Q4 2022 Public Board Meeting

Welcome everyone to this quarterly public update for Gumroad. As a reminder, we try to do these every few months as if we were a public company, as a way to keep us accountable, get feedback, get more people familiar with Gumroad, and it's fun. This is the growth of Gumroad as a marketplace, and obviously 2020 was a pretty crazy year for a lot of folks in the kind of creator economy. 2021 was about 30-40% up, and then this year it's plateaued. We've seen this for a lot of other companies. We'll talk about how we're reacting to that as a company as well at the end. There's a great sort of Silicon Valley truism by Josh Kopelman, I think. And he said, uh, there's nothing like numbers to fuck up a good story. You can tell a really compelling story, but at the end of the day, the numbers will keep you accountable. The theme of this meeting is an emphasis on the numbers. Like, why are things valuable? And $17 million in GMV earned by creators, that's a record. And in revenue on that, our take rate was about $964,000, up 8% annually, and we are profitable. So our cash in bank rose a little bit by about $54,000 or something like that. And so we're able to keep going, keep doing this and, and yep, keep shipping. And so we're going to share the screen a little bit. I'm going to pass it off to a bunch of the awesome Gumroad team.

My name is Vishal. I'll be presenting the new content editor. So let's get started. So assume you are a chef and you'd like to sell your traditional recipe that you learned from your grandmother to make a delicious, which is a stuffed sweet flatbread. Up until now, you would be able to upload a step-by-step PDF guide of your recipe and a a video maybe. And that was it. This is how your customers would see the different versions of your product. If you offer them, this is good. But what if you wanted to share some more information, have some images, production of your product, embed a tweet and whatnot? We have introduced the new content editor to solve just that. Just turn on the beta content editor switch that you can see here. And as you would expect, all your existing files will be preserved like this. And now you can add some more rich content to it. To save some time, I have already copied that product and added some restruct to it. This is how it looks now. See this tweet embed here and then some images, files, a YouTube embed as well. And important to know that you can do this per variant, right?

So if you have two versions of the same product, you can effectively have a premium version that have a Discord link in it, right? You can get creative with that.

Now let's see what your customers would see when they purchase such a product when they, they see it in their library. And as you would expect, it looks pretty similar to how you had edited it in the content editor, and your customers can even play the media files in line like this. So this is the iOS consumer app. Let's open the same product here, and it looks pretty similar on the mobile phones as well. They can even watch the video inline, watch YouTube, YouTube embeds as well. Even play the audio files. Like we can't wait to see what amazing things you can create with a beta dynamic product content editor. And if you change your mind and you want to switch back to the old files view, you can do that. Just turn off this beta content editor switch here. You can see here it is saying you you lose the rich content that you have added, but the files that you had embedded already, they'll be retained and preserved like this, as you would expect.

Thanks, that was awesome. That was an awesome demo. And I think when you say "as you expect," those three words represent lots of code, because often when an engineer says "as you expect," what it means is this is not what happens naturally. It requires a lot of work to make sure that when you can go back and forth like that and it preserves that, that's not easy. Often when we launch stuff like Gumroad, we, we like to move fast, we like to ship a lot of stuff, but this is such a fundamental change that we really want people to choose it. And I'm sure we can improve it. It's still the V1 of the V2 that we're on. And please send us your feedback. We're gonna keep iterating on, on this feature. About 14% of GMV now on Gumroad goes through this feature already. Connor, are you ready to talk about checkout and all the improvements we made there?

