Gumroad + Flexile Q3 2023 Public Board Meeting [UNCUT, UNCENSORED]

Scoot out of frame a little. This actually means a lot. Yeah. Make sure everyone can chat. Last one.

Oh yes, good call, good call.

What's that?

Excited to have him present.

All right, so I will prompt you to create an invoice in SharePoint, then I will talk to Sahil Lavingia for this, and then I will pay it. You will get the money, and I will confirm with you once you've received the money.

Uh, it should be initiated today. It might land tomorrow. It really seems to depend on the bank specifically.

Like, sometimes, I don't know, weird banks, different countries. You don't have to.

I just want to get my Gumroad G in my screen.

Probably should— you guys ready?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, we're getting started. Board meetings are in the news recently. So this is, people are curious what actually happens in these. My goal is to not get fired by the OpenAI board. And yes, thanks Raul for the Gumroad t-shirt. This is a Gumroad shirt that Raul made or had made. So we have one of these. This is a unique asset. So yeah, welcome everybody. This is a Q3 2023 board meeting. This is like the 12th or 13th one that we've done. If you haven't been to a board meeting before, welcome. The way that they go, we talk about what we shipped. The numbers and what we're up to next. And we're gonna do that for two products that we have. We have Gumroad, gumroad.com, which is an e-commerce website that we built to help people sell stuff on the internet. We help people sell ebooks, courses, video content, Procreate brushes, all sorts of digital content started in 2011. And then we have a product called Flexile, which is a tool to help pay freelancers cash equity and dividends. Which is a new product we've been working on, which is pretty exciting. Sorry for the sore throat. I've had food poisoning the last like 5 days. And if I go over there to throw up, that's what I'm doing. And we'll just edit it out of the Zoom. Awesome. So yeah, Q3 of 2023 for Gumroad was pretty awesome. We did $41 million in creator earnings and $2.245 million in net income. So annualized about $9.8 or so million. I think we might break $10 million in net income this year, but it's going to be close. And for last year, we lost $1.2 million. So, so this, this year will be, will be nice. This is what, what the financials tend to look like when I see them from our, from our accounting firm. Our CFO, Steven, sends this to me, and I thought it'd be cool to kind of highlight like actually what Like if you're, you know, running a business, you generally will get an email like this. If you're Elon, you get an email like this for Tesla, for example. I think he gets it daily actually. But basically it tells you like the sort of high-level metrics of the economy that you're kind of in charge of. And so I thought this would be a nice thing to just show people like kind of the unfiltered thing. And you can pause and take a look at that if you want. And then this is the sort of retained net income to the company. And so in purple, you can kind of see our— oh, this might be reversed actually. The purple should be net income per month. And so you can kind of see that like basically we started the company and we kind of like, we had like this like exponential up into the bottom right, which is what most startups have. When you hire a bunch of people faster and faster and you don't actually kind of grow the sort of net income of the company as you do that, you know, that's not really the goal. You're just trying to grow as fast as possible. And then in 2015, 2016, you can see, oh, we basically ran out of money, so we could no longer do that. And so I had to let everyone go, run the business myself. And then kind of basically for almost like 5 years, you know, the company has kind of been break-even. Quote unquote, which is how kind of like the entire like economy has been operating in a sense, being super focused on, on sort of growth at all costs without going bankrupt basically. And you can kind of see right at the end, which is in January of January 31st of this year, we increased our pricing and we're actually net income positive. And you can see that basically since January, so in about 10 months, we've almost reversed all of that burn. So like in about, you know, it took us about, you know, 12, 13 years to burn about $10 million, which is actually not bad. You know, most companies burn a lot more money. And then now hopefully that line keeps going and you'll start to see net retained earnings go positive. And the significance of this is that we'll pay taxes because if you don't have net retained earnings, you don't have to pay taxes. So the US government will get a check from Gumroad in 2024, which is very, very exciting. I think we will be the first startup to pay taxes. This is just another way of looking at the business. And so you can kind of see the net income chart was the line before. You can kind of see that on the bottom right now. And then you can look at sort of the other metrics that we have. Creator earnings per month is sort of the GMV of the marketplace. The revenue that we make on that, the gross profit we make on that, and then the net income. What did we ship? The most exciting thing that we shipped is more like this, which Connor over there worked on. You could see this in the bottom left. This has been a very successful feature for us, so I thought I would highlight it pretty concretely. Numerically. So you can see that this launched in July, mid-July, and it's already done about $1.6 million in revenue in GMV for the platform. And about, so about $16,000 a day. And it continues to kind of like go up into the right, which is pretty awesome. And I think this is, I'll tie this back when we start talking about Flexile and equity and dividends, but I think this feature alone will do about $3 million in net income to the bottom line of the business. So like, this is like, if you own Gumroad, the cap table, the investors, et cetera, you know, this is like a $3 million feature. This is not all Connor's, to all Connor's credit, you know, because at the end of the day, you know, Gumroad needed to exist, like the code needed to exist, the design, the React, like there's all of this work that leads up to this kind of thing. But I do think it's a really good example of like the amount of, you know, the reason basically of why software is worth investing in, in the first place is that it compounds, right? You're making an investment that returns over a very, very, very long period of time. And this is the point of investing in equity and owning assets is that you buy a building and then that building generates revenue by leasing out the space or having a tenant in it. And you make, you make back that sort of principal over time. And so yeah, $2.9 million in net income over the next 10 years. Features like this don't come around all the time, so it's not like we have 15 more of these hiding, but it is, you know, once in a while, really nice to find, find one of these. We also shipped a really nice content editor. So this is what it used to look like, Gumroad, for about 10 years. You know, was a place where you would come, you would sell digital files, right? You would come and you'd basically, I, we called it basically Bitly with a credit card form. You'd come, you'd upload some content or you'd say, hey, we want to send people to this link. You say, I want to charge $5 and then people would pay $5 and then they would get redirected to something like this, which is fine. I think it worked. I'm kind of surprised that it worked so long. But I think it's sort of, it's not super compelling if you're trying to sell a class. I think something like this is like a lot more compelling. You know, you can format the video, you can have the downloadables in a grouping, you can add context as you go. So instead of just dumping like 5 MP3s for selling, let's say, an album or a premium audio podcast or something like that, you can actually explain what the files are going to be. You can link to a Discord people can join. You can basically do anything. This is kind of like a super light website builder. You can have pages on the left now. So I think it's a lot better experience. It allows for like a lot more dynamic things that you want to actually sell, right? Before you were really constrained on like, I just want to sell like digital content, right? But it's like, well, what if you want to sell like access to a school? Like what is a school? Like what files are associated with a school? Like maybe if you, you know, the video of the lecture that you missed, but also like some other stuff, right?

Homework.

Things like that. And so I think this sort of leads the way to doing a lot more cool stuff. And let's see if we have a, do we have this video for this?

