Highlighted Quotes
- Location 501: “Work in Public” “Teach Everything You Know” “Create Every Day”
- Location 547: I had stubbed my toe on a problem—a
- Location 576: Instead of changing the world, you can change your community’s world.
- Location 586: The best way to win is to be the only. And the best way to be the only is to pick a group that is Goldilocks size, has problems they would pay money to solve, and is underserved
- Location 601: Then, your problem becomes: Which problem should I pick?
- Location 644: Once you’ve picked your own community, the path to the right solution will become clear for you too.
- Location 704: It’s the community that leads you to the problem, which leads you to the product, which leads you to your business.
- Location 724: Knowledge is important, but so is momentum.
- Location 734: Every founder, even the most successful ones, knows nothing at the beginning, and learns from there.
- Location 736: You do not need a team, money, or a degree to start building. You don’t need to ship or to code to make your idea come to life—at first.
- Location 765: Instead of skipping straight to software, stick with pen and paper.
- Location 767: Every big idea was small first.
- Location 789: You need to solve one customer’s problem reasonably well, if imperfectly, before you can scale.
- Location 854: Every business starts by testing a hypothesis with real customers.
- Location 969: “Do shitty work people love at first,”
- Location 1040: It just took off. A true viral success. —No one, ever
- Location 1064: Once you have enough repeat customers, you have product-market fit,
- Location 1074: “Viral success” is a myth, pure and simple. There is no such thing. It’s just something journalists say about a person, company, product, or service whose seemingly rapid rise is inexplicable from the outside.
- Location 1087: Charge Something, Anything
- Location 1105: There is a very large difference between free and one dollar—that’s
- Location 1190: My sense is that people who wish to reach customers some other way, like search engine optimization (SEO) or content marketing, are looking for an out. If that’s you: Stop! It doesn’t exist! Just hunker down and dedicate some time to finding people,
- Location 1195: Fanfare doesn’t bring real customers,
- Location 1206: Manual “sales” will be 99 percent of your growth in the early days, and word of mouth will be 99 percent of your growth in the latter days. It’s not a glamorous answer, but it’s true.
- Location 1228: Across the spectrum of minimalist entrepreneurs, I see a common pattern: manual sales, finding your community, talking about your journey, highlighting your customers, and getting authentic coverage.
- Location 1269: Not sales. Not marketing. Customers, educating, and being educated.
- Location 1308: Marketing is sales at scale.
- Location 1312: do not confuse marketing with advertising.
- Location 1330: I’m not a big fan of selling to strangers, but I am a big fan of bringing strangers into your audience and eventually turning them into customers.
- Location 1334: Start with making fans.
- Location 1334: Make Fans, Not Headlines
- Location 1362: Every customer will engage, follow, research, consider, and finally buy (and hopefully buy again!).
- Location 1417: just like working out, you should walk before you run a 5K, and run a 5K before you run a marathon. Your body needs time to adapt, as does your mind. And most important, your audience does too.
- Location 1429: Building a social media presence is a lagging indicator of the success of your company, and it should always be secondary to it.
- Location 1465: Teaching is hard, inspiring is hard, entertaining is hard. Now try doing them all at the same time.
- Location 1503: Besides the product itself, Gumroad’s email list is probably our most valuable business asset.
- Location 1549: “A lot of entrepreneurs think they have to start something totally new,” she says, “but a proven market makes your job so much easier.”
- Location 1568: The stories about your business will be stories about your struggles, your customers, your learnings, and your journey. They will create more fans. Who will in turn become your customers, who in turn will tell others about your business.
- Location 1586: enlisting your best customers as marketers.
- Location 1594: The key, she says, is to build relationships, to make contributors feel valued, and to give them the tools they need to make content that they can not only use for Haus but that they themselves will be proud of.
- Location 1635: A business built primarily through organic growth will be durable from the start,
- Location 1641: paid marketing should never get in the way of what really matters: talking to and selling to customers.
- Location 1674: owning a business that doesn’t own you; it’s also about owning a business that you want to work on, even if you don’t have to work on it anymore.
- Location 1683: Don’t Spend Money You Don’t Have
- Location 1688: Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, can size up a company immediately based on whether they’re “default alive or default dead.”
- Location 1691: the founders don’t know because they don’t think they need to know. They’re counting on investors to swoop in and save them if things go south.
- Location 1709: Pay yourself as little as possible, at least to start.
- Location 1719: Hire software, not humans.
- Location 1775: The tuning fork you should resort to over and over again is quite simple: your customers.
- Location 1799: “There is a misconception that money or investment confers validation and permission to do things in conventional and expensive ways, but that’s not true. It’s about product, revenue, and traction. Most of all, customer affection is the permission you need to grow.”
- Location 1818: If you do choose to go the venture capital route (Hit me up! shl.vc),
- Location 1832: This new practice will allow entrepreneurs to minimize complexity by turning customers into investors.
- Location 1840: profitability is a superpower.
- Location 1842: Profitability gets you off the grid, allowing you to grow mindfully with unlimited runway.
- Location 1850: They don’t have to bet the company anymore if they want to try something new, and they can wait years for something to pay off.
- Location 1907: aligning the ambitions you have for yourself and your company with the ambitions your customers have for themselves.
- Location 1909: I’ve worked sixty hours a week for years on end, and I’ve worked four hours a week. For better or worse, Gumroad grew at its own pace, and the number of hours I worked didn’t seem to have much of a correlation.
- Location 1917: The vast majority of small businesses are never eaten. Big fish want to eat other big fish.
- Location 1924: hire when it hurts.
- Location 1952: community before process, process before product, sales before marketing, and marketing before growth.
- Location 1972: I’ve never seen a house party end cleaner than when it started, and a company is a house party that never ends.
- Location 2000: “celebrate every opportunity to learn,”
- Location 2060: I recommend this level of transparency to everyone. The upside is that some of the people who get to know more about your company will love you. The downside is that some won’t.
- Location 2065: The most profound thing I have learned running a company has been the difference between behavior and intention. Behavior is what someone is doing; intention is why they’re doing it. Most people judge themselves based on their own intentions but then judge others based on their behavior. Transparency makes that difficult, if not impossible.
- Location 2068: it’s important for me to be open about my intentions.
- Location 2074: no secrets and no FOMO.
- Location 2081: if you hire well, your employees will be better managers of themselves than you could ever be.
- Location 2086: At Gumroad, we disclose everyone’s salary in the company to everyone else, using a simple spreadsheet I keep up to date.
- Location 2093: you don’t want unnecessary turnover to be a part of the culture of your business.
- Location 2108: The Peter Principle, coined by educator Laurence J. Peter, states that “the tendency in most organization hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence.”
- Location 2111: within a strict hierarchy, everyone gets stuck with the job they’re not good at.
- Location 2126: we don’t have meetings at Gumroad.
- Location 2127: discussion takes place only after mindful processing.
- Location 2190: Once you have cultural values that work for you, start to communicate them publicly.
- Location 2195: Communicating your values saves everyone time and energy.
- Location 2230: Your company is a business, not a cult. Embrace change, don’t abhor it.
- Location 2261: repeatedly making small choices that compound and that improve our communities. You can’t change everything, but you can and should change a few things, to
- Location 2269: anxiety is the “dizziness of freedom.”
- Location 2302: your business does not need to be the answer to every question.
- Location 2325: most businesses would be better off without venture capital.
- Location 2370: you should always try to build the right business for yourself selfishly while at the same time also serving a community of others selflessly.
- Location 2402: I believe the future of entrepreneurship is the future of humanity,