No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees
Link: No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees
Intro
Gumroad is a company with no meetings, deadlines, or full-time employees. In this article, the founder wrote about how the company works.
Highlights
Gumroad used to be a typical startup in San Francisco until it failed to raise more money:
I started Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we reached a peak of 23 full-time employees. In 2016, after failing to raise more money, I ended up back where I began: a one-person company.
Now, it has been transformed into quite the opposite of the Silicon Valley startup ethos.
If we include everyone who works on Gumroad, it’s 25.
If we include full-time employees, it’s none. Not even me.
We have no meetings, and no deadlines either.
But it's working:
Our creators earn over $175 million a year, and we generate $11 million in annualized revenue, growing 85% year-over-year.
Today, working at Gumroad resembles working on an open source project like Rails. Except it’s neither open source, nor unpaid.
If everyone is part-time, synchronous communication becomes impractical.
Instead of having meetings, people “talk” to each other via GitHub, Notion, and (occasionally) Slack, expecting responses within 24 hours. Because there are no standups or “syncs” and some projects can involve expensive feedback loops to collaborate, working this way requires clear and thoughtful communication.
Everyone writes well, and writes a lot.
This is a very important premise. Asynchronous communication can be very efficient, but only if people are with good skills.
What's more, no deadline, no central planning:
There are no deadlines either.
I try not to tell anyone what to do or how fast to do it.
When someone new joins the company, they do what everyone else does: go into our Notion queue, pick a task, and get to work, asking for clarification when needed.
But we don’t prioritize ruthlessly. People can work on what’s fun or rely on their intuition, because as long as we remain profitable and keep shipping, we tend to get to the important stuff eventually.
Our public roadmap helps Gumroad's creators hold us accountable.
But every coin has two sides:
What’s not so good at Gumroad? “There's not a lot of room for growth. We're staying profitable, and not planning to double the team every year. While there will likely be a few leadership roles, there aren't plenty of them and they aren't built into the career path of working at Gumroad.”
There are no retreats planned, and no social channels in Slack. There are limited opportunities for growth. And we can’t compete with the comp packages that big tech companies can provide.But we can compete–and win–on flexibility.
There are no perks of any kind, besides the flexibility and the cash.To be clear, we don’t provide healthcare. Everyone who works at Gumroad is responsible for their own healthcare and benefits. Everyone also pays for their own phone, laptop, internet connection, and all the other things they need.
One reason Gumroad is attracting the right type of talents:
“most entrepreneurs have two options: work a full-time job and hustle nights/weekends, or leave your job and risk everything to start the company. Gumroad provided a third way: I could contract 20-35 hours a week, and for a couple days a week, incubate ideas and work on my next thing.”
In 2020, Sid left Gumroad to start his own creator economy company, Circle, together with former Gumroad coworker Rudy Santino
While many companies invented special nouns for their employees:
Working on Gumroad isn't a majority of anyone's identity.
they prefer to spend their time and energy on: a creative side-hustle, their family, or anything else.
That includes me. From 2011 to 2016, building Gumroad was my singular focus in life. But today, it is just a part of my life, like a hobby might be. For example, I paint for fun, and every once in a while, I sell a painting.
Because the company is small, they don't need a strong identity to make sure the company is culturally coherent. They can rely on things that don't scale.
Everyone is like a contractor:
In practice, we pay everyone hourly based on their role. The range varies from $50 (customer support) to $250 (Head of Product) an hour.
There is another downside to this system: people have to track their hours. Some people solve this by billing 20 hours a week, even though they may work a bit more or a bit less. Others track it diligently, in 15-minute increments, and send a detailed invoice every week.
How they hire people:
- Apply via a form.
- An unpaid, few-hour challenge, that resembles the high-level work we do at Gumroad. This may include breaking down a large shipment (like Gumroad Memberships) into its atomic parts, planning the schema associated with a new feature, or writing up a Help Center article.
- A paid, few-week trial period, that resembles the day-to-day work we do at Gumroad. This may include fixing bugs, shipping a feature, or answering support tickets.
The company works very transparently, even when it's about compensations:
Within the company, we keep a document that lists how much everyone is paid, along with their average working hours. This allows the team to have as much information as I do when making compensation decisions.
They even have an "anti-overtime" rule to discourage working more than agreed.
We also have an “anti-overtime” rate: past twenty hours a week, people can continue to work at an hourly rate of 50 percent. This allows us to have a high hourly rate for the highest leverage work and also allows people to work more per week if they wish.
I wonder how people reacted to this rule. How does everyone decide how much work they do in a week? Will some people constantly overtime?
In summary:
This is what working in the creator economy should feel like.
The internet has enabled new ways of working, but we’re just starting to see them unfold. There are a lot of different ways to make work work. Ours is just one.
Closing Comments
The way the author's company works fits what it does. Their values (flexibility, believing intuitions) are aligned with their customers. Not many companies can simply copy how they work.
But this article is still inspiring. More and more people want to work on their schedules, and after the pandemic, people realized it's not impossible. Following this trend, so many aspects of the way we work today can be re-examined. For example, I never thought no meetings at work could be practical. But it seems to be fine if everyone is good at writing things down. (Writing is an under-appreciated skill today.)
The way how Gumroad works as a company is more challenging than it appears to be. First, they need to make the work itself engaging. Otherwise, most people may just collect their hourly pay but don't care about the long-term quality. There have to be intrinsic motivations. Second, their super lightweight management relies on having a high bar on everyone in the company. I'm curious how they got their current team built, and what's the stories behind them.
BTW, I quite like Gumroad's website art design. I'm aesthetically exhausted with the mainstream corporate art style nowadays 😕.
Bonus
Gumroad opened up some part of its internal wiki. You can dig more if you are interested: https://www.notion.so/gumroad/Wiki-72663c59ed5a432a9d52accafd8f166e