No.

Cool. And then product sections. So now you can finally have product sections on your profile before you basically were forced to have this grid of all the things you were selling. And now you can actually have sections, you can categorize your products. And this makes way for a lot of other cool stuff that that I'll share in a second. And so yeah, this is, this is sort of just a summary of all, of all, all some of the stuff that we shipped. We also shipped custom domains. So you can now have a custom domain associated with a Gumroad product that you're selling. You can now do upsells. So you can replace a product, a variant of a product with a higher variant of a product in the middle of the checkout and a bunch of other, a bunch of other stuff. Oh, this is another thing we shipped. Chris worked on this, which is we now send emails way faster, about 15 times faster. So you can see this is like, you know, imagine you send, you queue up an email job and you say, I wanna email my 200,000 newsletter subscribers. It would take 4, 5, 6, 7 hours. Now it gets done in like, you know, a minute or two. And and all your emails are delivered, which is really nice if you're trying to do a sale or you're trying to alert everyone to show up to a board meeting at a specific time. It's nice to be able to, to send emails really fast. And so you can kind of see sort of like the latency per email may have been up to 1 second per email. Now it's like effectively zero. And then what's next? I think it's really easy to remember this. There's basically just like the ABC of what I think is like the most important 3 features that we're working on. And I know creators listening to this have been asking for this for a while. So we will do our best to ship all of these things in the next few months. Abandoned cart emails. So you'll be able to basically set up a trigger so that if someone starts buying a product from you, enters in their email, but doesn't complete their purchase, which I believe is about 15% of GMV on Gumroad, you'll be able to, you know, send them an email and say, hey, you know, you didn't, you didn't, you didn't finish this and you can customize it so you can have a different one per product. You can do all sorts of of cool stuff. We're also working on product bundles. Connor's working on, which will allow you to create a bundle, map it to multiple products. So if you wanna sell 5 of your products for a single discounted price, you'll be able to do that. And then collaborations with, with other creators. So you'll be able to create a product and split the revenue automatically with another creator on the platform. And in theory, you could combine all of these features so you could do a bundled product with a product from you, a product from another creator, split the earnings, and then if someone wants to buy it and doesn't check out, you could send an abandoned cart email. So ideally all of these features kind of come together and work really well and at the end of the day lead to a lot more revenue and earnings for Gumroad creators, of which we get our nice 10%. And then the website builder, the website builder is kind of our north star, like where I think Gumroad ends up going over the long period of time, which is to kind of take a lot of the content editor stuff that we, that you, that we showed off and the product sections that we showed off and start to do basically combine those and say, hey, what if you were able to take that content editor experience and actually like customize your entire Gumroad profile in this way? And it would look something like this. So you could have different kinds of product sections. You could have text, you could have marketing, you could do about pages, blog posts, you could feature your, your, your core Gumroad products right in line. All that good stuff. And pretty quickly, hopefully in the next year, Gumroad should be, you know, a really, really great place to basically host your website. I have a little book website for The Minimalist Entrepreneur. I should just use Gumroad for that. You know, I have a website for my VC fund. I should just use Gumroad for that. And the cool thing, and I think this is something that basically every other website builder I've seen charges a monthly fee, right? So you create a Wix, Squarespace, Square, Block, whatever, like all these things basically charge like $10 a month. And that's fine, but I just don't think you should pay money to have a website on the internet with a domain. So what we are gonna do is this is all gonna be completely free and it's all subsidized by the fact that we make 10% anytime you sell a digital product. And so we can give all of these features away for free and hopefully make money on the sort of, on the backend, quote unquote. So pretty excited about, about this. Bundles. Are you ready for the demo from Connor?

Yes. Let me see if I can share my screen.

Do I need to stop sharing first?

Uh, I think I can make you stop. Okay, here we go.

Can you see my screen?

Yes.

Awesome.

Awesome. So hello everyone, I'm Connor. I'm an engineer at Gumroad and I'm gonna show you a feature we've been working on called bundles. Sahil Lavingia mentioned it. We hope that a lot of creators use it, and we hope it's a big success. So I'm gonna show you the process of creating a bundle product. Here you see I have 2 products. They're both programming books, and I wanna bundle them together into a bundle that has a discounted price. So you can see they're both $50. So creating a bundle product, if you've ever created a product on Gumroad, it's just like creating a normal product. Just go to new product. We're gonna have a new type called bundle. I'll just call this Book Bundle, and I'm gonna price it at $85, so it's at a discount. And here I am on the, the bundle creation page. It looks just like the normal product page if you've ever used that. And I'll just give it a quick description, bundle of my books. There you go. So I'm gonna go to the next tab. You can do all the normal stuff you would do with the Gumroad product, but I'm just gonna keep simple and show you how you add products to your bundle. On the content tab where you normally put in your product's content, like how Sahil was just showing you with our new website builder, uh, or excuse me, content editor, uh, instead we have a product selector here. So I'm going to add both of my books. You can see my C book actually has two versions, so I can select the version I want to be included in the bundle. So I have a version with the book and a version with the book and some code snippets. So I'm going to I'm gonna put the fancier version in my bundle. And that's all you have to do to add products to a bundle. So I'm gonna save my changes and I'll go ahead and publish it. And that's really all it takes to make a bundle. You can share it on Gumroad Discover just like any other product, and it works just like any other Gumroad product. So I'm gonna copy the link to my clipboard and go ahead and—

oh wait, I think I might be muted. Hello?

Can—

yeah.

Sorry, I just realized I was muted. So that was the process of creating a bundle and adding some products to it. So I just published it and I'm going to copy it to my clipboard and go ahead and show you the process of buying it. So I'm going to go over here. Sorry, Zoom is in my way. And I'm logged into a Gumroad account here. So I'm going to go ahead and add this bundle to my cart. You can see that it shows you the products in the bundle and the variant you're getting. And I'll go ahead and put in my zip code and buy it just like a normal Gumroad product. And once I bought it, it redirects me to my library with this new filter we have where it lets you filter products by the bundle that they're in. So it automatically applies that filter and you can see both of the products are in my library and I can go ahead and open them up and access them just like I would have been able to if I bought them individually. And I'll head back to the creator dashboard over here and to the sales page. And you can see the purchase I just made is here and the customer drawer allows me to manage both of the bundle purchases individually. And for instance, if I want to, I could turn off post for one of them, gives me complete fine-grained control over both products. So that's what bundles looks like. Um, we're hoping to have it out by the end of the year and we hope that people will use it to sell a lot of products.

Thanks.

Send it back to Sahil.

Awesome.

All right, that's Gumroad. Time to talk about Flexile with another demo. Let's do the demo and then we'll talk about the numbers.

All right, sounds good. Where am I? Share my screen.

Continue.

All right, there we go. Can we see this?

Yes.

Hi guys, I'm Helen. I have been working a lot on Flexile recently, so I'm just going to show you a couple of things that we've been working on.

