Antiwork 2025 Public Annual Meeting

Welcome everybody, there are a lot of people in the office, we have the team in town. The agenda for the meeting is we're going to go through the financials and then we're going to go through our reactions to the financials, what we're going to do about improving them, and we're going to talk about some value updates. Uh, the numbers people are mostly excited about, so this is a creative earnings since the company started. So you can see nothing too crazy from what people are already familiar with, but we peaked during COVID and then this last couple years we've declined a little bit. We basically back to 2020 levels in terms of GMV, which is not too bad. Twice as high as we were doing in 2019 pre-COVID. This is the company's revenue. We did about $10 million in revenue last year. And, you know, these charts are nice, but I thought it would be more helpful to actually show you what we generally actually look at when we make decisions. And everyone always tells me to increase the font size. I thought it would be helpful to just show you what these things actually look like. And so you can see in 2023, we did $21 million in revenue. You subtract cost of goods sold. Cost cost of goods sold are like the non-optional variable expenses for every dollar you earn, you know, to produce a cup of coffee. The coffee beans would go into this. And we had about $6.5 million in cost of goods sold. You can see the vast majority of that is payment processing. Stripe and PayPal add up to about $5.5 out of the $6.5. And then there's hosting, a little bit of fraud, sort of about it. And so after that, you can see we did about $14 million in gross profit in 2023. We did $13 million in gross profit in 2024. That's the sales revenue from the GMV going down a little bit. You can also see we have these new products, which we'll talk— as Gumroad has plateaued, we've invested more and more into building new stuff. So after the gross profit, $15 million, at the bottom, if you look at our net sort of operating income, it goes down to— that's most people cost. You can see payroll. Payroll is not that much as we're— we were mostly like a freelancer workforce. We're transitioning more to in-person now, sort of in-person full-time salaries, about $500K. Professional service, but most of it is, you can see, this is the freelancers, $1.6 million here, and then product development, $3.1 million here. So, right, so $5 million out of that pool, and then the rest is legal, finance, and ops. We spent about $300K on accounting, about $500K in legal. As a percentage of revenue, it's actually pretty low, but I think there's a lot of room to improve here. A big focus for this year will be using our products to cut the costs of these things and offer these products and services to other customers. The reason most customers don't optimize these sorts of things is the engineering costs required. You can select the engineering required to automate this, a couple million dollars a year. So it's only really worth doing if you're just gonna sell it as a service to other customers. And you can see almost every other cost rounds to zero. This is our SaaS that we pay. So about 20K a month on all the SaaS. So things like Cursor, Figma. Things that we don't necessarily need. Rent is, was $50K. Like our phone line, utility, almost everything running a nice software business round to zero. And then this is just sort of margin analysis. You can see Gumroad does about us almost about 67 to 70% gross profit margin. If you're doing public stock investing, you'll see that most software companies aim to be around here. This basically means you're a software company. If you're selling food, like if you're a restaurant, you're not gonna have gross profit margins of 60, 70%. You're gonna have gross profit profit margins of between 20% and 30%, maybe 40%. If you're a grocery store, your gross profit margin is going to get closer to like 3% to 5%, I think. You basically— the more of a commodity you are, the more you're competing to supply a good that people can get from many sources. If anyone wants, I can do a nice economics lecture on supply-demand curves, but software is generally not as much of a commodity. It's more of an innovative technology. This is all the math that went into increasing our pricing. We did 2 years ago now. It turned us into a real software business. Without that change, our gross profit margin was really low. We weren't really acting like a software business. For the stuff that matters maybe the most, which would be our net income. You know, if you're an owner of the business, kind of like the thing you care about the most. You can see in this '23, we did $8.9 million in net income, which is pretty solid. And in 2024, we did $4.4 million in net income. And that variability is in those things I talked about, growing the team, paying them more money. The goal for 2025 is to try to hit $10 million in EBITDA. But I think it's a reasonable goal. It's a nice round number. I think our investors, all of our 7,000+ crowdfunding investors, deserve us to try as hard as we can. So hopefully when you see this next year, all of these numbers are 30% higher than they are now. And so this is the Antiwork stack. As I mentioned, the products that we now have— every company effectively has 2 stakeholders. Money comes from somewhere and money goes to somewhere, and the rest you keep, you distribute to your investors, your employees. They're all in the middle. So in the top you have your customers, that's where the money comes from. At the bottom, the government where you pay taxes to, or governments plural probably I should say. Like money comes in, IFFI is like the first blocker. I often use a nightclub metaphor. You have the bouncer, IFFI is a bouncer that makes sure that the people coming to the establishment are positive additions. Then you have helper, the front office customer support. Then you have unique product offering. In our case, that's Gumroad. And then you have back office things, Shortlist, which does QA or payroll, HR, finance, legal, ops, which we built Flexile for. So this is the current anti-work stack. We may