Yes. We shipped the new checkout page where you can buy multiple products at once. That's the obvious reason for adding a checkout page. It makes it a lot easier to buy multiple products. At the same time. Something a little bit less obvious is it gives us room to add new features on the checkout page. Having everything in one page like we did before limited what we could do in the checkout flow. So I'm going to walk through a few new features we've shipped this quarter related to that. The first one is this floating call to action bar. This product is actually a great example of why this is really useful. So he has a large cover image. It's generally good to have a call to action on the page. All the time so that the friction that the user faces when trying to buy the product is minimized. So you can see if I click this button, it would take me down to the call to action section right here where you can configure your options. But another reason that this exists besides just for products that have large cover images is if they have long descriptions, someone's reading through sort of the value proposition of this product, they get all the way to the bottom. They're really far away from the call to action button. It's annoying to have to scroll all the way back up to the top. So If you just click this, you can configure whatever options you want and add it right to your cart. Another cool feature actually that we added recently that I was just reminded of is the, this configure button. It actually lets people change how they have the product configured in their cart. And in the coming weeks, we're actually going to explore some additional features on this checkout page, like upsells and cross-sells. And those would've been much more difficult in our legacy payment flow. The next thing I wanted to walk through is the ability to have multiple seats associated with the license membership product. So now if you go to a membership product page, if you have the license key setting toggled on, you'll notice a sub-toggle that allows customers to choose the number of seats per license purchase. And you can see in this preview when this is on, a new seats field pops up. Turn it off, it goes away. So on the full product page, this is what it looks like. And if one of your customers wants to purchase multiple, multiple seats and have them attach their license, they can do so like this. Before, it was pretty common to see a hack of having like multiple tiers where one tier is like one license, one tier is like 10, 20. This gives you a little bit more precision if someone wants to buy 3. You don't have to have a tier for every number of licenses between 1 and however many you want to offer. So that's pretty convenient. And once a user has actually purchased a multi-seat license, if they want to expand the number of seats they have, they can do that pretty easily. Just by going to the membership manage page and adjusting the number of seats. I'll just knock this up to 4, update the membership. They'll get charged a prorated amount based on how long it's been going. And yeah, that'll work. So now if you actually want to adjust the number of seats on their license, you can do that from the customer drawer. You can see here it's updated to 4, and let's say you want to give them a seat. You can save it and it updates it. So yeah, it should unlock some additional revenue for people who are doing multi-seat license type things without them having to hack around it. Then the last thing, this actually launched just today. We revamped the third-party analytics settings and added some additional functionality around the third-party analytics snippets. So if you go to your settings page today, you'll see that there's this new third-party analytics tab. All of the third-party analytics settings used to be in the advanced settings or just lumped in there with the miscellaneous settings. And I think it's a lot easier to think about now that they have their own home. They were scattered about that page before. Now they're all here in one place. If you have Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel, set it up here. The biggest changes around snippets, they were a little bit tricky to figure out and basically all they did, they allowed you to put custom JavaScript that would be run after someone purchased a product. And it was pretty limited if you wanted to do any sort of retargeting or ad conversion tracking. For now, for this initial release, we added the new ability where you can have JavaScript that runs on the product page. We may add new pages in the future if people have use cases for that. But as of right now, you can go in here, you can give a snippet a name. So this particular snippet runs on the product page and it's really simple. It just logs something to the browser console. So I have this set up to run on the product page for all of my products. So here are two of my products. And I'll just go ahead and refresh the page here. And you'll see that it printed "Hi, Gumroad board meeting." Same thing here if I refresh it, "Hi, Gumroad board meeting." And just to demonstrate, you can actually select— or you can add additional granularity. I'll switch it just to sample product and I'll save it. And if we go to sample product and refresh, you'll see that it still prints out the console.log message. And if you go to the other product, And it no longer does that. So this should hopefully unlock a lot of new abilities if you're doing retargeting or any sort of ad conversion tracking. And it should make it a lot more easy, a lot easier rather to, to organize these third-party analytics snippets.

Awesome. Yeah, we got a bunch of requests over the years for people wanting to do this, but as I mentioned, Gumroad has, because of that single page constraint, we've really never been able to support this as well as we want to.

The way we did it in the past was a little bit of a hack.

Back.

So yeah, now the real like first sort of first-class snippets you can embed, it's JavaScript. JavaScript's pretty powerful. So people should be able to do quite a bit of stuff that they weren't able to do before. So excited to see what people come up with. We have some emails going out to people who have ideas telling them this is out. So hopefully we'll, we can report back next time with some cool examples. Cool. So I'll go back to sharing my screen. Can people see my screen? Awesome. We launched this content editor. Anyone can go use this now. It's available publicly. Please use this. Please give us feedback. This is what it looks like for a customer once they've bought it.

It.

It also works in our mobile apps on both iOS and Android. Special shout out to Vishal and the team for whipping this together in the last week. So yeah, pretty awesome to have this. I, I'm super excited about these kind of multidimensional multimodal experiences and yeah, I'm pretty, pretty stoked about it. We went through the new sticky bar, so there should always be a button. You should always be able to check out if there's some improvements you have here on making it even easier to do. Would love to hear that people have been Generally the feedback on that has been 100% positive. And then third-party analytics, as we mentioned, you can now have way more customization. So yeah, I'm gonna talk about pricing and then we're gonna talk about what do you get for this. So Gumroad today, we've tried a bunch of different pricing schemes throughout the years. I think when I first launched Gumroad as a weekend project, we didn't even have pricing. I think if you go to like the Hacker News post, it says, I don't know, I think I'll charge 30%. Anyway, we've tried a bunch of stuff. So we started out actually similar to this where I think it was something like 7.5% plus $0.30 or something like that. And we stayed around that kind of marketplace thing. When we were struggling to get profitable and we were like, oh, what are we gonna do? We kind of wanted to make sure we were gonna have a floor. And so we switched to this kind of two-tier where you could sign up for a membership, a SaaS sort of product offering, and then that would get you reduced fees. So anyway, Daniel, the seller, actually had this idea of trying out tiers and to get to simplify the SaaS stuff, right? So to say, hey, we, Instead of trying to like, what if we could somehow do the math for them? Right. And like generally creators, we require more help in the beginning and then over time maybe hit terminal velocity. And so our pricing should reflect that. And so we tried that, I think maybe a year or so ago to simplify, we got rid of all the monthly stuff, which I think was a positive thing to, to simplify that. And I think now just looking back, I think that the tiers are cool, but we just haven't seen that they really work. There's a bunch of issues and if people have more deep Q&A, I'm happy to get more into it. But I think as I look at the field and say, okay, what, who has the best possible pricing? I think Patreon and Substack are probably like the best, right? Where they're, they charge, I think Patreon's 12%, I think Substack's 10%. And it's just, it's super simple, right? It's if you make $100 grand, Gumroad makes $10 grand. If you feel like it's worth that, awesome. If you don't, the math is simple to do. And so that's what we're moving to is basically getting rid of the tiers and then being exclusive of credit card processing. And so we already do that for PayPal, but now we're gonna be exclusive of Stripe. So basically Everyone knows Gumroad, this is like the revenue to Gumroad will be about 10% of GMV and yeah, should just simplify things. But yes, it will be more expensive overall and we'll send an email out to all creators about this today and we'll give people plenty of time. So, so this should go live January 31st of next year. Now I wanna hand it off to Jack and Jack's gonna talk about what we're up to next on—