Thank you.

All right, we can probably hear. Okay. Oh yeah, I got myself. Yeah, someone has it. You guys can hear me, right?

Yeah.

Okay, cool. So we've been making some improvements to the customer side, the sort of like company admin side of invoicing. So I'll show you a couple of things on a staging app and then we will pay Connor some money, which I'm sure he's very excited about.

Yes.

So some changes that we've made on the invoices page is that we've changed what you see when you first go to the invoices page to just the things that need your attention, either to approve an invoice or to pay. You can also in other tabs see other invoices, things that are fully approved that will be paid out on your regularly scheduled invoice payment date. And we also have some additional information about the actual status of those, of those invoices. So for example, we have a few invoices here that are awaiting a final approval, since this company requires two approvals before paying an invoice. And then we have this one here that's fully approved, and it should be paid on schedule on December 7th, as you can see down here. And you can go and change that date if you want to. And then finally, you can go over here and see rejected and failed invoices here. If we wanted to, we can go try and repay this invoice since it didn't go through for some reason. And then if we want to go see invoices that have already been paid, we can go back here and we can see a long history of all of our invoices and the date they were paid. So that is generally the improvements we've made to sort of organization of invoices and showing people a little bit more information about the status of a given invoice. And then the second big thing that we have just shipped is the ability to pay an invoice on demand. Previously, you'd have this set monthly date where all your invoices would be paid, and that's the way Gumroad always did it. So that's why we built it. But in, you know, onboarding our first few customers, they for sure wanted to be able to pay things on demand as they came in. So we've just shipped that. It's behind a flag now, so you have to be actually given access to that feature. But it allows you to pay invoices immediately. So you can see this one here has sufficient other invoice, other approvals that I can pay it immediately. So let me approve some of these. And pay the one that is able to be paid and hit Approve/Pay Selected. And we can see that we'll be approving 2 invoices and paying this one invoice that is able to be paid because it has other approvals. So let's do that. And now they have gone away and should be in our history tab or approved tab for the ones that we just approved. So that is all with dummy data. Now let's have Connor submit an invoice and we can pay him in real time.

All right.

Real money.

With real money.

I'm on my phone right now.

I'm going to— I just sent it.

All right. There it is. Hooray.

All right.

So now I'm going to have Sahil approve this invoice. Awesome. Great.

Done. Let me just review the work.

Oh yes. Make sure that he's not trying to pull a fast one.

What? You didn't say what you did. Oh, the demo. Oh my gosh. Really?

All right, fine.

Okay, great.

Sahil Lavingia has approved.

Great. So now I can go pay this. Let me do that.

Clever.

Okay, let's pay him $150. All right, so now keep checking your email and you should get a notification you've been paid momentarily.

I did.

There it is.

You did.

Oh my God. Oh my God.

Yeah, so we hope that this feature will enable people to, you know, really use this in more flexible ways. We're always trying to be flexible. And yeah, so if you're trying to pay invoices, you know, talk to us, sign up.