add to this over time. The goal is to effectively rip things out of Gumroad that are not necessarily unique to Gumroad that we can scale independently, build self-serve products around, open source all of it so more and more people can use them, and over time improve the quality of software, B2B software, that people are used to. What, what the direction is when you're working on one thing like Gumroad, it's like pretty easy. You ask creators what they want and they tell you. But we just started in Google Docs. We became a merchant record, we shipped instant payouts, we added a bunch of bank accounts, we added product bundles, which is a huge feature, wishlists, collabs, a bunch of content profile editing features, abandoned carts. And this, this is really what product management is in my opinion. Once you have product market fit, you just ask your customers what they want, they tell you, and then you have a fun exercise of prioritizing it all. This is what's coming up in, in Q1 and Q2. We're building community features. We have a social proof widget. Instapay apps is going to get expanded. Installment payment. The audio preview support within product descriptions also got a lot of feedback that they We really want that. And we just shipped UTM link tracking. So this is now live. It's just, you ask people what they want, you do a little bit of math to try to prioritize what you think will lead to more creator earnings, and then you keep going. But when you don't have product market fit, it's a little bit harder to decide what to build. And this is why companies often come up with values and value systems. And so we've been working on a new set of— Koordinate us. And I really like this phrasing, which is to make work play. The goal of the software that we're trying to ship is to make work more fun. Gumroad's original tagline was we want to make it possible for creators to spend all of their time doing what they love. We're trying to expand the scope of that. How many people can we empower to spend more of their time doing what they love? It's different for everyone, right? That's the beauty of working with other people. You can have comparative advantage. Some people like doing engineering, some people like doing design. But there's many things that people just don't really generally like doing. And so if we can build tools to help people eliminate those sorts of work, I think you'll have more time, energy, and money to spend on the thing you want to spend more time doing. So Shortlist is our QA, Iffy is moderation, Helper is customer support, Flexile is payroll, and Gumroad is all the above for creators all in one. And then to reformulate our values, Anu helped a lot with just trying to make them more pointed, more spiky. And I like them. I like them quite a bit. Make work play is my favorite one. Celebrate. I think that's really key. I think it's really easy to just spend all your time shipping and shipping, and you want to— I think this is often about partying and having fun. Weddings, birthday parties. Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's, everybody, by the way. I love all of you. I love everyone who's tuning in. I assume people are tuning in because some part of them love what they do and loves software and loves like the time and era we're in, and that's awesome. Hopefully everyone gets to spend more of their time doing what they love. Build our office like a playground. We're redesigning our office. Meaning over money. Uh, at the end of the day, it's hard to compete with NVIDIA stock, FAANG salaries, I think we can manage both, but I care more about meaning over money. So prioritizing projects that not just are purely around making as much cash flow as possible, but are fun to work on, have a large impact. Build for builders, open source everything, shipping world-class software. I don't want to just ship mediocre software. That's a big reason we're coming back in person. I just think it's really hard to build world-class software when you're all remote. It's like playing basketball with like 3 seconds of lag or something like that. I think it'd be pretty hard. Uh, world-class means best. Working with the best. This is a new value that I reformulated from a lot of the old ones that we had. Seek feedback on everything from everyone. The goal of bringing people onto the team is that everything we ship, the quality, like the quality of what we like, AI will basically solve the quantity problem where we can ship like an infinite amount of code at this point. There's no real bottom on shipping code. It's like you can take an infinite amount of photos. That's not hard to do these days. But actually increasing the ceiling— how good can we make the stuff that we ship? And that requires getting feedback on everything from everyone. That's why I do these meetings publicly, is so I can get better and better at running the business and making better decisions. That's why I want people in the office with me, is is the quality of the decisions I have to make have to be better. Ultimately, the success of the— is going to be largely predicated on how smart the decisions I make are. And it doesn't matter how fast we ship if we decide to work on the wrong thing, or we decide to pick the wrong framework, or we make the wrong schema choices. And I think as things get crazier and faster in terms of shipping, the quality of the actual decisions. Like, we should almost be spending almost all of our time seeking feedback on our ideas, making them better and better. And then every day, and you just not getting lazy, not doing the same thing every day. Your job should be constantly changing. You're basically hired to fire yourself. We try to reformulate that because that was a bit negative, and to fire yourself into new challenges. But that's what we do. We want to automate as much stuff as possible, eliminate all the work so that we can spend more of our time on creative problem solving. Work is boring and rote, and play is fun and creative. So less stuff that's boring and rote, mechanical, and more stuff that's fun and creative. And inherently, like, boring and rote is also deterministic. I know the value