I am a regular of. In the end, I didn’t start with a question but instead said I’ll attempt to do it.

Of course, I could have still abandoned the idea if there was no interest. So the early marketing was basically just my developer's blog with a link to a landing page with a mailing list. I got my first real subscriber on 27 September 2018. It took me exactly 159 days until I reached 100 subscribers on 4 March 2019. It’s said that the first one hundred is the most difficult, but that’s not entirely true here. It took me another 334 days to reach 100 more subscribers. Most of my other other subscribers came from my blog although this was not directly measured.My blog enjoyed on average 350+ unique visitors all that time and I put a small corner image link to drive traffic to the book homepage.

Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

Since launch I tried posting my book to various places like Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt.

The most influential was my highly upvoted Hacker News post (300+ upvotes) that sold 100 copies in a day. I never earned so much money in one day in my life :).

Lots of Reddit submissions completely tanked. I was sometimes featured in some newsletters which was pretty good.

As for Product Hunt I submitted it when I had 800 copies. I got over 30 upvotes which I felt is good for a solo person with a technical book, but haven't sold many.

Only now I'll focus on SEO which I completely ignored (unless we include my regular blog where I post regularly). Business Class is pretty new and so I only posted it about it on my blog and Twitter which is now bigger since I started.

How does your business make money?

Deployment from Scratch is a book with some additional resources in a single package.

The original price from the beggining is $50 and never changed. I should probably experiment more with pricing going further.

Sales of digital products come with spikes of virality (usually when they release), but go down over time. My best month is the one when I posted to Hacker News in December 2021, a few months after the official announcement. I made $8930 in sales. In the lowest months, I made $640.Since I worked on the book for a full year in terms of hours (spread in three), you could say it earned me a salary equivalent of ~ $2000 (before tax). So it’s not that much from a salary perspective especially considering how hard it was. But despite that, it feels amazing. I was basically able to write and market a technical book. I am proud of myself for that.Business Class is also a single payment, no subscriptions. But I made Business Class specifically so I can launch a SaaS business and sell a subscription.

I earned $40k in revenue since I started selling which is $1420/mo. I don't include months of work before that so technically it's way less. It really is a long journey, not your overnight success.

Most of the sales are for my book Deployment from Scratch and in a book business every month is very different. This summer the revenue is quite low for the book, but at least I launched my new product, Business Class.

Take us through a typical day in your life running the business as a solo founder

My days depends a lot whether I have a day job or not. Right now I don't have one again, so I am on the road and working from different cafes and hotel rooms.

I am not someone working 16h a day, no. I do indie things because it let's me work 3 hours or less. Otherwise what's the point? But any day definitely start with coffee and I can do up to 4 of them! Coffee is my fuel.

Before you go, what advice would you give to another who wants to start a business like yours?

Just start today. A lot of your assumptions are likely wrong, but you won't find out until you start. And if you are writing a book, try a smaller one first. I had to wait a long time for my release date.

If you are a fellow dev, you might have to consider writing a book yourself. And so, apart from the odds of success, you might want to know-how. If you make a deal with a publisher, they would likely have a system in place for you to use. But if you are going to self-publish, it’s up to you. I wrote my book in Markdown and LaTex. I then built the PDF using Pandoc.

I also used a lot of Ruby, which I already wrote about in Ruby for ebook publishing. I would make my whole setup public if it weren’t such a mess as it is. I did the technical illustrations with draw.io.I guess the final thought should be whether this is something I would do again. After all, it was a lot of work over a couple of years. Maybe the single most mentally challenging thing I did, even (although I might be saying this only because I forgot all of the pain of studying informatics at this point). Still, writing a technical book in one’s line of work is also satisfying. Seeing the final result, the 5-star ratings, or emails as well.

Watch the full video here