Awesome. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the biggest things that we, you know, at the end of the day, all we do is we talk to customers, they tell us what they don't like, and then we do, we fix them, you know, same with Gumroad, same with Flexile. And this was like the big thing that our, that our customers wanted is like, you know, you have a contractor who wants to get paid out once a week or in theory, you know, I would love to move to a world in which people can choose, like if you want to invoice daily, you should be able to get paid daily if you want. There are all these cool things I think we'll be able to do with Flexile to honor the namesake. And that's just, yeah, that's one big improvement. Another thing I wanted to talk about, actually, let me talk about the numbers real quickly and then I'll go back to that. So yeah, big news, we have our first repeat customer in Tony Dinh. Very exciting. I asked him, I said, hey, do you want to come to this board meeting live? He said, it's 6:00 AM where I live, but I'll give you a testimonial, which is Flexile is great and it saves me tons of time. And you could see by his testimonial how much his time matters to him given how short this testimonial is. And he has a great blog post that he wrote called My Solo Preneur Story: $0 to $45K a Month. And he talks about the journey of sort of scaling his business from basically a single indie hacker and now he runs and manages a team of freelancers and he makes, you know, $45,000 a month doing this. And I think he has a great, an amazing blog post, but I think he's a great example of the kind of person that I want Flexile and we want Flexile to enable, which is someone who can be independent but scale up, right? I don't think that these need to be mutually exclusive. Currently you kind of have to like have a team and raise venture capital and give equity and go IPO or bust. And it still feels like that's very much like one side of the equation. And then there's like, you know, kind of being an indie hacker. And I would love to see a world in which actually the indie hackers have just as much power and leverage as all the VC-funded people. They have access to the team. They have all the access to the same tooling. And in theory, they have access to give them equity. This is Flexile's chart. Flexile's a lot younger than Gumroad, but we crossed $100. In MRR, which is awesome. And, you know, and just because Gumroad's at, you know, $20 million in revenue doesn't mean that like $100 in MRR is any less awesome because getting to product market fit is very difficult. It is so hard. And one of the— honestly, one of the best things about doing these board meetings is it keeps us super accountable to— I'm sure I was way more optimistic about how Flexile was going to turn out earlier and the vision and the changes and having it all documented where you people can actually see like, oh, Sahil was actually completely full of shit. But he didn't realize it. He was honest. And that's key too. And, but, but I think that, that's, that's also a lot of fun and, you know, we're, we're, we're headed in the right, in the right direction. So hopefully this thing, this keeps on, keeps on going. And then I wanted to talk about, about this new feature real quickly. And this is gonna be a kind of a Gumroad-only feature, but I do think this is one of the things I would love to see people like Tony take advantage of. I probably lean more nowadays into the more like bootstrappy indie side of things than the VC IPO sort of side of things. But I think one of the things I don't like too much about the whole bootstrapping ecosystem is that the founders generally own 100% of the business. So they often talk like a really good game, but then when the business sells for like, you know, MailChimp sold for $11 billion, I think to Intel or something, Intuit, Intuit. Yeah. You know, the founders made that, right? And that's fine at the end of the day, like people entered into a voluntary contract and all these sorts of things. But I would like to imagine like there should be a better way without having to sign up for the venture capital IP or bust. And Gumroad is in a unique place where we have cash flow, right? We don't have to pretend like, hey, you get this offer and 1% of the company, and that is kind of a lottery ticket, right? And so most people are just like, yeah, cool, I'll take it. I'll take the options. And you just kind of wait and you can see with OpenAI, a good example of like, how much are those options worth? You know, a week ago people thought they were worth a lot of money. $85 billion, I think, was the tender offer. And that's what happens when the market of, you know, the share price is driven by the market demand, not necessarily by the cash flow associated with that asset, right? There's a difference between price and value, and price can fluctuate a lot more dramatically based on what the market may be willing to pay for a scarce asset than maybe the value of that actual asset. You might see this in a house in New York City, where a house in New York City sleeps a person, but the price of that house goes up and down based on the scarcity of the land of Manhattan, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, we've come up with what I think is a pretty novel approach and I'd love to tell you about it. And the, and the, what we've done is we basically have figured out a way for every freelancer who works on Gumroad to choose how much equity they want to earn in Gumroad. On an hourly basis. So let's say you get paid $200 an hour. You can say, hey, I want $200 an hour in cash. That's the, you know, that's the simplest thing, right? That's just the way it works. You don't know who I am. You just want to do your work and get paid. I think we should allow for that. I think you may live in a place that's expensive. You might, I don't know, for whatever reason, I don't think we should judge you for that. You know, startups, you, you're kind of just forced, you know, to take the risk, right? But if you say, hey, I actually want 50% of my comp in equity in Gumroad because I believe in Gumroad, I think it looks great. I'm shipping this feature that's going to generate a lot of net income. Like I want to earn part of that for myself. I think we should allow you to do that. And so you can say, hey, I want to take 50% of my hourly rate in equity. And the way that works in practice is that you bill, you start billing $100 an hour, right? Instead of $200, you now bill $100 an hour. And that $100 an hour you get in equity in Gumroad. And the way that works is you get options issued at that conversion rate. So we use the last valuation of the company, $100 million. We give you options at that amount and we give you the exercise price of these options in cash. And then you can choose to exercise them. And if you choose to exercise them, that money comes back to the company and you start earning dividends. And so I know this is kind of maybe complicated to wrap your head around, but I think the simple way I'd like to think about it is for every dollar you trade in cash upfront, you get the exercise price, which is about 37%. So you get 37 cents back and about 10 cents a year, right? Given a $100 million valuation, we're doing about $10 million in net income. We, you know, should be about $10 million pretax in value that Gumroad is creating. And so you're sort of saying instead of a dollar now, I'm getting 40-ish cents and 10 cents a year for life. So it'll take you about 5 to 6 years to make back your investment. And then for life, indefinitely, you are now getting 10 cents a year for that dollar that you gave up. And the goal is over time, the equity, the cap table composition of the company automatically just changes all the time. Every year, let's say, you know, Gumroad does about $5 million in comp. Right? So let's say 20% of that, about $1 million ends up being traded for equity. That means about, you know, at $100 million valuation, about 1% of the business is changing hands, right? It's effectively moving and automatically, I think, going to the people who are the right people to run the business. And you could see in this OpenAI thing, the employees have a lot of leverage, right? Companies don't ship things. People ship things. Companies pay the people to ship things. And so I think this is like a really cool, clever way, I would like to say, in order to basically create this like almost like a liquid trade in between cash and equity. And it sounds simple, or maybe to you it sounds complicated. And we tried a lot of different ways. And I think this is the most compelling. I think a lot of startups, what they do is they say, hey, you get cash and you get equity. You have no choice. You just take it. Or you say, hey, you get a cash-heavy offer, you get a cash-light offer, equity-heavy offer, and you just say, what's the chance this exits for $5 billion? You know, like what? Like you just kind of say, am I a risky guy or not? You know, like it's just made up. But the beauty of Gumroad is you can actually model this out and you could say, I want 15% or 25% or 80%. We allow up to 80% of your comp you can take in equity. And I think this is going to be pretty, pretty cool. Like imagine you have a friend who you really want to help, who's like busy working at some company and you don't want to pay them their hourly rate, but they're really good. What if you could attract them to the company and say, hey, sorry, I'm not willing to pay you $500 an hour in cash, but I am willing to pay you $100 an hour in cash and $400 an hour in equity. All of a sudden, that's, that looks great for them. They're long-term aligned. That might be great for the business. The cash flow is improved and every single owner, including by the way, the person who just made that trade gets more money because the cash flow of the business is now improved. And so you have this virtuous cycle where as more people are aligned and making this decision in order to take equity, the cash flow of the business improves in the best possible way, right? Imagine shipping a feature that generates $1 million in net income. Very, very hard to do. But if you allow your own team to trade their cash for equity in a way that they choose, It's a million bucks, right? Right there. And so yeah, I'm pretty, I'm super, super, super excited about this. I think that this could be quite popular in the industry. I think all companies should consider, for example, when they issue options, giving them the exercise price in cash. Otherwise you're just getting, like, let's say I give you $500,000 in options. Is that $500,000? Well, what's the exercise price? If the exercise price is $400,000, it's only $100,000, but only if you have $400,000 to exercise. And everyone who's worked at a startup that's maybe done well and you, there's no liquidity in the future, but you're holding onto this thing and you're like, what do you do? And you hope that like some VC comes in and does a secondary and like all of this complication could be dramatically simplified. But the reason this hasn't happened is because like companies aren't profitable. There's nothing to give, there's nothing to get. Why exercise in the first place? There's no dividend to get at most companies. But I do think Gumroad will be the first of many, many, many companies that will be focused on just cash flow, just making a great business, just like the coffee shop next door, just like the theater we're in. These are profitable businesses because there's no concept of VC. So if you're not profitable, you're just dead. Profitable business is a bit of an oxymoron, kind of redundant in most cases. But I do think like you could start to see this becoming much, much more popular. And imagine someone like Tony who might not have maybe like the cash balance of a company like Gumroad, hasn't been around long, but still wants to build these long, long-term relationships, should be able to do that. And I think often people ask me like, how does Gumroad work with like you? Like we have no full-time employees. We do $20 million in revenue with freelancers. Like that seems crazy, illegal, risky, all sorts of stuff. You know, do people leave all the time? What if people just don't show up? But like the last person to leave Gumroad left in October of 2021. Like just because we have freelancers doesn't mean that they're any less committed. And my plan is for people to work on Gumroad forever. Like why not? You don't have to work 40 hours a week. You can work 5 hours a week. So you could have a kid and work 5 hours a week for 2 years and then come back, which is by the way what I plan to do. When we have kids. And so yeah, I think of this as sort of like, how do you run a business forever? And how do you incentivize people in a really equitable, sustainable way over a long period of time? Because the truth is, if you're getting paid via dividends, you're not getting a cash payment upfront, right? The problem I have with the ecosystem is imagine you start a business and you raise money at $100 million valuation, and then some VC really wants in, and then they offer you $1 million in secondary for your shares. Going back to that chart before of net retained earnings, you've now pulled $1 million out of the company without that line ever being positive. So you've effectively captured value, $1 million worth of value before ever creating $1 million of value for the economy, for the customer, which I think leads to a lot of issues, which I think, you know, people are seeing in the case of WeWork or any of these sort of famous stories., but imagine if you can only get paid as a percent of the value you've actually created for people. I think that's pretty sweet. And so I'm pretty excited about this feature and it goes live on Jan 1st, 2024 for Gumroad. So everyone will be able to choose their comp, their sort of comp package. And then the cool thing here is if people are, you know, if Gumroad, if people choose to choose more equity, it also means we get to give more and more cash, right? Because if people are trading 80%, let's say for equity, then all of a sudden we can offer $300 an hour in cash. And then if, you know, and that starts to drive a lot, you know, some of the best talent to work at the company, they're super incentivized to like just generate cash flow. They would only be joining in order to do that anyway. All of a sudden, I don't even have to manage them because they're already thinking like Connor's like, hey, can I work on this thing? It's going to generate more GMV. Like that already starts to happen. And you could do all of this without having to hire a single full-time employee, which I think is, is pretty, pretty awesome. And I think that might be it for the board meeting. Is that it? I think that's it. We have questions. Does anyone have questions? I'll start with one question on here. Do you have a question? You have a question? No. Awesome. I'll start with some questions here. I'll take some questions from the audience. Any news on H.AI from the last board meeting? Honestly, it wasn't good enough. It didn't meet the caliber of what we wanted to show off today. But I will say, and I'm going to edit this out on YouTube, so you're going to be disappointed, but it's helper.ai. So if you visit helper.ai, you can see our little splash page that we've built. But it's an AI customer support tool. Currently, we use it to draft responses, but it's soon gonna, gonna take over all of, all of the customer support that, that we do. And the goal is to get customer support tickets down. It takes between 6 and 10 hours to get a response to an email if you send us an email. I want it to be like 15 minutes or less. And the way you do that is you make it super, super fast for the AI to generate all the answers and all the workflows required to answer the tickets. And then you have humans in the loop, you know, actually answering all the tickets with the sort of AI assistant help. I don't personally believe that you will ever automate humans out of the loop. Not at Gumroad and Flexile anyway, because we're always gonna be working on creative, fun problems that humans will do. Robots can work at all the boring companies. So yeah, that's that one. Does Gumroad plan to raise money in the future? Yeah, potentially. I do have a plan and we'll see what happens by then. But we do plan to do what we call a DIYPO, a Series D, Series Dividend, which is if people are excited about this, look, the goal is not for Gumroad to IPO. The goal is to continue generating cash flow with Gumroad, with Flexa, with Helper, potentially with other companies that we start or invest in, all aligned in this sort of like trying to use software to build great sustainable businesses that just generate cash flow. If you want that, if you want a chunk of that cash flow, you'll be able to invest in it. And we'll probably do it at $150 pre-money valuation. So about 50% more than the crowdfunding round. And we'll take that money. But like, why do it? Like, what are we going to do with the money? We're already profitable. We're not going to dividend it back. As mentioned, that comes from net income. We'll basically invest in companies and bring them on the Flexile marketplace. So you'll, you know, basically we'll use it to kind of convince founders to sort of quote unquote list their companies so that freelancers who are on the market will be able to work on them. And if you're, yeah, if you're, by the way, if you're an indie hacker listening to this and you have a company that's cash flow positive and you could use like a million bucks to like buy a house, let me know. Jeff Bezos bought like some small minority stake in Basecamp a while back. We'd love to do that for, for you. So if you want a Bezos tier Basecamp, let me know.