you're getting out of it. You can say, okay, I'm going to spend 10 minutes and get this. Fun and creative is much more undeterministic, non-deterministic, stochastic. But also more creative and more fun, and that's what I want to be doing with my time. I don't want to be working for work's sake. I don't have to, so I'm not going to. The more emphasis we put on play, the better. So these are the rules of the playground. Feedback appreciated, by the way. This website's open source. You can just open a PR if you spotted anything that could be improved. But I like these quite a bit. And you can tell we lowercase a lot of stuff now. It's, I think, a good filter for who you like talking to. If you're capitalizing and adding periods and focused on correct punctuation, it feels like work. And if you're just like texting a friend, hey, you want to grab coffee tomorrow, you might say TMMRW instead of spelling out tomorrow. So the more playful kind of vibe is what we're going for. And hopefully this bleeds through like all of the stuff that you're about to see. So yeah, this is Make Work Play. Pretty simple. Cross out the work, replace with play. To focus in on this— We've made good progress with open source repo every month, and by Gumroad's 14th birthday, April 4th, hopefully we should be completely open source. So Shortest we open source in December, Giphy in Jan, Helper we'll do by the end of this month, Flexile in March, and Gumroad in April. And Yeah, as I mentioned, build for the builders. I like people who— Oh yes, question, awesome. Yes, just a quick question. As you're open sourcing, are you still gonna offer a version where you're hosting and charging for it? Yes, yeah, so the question is will we start, will we keep offering a hosted version, gumroad.com, or— Yes, we will. We'll be like ideally the number one user of the software. If that doesn't happen, that'll be an interesting interesting timeline where— that's certainly possible. And yeah, the sort of Gumroad open source and all of these projects open source will be monetized in, in two ways. One is customers who outgrew Gumroad or didn't— were too big for Gumroad even to start. You know, you could have like someone who wants to build their own marketplace, for example, and right now you basically have to spend hundreds or thousands of hours building your own marketplace. Let's say you But really you're just like taking Gumroad and you're like, I want to sell fonts. I want fontrow.com. Or you want to sell silk, you might want to have silkrow.com. It's going to be a lot easier for you to take an existing codebase that has 99% of what you need and then add features. And I think licensing will be the way that we monetize the open source version. It's free and open source up until you hit $10 million in GMV, and then you're going to have to license it from us, or you can get a license ahead of time. But if it's like enterprise and then you host it. It's your thing. We just collect payments every year. You send us a check. And so licensing and potentially consulting. If you need help setting it up, we may be the best people to get it set up for you really fast. And I think as AI software engineers become more and more of a thing, it'll be easier and more scalable to offer those kinds of services. And it'll be more compelling to just say, hey, Devin, I want to build fontrow.com for Gumroad and add these these 3 features. Not today, but in the next decade, my guess is it'll be possible to do stuff like that, and open source software will have a large lead. The closed source software, your team can work on it, but you're bounded by 10, 20, 30, 40, 100, 200 people. Open source, anyone who wants to can work on it. You're still bound by how many, like, are good enough software engineers, which is limited. But in theory, if the means are correct, we'll have infinite amounts of software engineers and it. So all of a sudden the value of being open source should effectively be 100%. There'd be almost no reason to be closed source. For example, anyone can cook, so it's not like restaurants keep those things secret. They publish their cookbooks. They use it to drive revenue awareness to their restaurant. You don't go to the restaurant specifically to eat the thing. Music is effectively free and open source. HTML, CSS is all free and open source. So I think software over time will, will head in in that direction, including all of the stuff that we build. And it's kind of classic integrator's dilemma. Do we wait for it to happen or do we participate in it happening to us? I'd like to participate. It's more fun, I think. So Shortest is open source. That's our AI QA. Iffy, we open sourced. By the way, if you want to click these links, just go to antiwork.com/2025 and you'll be able to page through this deck. I'm pretty excited to speak specifically about Iffy right now. There are these enterprise, you know, products that were built to do moderation, a lot of it human in the loop. Pre-AI started in like the sort of Web 2.0 era, the 2007 to 2015 timeframe, and they're expensive. You have to wait for them to add features. There are many of the— it's not really a winner-take-all market. There's no real network effects on the consumer side, uh, which leads to the subpar product. Uh, but in theory, if you have an open source version like Iffy, Maybe all of the creator economy companies can get together and work on the standard, right? It's hard to have a standard in software without it being open source. Standards lead to really good product and customer consumer experiences. That's the value of being open source, building the best possible software. The hope is to do the same thing with customer support, HR, payroll, equity. With Helper, the sort of like elephant in the room is Intercom. With Flexile, it's Carta, and with Gumroad, who knows what the— I guess it's Gumroad might be the elephant in the room. To talk a little bit about Flexile specifically, we ship custom docs, so you can now upload and add and edit all of your own custom docs. And we have consulting agreements, and the goal is to make it self-serve. The onboarding is way too manual. We need to make these products