I founded Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we had a record number of people - 23 full-time full-time employees. In 2016, after a failed fundraising attempt , I returned to the point where I started. The company again had only one employee - myself.
Currently, when I am asked how many people work for Gumroad, my answer is "ten or so." Thus, I translate the number of people who work in the company into figures that others understand. In fact, everything is a little more complicated:
If you count everyone who works on Gumroad, you get 25 people.
If you count full-time employees, then there are none. Even I am not one of them.
We have no meetings and no deadlines.
And this approach works: our authors earn more than $ 175 million a year, and the company makes an average of $ 11 million a year, and this figure is growing every year by an average of 85%.
Despite these results, I don't expect anyone to want to fully adopt our way of working. We came to such a model by accident; we did not have any grandiose plan.
Freedom at any cost
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