Collabs.

Collabs.

December, possibly, probably January is what I would say to that in terms of release date.

Collaborations feature release date. All right. And then will Flexile enable USDC, ET ETH and Bitcoin payments for freelancers potentially. I have a, we have a lot of stuff that we are working on. We actually do support ETH for invest investors. If you have, we also used Flexile to issue dividends out, which is another thing we plan to support for other companies, but is not, is kind of not as important right now. But we do support using Ethereum to send dividend payouts to investors. So yeah, very likely we could support crypto. Yeah. Questions from the audience.

Frank. You imagine e-commerce integration for Flexile. So for example, let's say I'm, I do merchant, right? So let's say I'm doing a site for a particular client. Designer that I can pay folks like whatever their full-time rate is. I could give them some percentage of profit from that particular item from Shopify, or I could pay them a full rate. That's kind of the conversation I'm having with people now. So I'm wondering if that could be like a future part of what Decent X offers.

Yeah, that's a good question. The question basically being like, yeah, if you have like an e-commerce store and you want to work with someone on a product, like a designer on something, and you want to give them, let's say, half. Which is interesting. It's almost like the collabs feature a little bit. I do, I do. I'm very interested in that because I've had similar like ideas even around like, for example, let's say customer support. Like, is there a different model for like incentivizing customer support? And like, do you want to like, does Flexile support like getting people paid per ticket they've answered or, or like 5-star?

Can you apply this sales thinking to everybody? Because it always felt unfair to me that like salespeople get like the commission. Everybody plays a part in building the business.

Yeah, I feel like, yeah, there's like, there's like the sales commission model is really awesome and works very well. And then there's like the sort of startup equity model that also works really well and like trying to take those ideas and like put them into this, like this new world is like actually really interesting. And yeah, I do, I do think like there, there should be a way to have basically some form of API basically. So I don't know how, tied it'll be with Shopify specifically, but we might have an API that makes it super easy to like to do something like that. Even with, you know, Gumroad or something like that, you could say, hey, you get 10% of my Gumroad, all of my Gumroad stuff or, or something like that. So it could be pretty interesting. And part of, part of not having product market fit yet is being more open to being creative about ideas and things we could, things we could do. Any other questions?

Ernie, how do you think about just the cost of shares and then for contractors like that, what percentage of your—

Yeah, so the plan is currently to allocate about 60% of net income to dividends. So let's say in 2023 we do $10 million, then we would take $6 million and dividend that back. But let's say like, you know, next month in December, I get an email from Tony who's like, hey, I want to sell 10% of this for $1 million or whatever. All of a sudden that might— I would have to like— Steven would have to tell me like, how does that affect the net income statement exactly? But let's say it reduces it by 1 and we make that decision because we think it's better to do that than dividend it back. Then, you know, we do 9 and then 60% of 9 or so, $5.4 million. So in theory, you know, if we lost money, it'd be a 0% dividend, right? But the goal is, and this is, you know, a lot of people have asked me like, well, why do you know, why are you doing this? Like, what if you decide to do something else? And I'm like, well, I just want the rails for dividends to exist. So if we decide we want to like focus on growth, cool. Like it's zero, right? But if we have an amazing year, you know, like let's say we decide to spin Flexile out as a separate company. And do secondary for that, and then all that cash comes to Gumroad as revenue, all of a sudden that's a huge cash payment you could give back to. So I think just, but being able to do it, I think I talked to so many, when I started talking to people about doing dividends, they were like, oh, like you can't, or like that's not possible, or like you should rethink that. Like all these things. And I would always ask why, and they would come back to like the software doesn't exist, or it's like a pain in the butt. Like no good reasons. Like no, like, like moral reason, you know, just like the software doesn't exist or something, you know? And so we built the software, so that's no longer an excuse. And so hopefully, you know, hopefully now that the software exists, more and more companies will be able to offer to do this. And it's, you know, Nvidia, they issue a dividend every single year, right? Even though they're growing like crazy. So you can do both. And I think it's actually like a good practice to do both. And my guess is as interest rates are at 5% and will be probably for a little while longer, more and more companies will be thinking more about making sure that their cash flow is actually above 5%, right? Yeah, risk adjusted.