self-serve, open source, and just focus on making them really the best. Out there. Equity contracts is live. As of what? How long ago? 30 minutes ago? Alright, so yeah, if you want to sign up to Flexile and issue equity, you can now do that. One of our values is offer equity to everyone and really build that financial alignment, and Flexile is what we use to do that. Not only to employees, but also freelancers, but also vendors. And soon, as our products are going to be open source, to open source contributors who will be powered by AI agents. So we'll see how that economy develops. But I think there's a lot of real potential to align companies with each other and people with companies and companies with people. Equity is a really good way to do that. And FlexApp will hopefully lead the charge to to a large degree. We also have a new product to add to the stack next to Gumroad. We have gum.new. gum.new is a new product which allows you to create new gums. What is a gum? Let's find out what a gum is together, hopefully. Gumroad started because I wanted to make it really easy to sell stuff on the internet. I had this pencil icon and It was hard. It was a pain in the butt back in the day. But it made sense. Back in 2011, selling stuff on the internet was predicated on your ability to build a website. And we were entering this new weird phase of the internet where people had audiences but no website. And so Gumroad was built for that environment in which you might have 100,000 Twitter followers and you just want to sell an ebook. And you didn't have a website. You just were writing bangers all day long. And Gumroad was basically Bitly with a credit card form, made it really easy to like upload a piece of content, tag it with a price, get a link, share it with your audience, boom, you're making money. And that's pretty cool. And I think Gum.new is kind of— if I were to start again in 2025, like what, what is like the sort of modern day take on that, which is of course AI powered and just way more flexible, way more natural language. Instead of a CRUD app in which you say the name of the product and the price of the product and all these different fields that show up, and as you add more features, the form gets longer and longer and longer. And then you display the— every product kind of looks the same, right? It has like a cover, and then it has a name over here, and then it has a description, and then it has a buy button. And as you add more features, you have to figure out like where does all these features go? And what if you're like, I want the buy button over here, you know, or I want the title over here, and I want the page to look like title, price in a circle, and then I want a big image, and then a buy button on the image. A buy button on the image, right? Like, when are we ever going to ship a buy button on the image? And now we can. So this is how gum.new works. You log in with Gumroad, and then you can pick a product or you can create a totally new product. So you could even say, soon, at least I'm not gonna test that feature, it's too risky, but I want to make a Valentine's Day themed landing page to sell the AI tutorial, a product that I created on Gumroad. And you just hit create and it takes some time. This will get faster. AI is just gonna get smarter and faster and better and cheaper. So we added a fun animation. If you were bored, you want to play with these coins. Whee! Maybe there'll even be a game to juggle. You know, you can try to like— no, don't hit the ground! Juggle a coin with another coin. You know how long this would have taken me to build without AI? Long time. Woo! And so it loads, the coins fall, and boom, you now have a landing page. To buy the product. And what is, what is a Gumroad product landing page? It is just really HTML and some CSS and maybe some JavaScript to do some fun animations or something and a buy button, right? And so you click the buy button and you can buy your product and you're done. And that's gum.new. So anyone with a Gumroad account can use it. You just log in with Gumroad and everyone should use it and let us know what you build and create with it. Woo! Yeah! Wow, this is a tough crowd. Tough crowd. All right, lastly, just to end with, we're making our office, as I said, rules of the playground. I want the office to be a lot more play-like, and so we're redesigning our office. We're just making it a lot cooler, a lot more like a— I was trying to think of like, where do people enjoy spending their time? Libraries. Where do people learn the most? School. TV room, things like that. And there's an Antiwork A embedded in that entrance that you can see, the kind of like a camping yurt style vibe. And we're gonna have all the desks— we have desks also for for the people who don't want to stare at other people, they can still do that on the window side. There's 4 desks, but there's like 8, 12 desks that all face each other. And this is also reminiscent of the value of get feedback on everything from everyone. Like there'll be monitors, you'll easily be able to present something over here, and then everyone can see and give you feedback and improve the quality of your thinking, which is why I think people should want to work here is to get smarter and better and push yourself. So yeah, I'm pretty excited about this. And there's also an A embedded in this couch, so you could sit there or you could sit on the— in the U. And it also frees up the— all of the wall space so we can do a lot more whiteboarding, which is really a lot of fun in my opinion. All right, that's all I got. That recaps The business, the P&L, the products we're working on. We shipped a lot of other stuff, but I just wanted to cover the highlights. We did a big support burndown for Helper. We answered 800 tickets. We are making that product really cool. I'm excited to open source that by the end of the month. And then Gumroad, the big daddy, our sugar daddy, will be our glucose guardian, is our gender neutral. We'll be open source On April 4th, hopefully, depending on how fast we can get through the security audit report that we got. Thank you for spending your Valentine's Day with me. I love you.