Yo, David. It seems like Flexile maybe hasn't been growing as fast as you wanted. If that's the case, what do you think's behind behind that and you've had, like, how do you think about your go-to-market strategy?

Yeah, I would say the biggest reason is the network effect of not being first, which is Deal and Remote are kind of like the established players. And I think most people are just like, oh, I'll just use Deal. Like, I'll just use, you know, like it just, I mean, same thing with Gumroad. It's the same reason people use Gumroad over something else. And maybe it's the same reason people use Patreon over Gumroad or like, Everyone has this idea in— I often use the example of, and I've been using this since I was at Pinterest because people would always ask me like, why Pinterest? Like, this is a stupid website. And I would always say like, when you message someone on Facebook Messenger or you post on their wall or you message them on Instagram or you text them, like every single one has like a different connotation. And so like, even though messaging is like a commodity, there's still value to all of these different messaging services that exist. They all serve a different function and role. And so I think, you know, I think sort of, you know, those companies have sort of established themselves as like the thing to use for that specific kind of thing. And that's why I think this equity, flexible working, like we are not focused on like W-2s, for example, right? We're not focused on health benefits, like these things that Remote and Deal are focused on. And I'd rather sort of double down on our niche and really just focus on like basically the indie hacker. If you're an indie hacker, you know, I want Flexile to be the best. It might mean convincing someone, an indie hacker might use Deal, and that might be like a, what I would call like regrettable churn, right? Like someone we wish we had but don't versus like people that it's easy to say, oh, we should get them, we should get them. We'd like, you know, you try to sell everybody on your thing. And then the other thing is just time, right? I think it's just showing people like the value of using Flexile. Like I think next update when we have the split live and we say, hey, we saved, you know, $200,000, $300,000 this quarter, not saved, but, you know, like transferred it from like a cash outflow into an equity trade with our freelancers to align us more. More and more founders are gonna be like, hey, could I, like, could I do that? Can I do that with with Deal? No. Why? Well, Deal doesn't know about equity, right? They don't manage your cap table. And so, you know, this is kind of like Deal plus Carta in a single thing and dividends as well, which Carta doesn't do. And so, yeah, it's just, you know, it just goes back to just like solving our own problem, being okay with that too. Like the nice thing is we're profitable. We're not trying to, we don't have to, we're not selling VCs on Flexile. We don't have to raise money. We're just building. I just want to build what we think is the right piece of software for us. And then find other companies like us. And I'm really confident that 5% interest rates will catch up to a lot of people over the next several years. And eventually, you know, if you're sitting on an asset that's not really generating cash like Substack or Patreon or Kickstarter, you've just kind of been treading water for the last little while. You might say, hey, we should actually try to get profitable. But it's very hard to do that by switching to deal or switching to, you know, like just switching SaaS providers. But if you say, hey, we need to completely rethink the way we run this business, or look, at the end of the day, Kickstarter, like Gumroad, we did a ton of value, we created a ton of stuff, and now we just kind of, you know, have this network effect. Maybe we should have a super lean, mean team of customer support, some designers, some engineers. We should pay them hourly. They can scale up and down as the work is needed. They can trade their comms for equity. They get that equity entitles them to cash flow dividends in the business, which we can get because that's what we're focused on. Instead of like, you know, all these people at these companies have equity, they have options. What do they think those options are worth? Probably nothing, right? And so yeah, I do think, you know, that's kind of like I'm positioning Flexcel to sort of sell these founders in like 5 years. Like Gumroad took 12 years to get to real, what I felt like was undeniable product market fit. In the sense that like just cash flow positive, by the way, I also think product market fit is like a psyop of the tech industry. Why do you need the word product market fit? Just say profitable. Just say cash flow positive. If you're cash flow positive, you have product market fit. You're profitable. Customers use your product, you know, pay you more than you paid your vendors. If you don't, you don't. Obviously there's some nuance there, which is why all these terms get introduced. But at the end of the day, you know, when you go back to basics, like you can kind of get back. So, so that's kind of, you know, like, you know, that anyway, that, that's kind of what, what I think it'll take. It might take a little while. And also the public board meetings, I think one way to show people, like, you know, just show people what it, you know, like the, the, the, the thought process and, and, you know, one day we might snip up the videos and say, hey, this is like the vision for Flexile and how it changed over 5 years. And that way, when you use the product, you don't have to go through the pain of the 5 years. Right. Getting to product market fit is all, you know, like I'm very grateful to people like Tony, right? Because they have to give us feedback and they have to say, hey, Sahil, like this is not working for me. And I'm like, oh shit, like we gotta fix it. Like literally it's like, we gotta fix this and we ship that, right? And that would be sorry for collaborations getting a little delayed. Like we had to fix that, right? And so there's always a balance. But yeah, I joke that like, you know, people say like remote work, how do you motivate people? It's like just add customers to your Slack. If you have a customer in your Slack, that's kind of like having a boss in the office. So yeah. Welcome.

I'm in. So the website builder, people have their own, their own like URL or it's gonna be gumroad.com/gumroad?

It'll start out like default, it'll be yourname.gumroad.com. So ideally it starts with you. Or your brand or whatnot, but you should be able to map it to a custom domain completely for free. So most services charge for this. All do, I think, but we won't. So yeah, you can basically spin up unlimited, you know, websites, domains with more and more customizability as we add more of that completely for free. And if you say, hey, I never want to sell a digital product, like totally fine. Our goal is just to attack our competitors. With this feature.

So yeah. You mentioned some tools for Gumroad sellers to kind of set up a storefront. Is Gumroad going in the direction of being able to replace a Shopify store or provide more like post-sale support or talk to a chatbot before the sale or anything along those lines?

I don't know if we'll ever go into like the physical goods. So I think that will always be a big divider between Gumroad and Shopify is like they're really focused on physical fulfillment and we're more on like digital fulfillment, quote unquote. We do some physical and they do some digital, but I think, you know, we're quite different in that way. I do think over time we'll just get more and more powerful. So you will be able to do more and more stuff. Like I think one of Shopify's coolest stuff is the app marketplace that they have. So you can like build plugins, right? Gumroad is very constrained. We have a small team working on Gumroad. If it were possible to extend Gumroad in certain ways, That might be possible. 2 board meetings ago, I think we talked about the checkout page before you would check out on the product page itself. And we now have that as a separate checkout experience, which you saw. And the reason for that is it gives us like a full page to do stuff with, like more like this was, was possible because of that. And so that also allows for potentially more, more stuff like this, like a chatbot where you might wanna ask questions or, or things like that. But yeah, we'll, we'll see. We just, we just talk to customers. They say, hey, we want these features. I'm sure once we build these ABCs, like they're gonna ask for more and we'll do that. And it just, it just keeps going, keeps going like that. The best thing about Gumroad is that it's very easy to get feedback. You know, we launch something or we don't even launch it, we just ship it and we get feedback on it almost immediately because people are constantly using Gumroad to try to sell stuff. And if you're not, if, if you can, you You know, if they can make more money, they'll let you know, which is great. Yeah.

You mentioned that the website stuff has taken on competition. Well, I have sort of like two questions like that. When you started Gumroad, did you have a thinking that you wanted to do websites at some point? And then the second follow-up question is, is the competition before the website is different than the competition after, meaning like now you're in the WordPress, WooCommerce game. Yeah. Was that intentional or?

Yeah. I mean, I do think it, I mean, it's, it's a, it's intentional. I think I just thought about like what it, like, it seems like there's basically two businesses on the internet. One is website builders and one is email marketing services. And it feels like that's it. Like that's all the internet is. It's like websites and emails, newsletters. Like that's all. And it's just like every generation needs more and more of them, right? And so I just looked at Gumroad and I was like, okay, we gotta get into these. Like, this is the market. Like, this is what people use the internet for. And if we wanna, you know, be bigger, then we should probably, you know, support more and more of that stuff. And so we will be doing even more stuff on the email marketing side as well. And similar, like, it'll all be free and like the 10% for digital products kind of makes that work. And we'll see, we'll see how it, how it ends up working out. You know, like basically the goal is to kind of go after Wix-ish, you know, kind of portfolio creators on the website builder side. And then, you know, after kind of like the ConvertKit kind of like email newsletter kind of like services on the other side. The reason I prefer like our business model is because it keeps us super aligned with the creators actually making money. The one thing I don't really like about a lot of these services is they're kind of like AOL in which they get you to sign up and then you just forget about them. And a lot of these services, like they just make money because like, you know, over 5 to 10, 15, 20 years, like they just have a bunch of people signing up and paying a monthly fee and like it just feels like they're capturing value but not actually creating that much value. And then on the other hand, you have email newsletter services who often charge like per, like the size of your list. So if you have like 100,000 subscribers and you're freaking awesome, excited about it, you might pay MailChimp like $200 a month or some, you know, one of these services even though you haven't made any money. So I have all these friends who are very optimistic, but they're, if you look at their cash flow, they've lost a lot more money than they've made. Right. And so I think like, that's great. I think it's good to be optimistic and, and all these sorts of things, but I would like if, you know, We only made money when you made money, and that means 10% of your revenue on the platform, right? And so that's kind of like philosophically why I think I'm kind of excited about this. Will it actually work? Like statistically, no, right? Statistically, most experiments don't work, right? Like when, like Flexile will likely not work, right? Just like Gumroad was likely not to work. But the fact that Gumroad works honestly, like gives me a lot of confidence. Probably too much confidence in making more bets. So we're going to do it, might as well, right? Time passes whether you make bets or don't.

So yeah. The equity allocation feature that you described, is there, did you model that off of any close example you've seen today or what's the closest to the index?

Oh, that's a really good question. Yeah. So in terms of What we modeled it off of, Netflix used, I don't know if they still do this, but Netflix used to do this where you were able to trade a percent of your comp into shares and they would allow you to choose that percentage. I think it was much more constrained. It was like 0 to 5% or something like that. I remember reading Shopify does something where they kind of just give you 3 options, I think, and you can kind of pick. Someone told me recently that there was a company that was doing something. Can you, can I say the name or no? Yeah, it's public.

Brex.

So Brex would do this where they would kind of make you an offer and then you get to choose how much of that you want. And this is, you know, this is, this was kind of like our first iteration. It's like very simple. And we ran into this issue of like, well, actually everyone would just choose 100% cash. Because if you're only getting options, it's not that. And this honestly keeps us super honest. Like even for example, the valuation of the company, right? Like you have a startup that raises like a $500 million valuation, right? Because secondaries, because of this, it looks good, whatever. It doesn't really matter, right? But all of a sudden, guess what? That means that nobody's going to trade at that price, right? Gumroad's not worth $500 million. Like, no, everyone would say, ah, now I'm good with the cash. Like, like Gumroad, like cool. Like you take, you own Gumroad. Gumroad and like, awesome, you know? But if I said, hey, Gumroad, like the conversion rate is 10 million, well guess what it would be? Everyone would convert 80%, right? So you, it sort of creates this like nice, like, yeah. And it keeps me honest because like, I'm not, let's say I could raise at a high valuation, I might not want to. And these incentives exist for everybody, but I think they kind of are much more top of mind when, when, you know, when you can see it and you, that feedback loop, that real-time feedback loop is much, much stronger. It's not real time. So there's like every year you'll be able to elect for the next year what percent. Coolly, our law firm wanted us to like do that. Technically, like pulling this off is insanely complicated. Like the Excel sheet that like our accountant put together to like for the engineers to know how to write the code to do the QuickBooks integration so that everything was the cash accrual Cause you know, you're, you're paying $200 an hour, so you're still getting, you're still invoicing $200 an hour, but you're only getting $100 an hour in cash. But we still have to track that this is accruing, but it's accruing. We're not paying until the end of the year. And like, but the end of the year, we also give you a cash bonus. But do we track that cash bonus now? Do we track the options now? Actually, we can give you, what happens if you leave halfway through the company, but you've already deferred cash, but then we can't. Grant you any options because legally we can only grant. So then we, what we actually have to do is we have to issue you the options at the beginning of the year and then we vest them as you invoice. So every time you invoice, we actually vest the shares and then we like all this crazy complexity, which is why I think no one has done it. Like to do this, you either need to like have a full, like a full-time team that just like onboards people and like does this all the time, which is what we were doing before Flexile is like, you know, hello sign and then they'd sign it and then we'd like, you know, you'd send a PDF invoice and then, you know, I'd, you know, Steven would like input it and then I'd like approve it. And then, you know, all this stuff we're trying to automate. And that gives me hope that there, that Flexile is useful. Like there's some utility there. Tony says it saves him time, right? He's happy to, you know, to pay. So, So yeah, hopefully people really like it. And I do have at least a couple friends who have startups that are sort of, they're startups, they've raised money. They're like, for example, one of them is at like about $10 million in ARR. They're like a break-even, but I think in the next 3 or 4 years they will be cashflow positive. I don't know how interested they are in dividends and all this kind of stuff, but they definitely are interested in like, if we could just allow people to choose their risk profile, And this is, this, they've kind of taken this and implemented it just manually. So hopefully we can say, hey, like, do you want to just automate that? And I think there's even, I mean, there's even more cool stuff. Like, you know, the stuff I said about like, what if you could get paid every day? Like, imagine getting equity every day. What if dividends were every quarter or every month? Like, and you're incentivized to exit. Like, there are all these, these cool things that I think you could do. I even had an idea once of like, what if, Could you reserve somebody? Like, could you, you know, like a reserved instance? Could you say, hey, I'll pay you for 5 years of billing upfront for a 30% discount and you could go buy a house and we have the cash in the bank. That's interesting. You know, that's kind of what a W-2 is, to be honest, right? That is kind of how a W-2 functions is you're trading like a much lower hourly rate for like dependability, et cetera. But what if you can make it liquid? You know, what if you could like allow people to mess with the levers? I think that stuff is a lot of fun. So hopefully other people like it and use it too, and it generates value for everybody. And honestly, I think if this works, I think the NASDAQ is dead. Seriously, like why go public if you can do all of this yourself?

DIYPO.

Like there's literally no need for the NASDAQ, which is basically like a bunch of people got together under a tree and were like, hey, we need to all like trade shares together. Literally on like Wall Street or something, you know, you don't need that anymore. You don't need banks, you don't need paper. Like, you know, companies can completely do all of this themselves. So I'm, yeah, that's the reality distortion field. Like I want to kill the NASDAQ. Yeah. Which is about $30 trillion, I think, in market value. But one fact quickly about the, about public companies, And one reason I'm so excited about Flexcell and dividends, even though we haven't talked about that that much, the public companies, there's about 2,000 to 3,000 public companies that do $10 million in net income per year. 2,000 to 3,000. So not that many. Like there's about 6,000 publicly listed on NYSE and NASDAQ. Private companies that do $10 million in net income in the US alone, just on IRS tax returns, $200,000. So there's 100x more dividends privately than publicly. So like imagine all the public success and profits. That is a fraction of the gas stations, of the coffee shops, of the construction companies, of the, all of the infrastructure you see on Earth. Like we've, we've lived in this bubble for the last 10, 15 years where FANG has completely redefined the way that we think about investing in the stock market. You know, Sequoia owns 40%, like all this kind of stuff, VC and how important that is. And I think we're entering a place in which like that's no longer true. Like software companies are much more like railroad companies in which we've built something, it cash flows and we sustain it and it's awesome. And this is what happens to every single industry. Railroads used to be much more like startups. And now they're not, you know? But the problem is the startup industry is obsessed with remaining the startup industry. It's like trying to build a train company today. It's like, no, we're just building websites. It's not too crazy. Guess who owns the internet? Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, the same people who built the internet. Guess who owns the railroads? So I think a lot of this stuff will, you know, will turn out to be true. And I think in that case, How do these other businesses operate? They understand the value that they provide. They make some margin and they dividend, you know, they dividend back to investors and their employees and everyone is, you know, you look at Costco, you look at Procter Gamble, you know, you look at Standard Oil, you look at a lot of these really great companies. That's how they incentivize their folks. But they spend millions of dollars being a public company and doing that. What if they could just use Flexile and it was like 10 grand a year? You know, so that's kind of like the vision I think behind it, behind what we, what we're trying to do. But currently that just means, you know, building a little SaaS product that's at $100 an MRR. So we got a ways to go, but we have time. I, oh, by the way, I'm committed. I'm publicly committing here. I will work on Gumroad until I'm 65 years old. So 30, 34 more years. So at least you dividends for 34 more years. So that's about $300 to $400 million at the current rate. So yeah, we'll see how it goes. Questions anymore?

One more?

And then one more, and we'll be done.

An experimentation. The shareholders, do they get to vote on how much you get to experiment and how much of the government profits you get to throw into experimentation?

Yeah, so good question. Basically, do government investors get to choose or vote Currently, no. They, you know, basically, I mean, yeah, currently, no. I do think that it's an interesting idea. I do think it, one, I do think it's important that like, you know, experiments are run by people who can't get fired in a sense. Like you want people who can take certain risks on a long period of time. So I don't think democracy might be the best form right away, but I do think it's interesting that like, if the cap table is like on Flexcell and all of this is codified, could I at least say it, like run a poll and say, hey, Gumroad did $10 million in net income, how much should we dividend? You know, default 60%, but 20%, you know, should, and then, you know, the money we don't do, we're just going to put in T-bills anyway, right? So until we deploy it. So, you know, I think it's interesting and I definitely want to experiment more and more with, with like almost like a DAO, right? In crypto, like this sort of decentralized governance model. I do think it's pretty interesting and I do think like boards are this kind of anachronistic way of running a business that could kind of see an update potentially. But I also think it's, you know, there's reasons things are done the way they're done. There's a lot of precedent for Delaware C-corps and boards. And you know, when you can see with OpenAI, when you get too clever and you try to mess with the system a little bit, you know, certain things can happen that you may not have expected as well. So I like to make a change and then wait a while and see if it breaks. And I'm pretty, you know, I think a lot of people are probably looking at us using Flexile, seeing how this goes for us. And then once Gumroad doesn't explode or implode, then they'll be like, oh yeah, like this looks cool. Like let's give it a shot, you know?

So, and internally you can have like a budget of how much you wanna spend on Flexile or is it more of a timeframe?

Yeah, that's a good question. My budget is about a million a year. About $500K to $1 million a year. I think we spent about $1 million a year, $1 million so far. We've worked on it for about like a year and a bit. Yeah, so I would say about $1 million a year is how much I would want to spend on it. But it's hard to say honestly, a lot of it is just like customer feedback. Like if it feels like we have traction and we really need resources, like we'll make that investment. So it's a little bit like if the pull comes, it might get more aggressive than that. But I think sort of like I want to invest And I think of it more like people, honestly. Like, I think about it like more like, you know, I want like a few design, you know, one designer and a few engineers is kind of how I think about it, which maps to about $500K to $1 million a year, something like that. Something like that. And by the way, we built all of Flexile and got to $10 million in net income, you know, on Gumroad like that. That includes all the investment in Flexile as well, right? We could be way more profitable if we really wanted to. But there's plenty of time to be super, super profitable.

Yeah.

Frank, did you have a question?

Yeah, just on the custom domains for Gumroad, do you guys use Entry for the DNS part?

What do we use for the DNS part? I don't know. Probably Cloudflare if they have something is my guess. We did do something once with NameSilo. We, 'cause we're gonna integrate buying domains. And I think we use NameSilo for that. We never actually launched the feature for some reason. This is like 2015 when we were running out of money. We're like, what can we do? Maybe buying domains, like, uh, hail Mary. Uh, didn't work. Um, I'll check and let you know. Awesome. Well, thanks everybody for tuning in. Thanks Helen and Connor for showing up in person. And, uh, hopefully it was, uh, fun and educational.