The first thing I wanna talk about is improving the product creation navigation. Now, This may not apply to existing creators as much. I think there'll be some benefits there, um, especially for new creators coming in. And right now they'll see these kind of tabs up here and they have a save changes button and a publish button, but there's no clear kind of progression going from product to content to checkout to share. Because that's ultimately those 4 steps. In fact, really only product content checkout needed to complete. And then once that product is ready to go, then you click share. So we did a bunch of kind of explorations and looking at like, how can we reduce friction for not only people that are creating products for the first time, but also people that are creating products regularly, users. So some different options here, trying out, hey, maybe we put it in the footer here. Maybe we put it so you have next and back buttons, but something about having it here, just because a lot of the other buttons are there presently in a lot of the other pages, ultimately landing on something like this where you can go, essentially go in, create the new product and just hit save and continue. And then it takes you to content. You do this, you hit save and continue. And then ultimately you can either stop there and save the changes and come back to it, or you can then publish and continue, which then puts you to share that product. I think a lot of times people skip around and you still can. The advantage is for those who understand the system a little bit better, they can just click to these tabs however they want to. But there's something just nice and linear about just going over and just going next, next.

Yeah. The first time is like pretty daunting when you're like, yeah, like what? Because every— should I use this or not is a question basically you'll have for every single bit, right? Which is just a lot.

And I think there's a lot of these— that's something that we've been discussing internally— a lot of these small wins that may seem small, but when you really look at how people are using them on a day-to-day basis, it saves time. And I think a lot of those small wins can help over time. So this is, this is a pretty small feature, but I think it'll help not only existing users, but new users as well. So hopefully that'll be— this isn't a giant undertaking. So this is something probably next quarter or this quarter that we'd be able to look at. I'm not sure timing-wise. I know it's next up in the—

Q1, hopefully we'll be able to get this live.

We'll see.

Yeah. And then next one I think will be really interesting for people who want a bit more control over the Stripe data and being able to have their own dashboard within Stripe and maybe already have an existing Stripe account. This will be a pretty big update for someone who wants to go in that already has a Stripe account, can go in here, click on Stripe, connect with Stripe, go through the onboarding process and kind of the connection process of Stripe. This would hold true. For people who don't have Stripe accounts too, that it would lead you through this process to create a Stripe Express account if you wanted to, with the full account, and then you would have that account connected here and you could disconnect that if you wish. But this will help for people who already have Stripe accounts or want a bit more control over the, just the dashboard and that sort of thing. Yeah. So I think that'll be a huge one. That one's very close. That one's very close to follow.

Yeah. I think, I mean, this basically means that no matter how much Gumroad can do, we will probably never have 7,000 employees like Stripe has. And so if there's certain features that you want access to on your Stripe account or you have one for your business already, I think it's gonna really help people who just wanna try Gumroad for their business. Like they already have everything set up and it's, oh, I just want to mess around with like third-party analytics and the landing page stuff and not have to think about like all new payments, all new identity verification and all this stuff that is not fun.

It's right. It's actually skipping all this and just trying.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And you, we will make it possible in the future, especially if this experiment works. And people really like it. You'll be able to do, you'll be able to sign up with Stripe and in theory, like your Gumroad login could just be your Stripe account, right? Why would we need you to have another password or another this? Yeah.

And essentially too, you may have a reputation, a good reputation already on Stripe being verified and being able to do larger payouts. Like a lot of those things that you have an advantage of already, you may already have that because you went through this process and verified and they see. So I'm sure there's some advantages there to doing that. So that's the Stripe creators create their own connected on Stripe account. I have one smallish change, but actually may have a big impact on the front end. It's— this is much more backend heavy, but being able to do cross-sells, AKA recommended products. So really just in one click, being able to turn on show recommended products on checkout and being able to show those in the new checkout. This was a— we had to get the checkout done first to then introduce this, which I think would be really helpful. So it was a prerequisite to that. These products are shown by us based on revenue, popularity at Gumroad. Algorithm that you won't really have to do much work at all except just turn it on. I think it can be overwhelming. I've done it before in other e-commerce platforms where you've gotta choose recommended products for every product. And it really, a lot of times I was just checking things off, really not understanding that I could be making more kind of data-informed decisions there. But because I wasn't able to manage that on a day-to-day basis, letting Gumroad manage that for you and saying based on what the product is, based on the price point, the popularity, a lot of these things, and it can get smarter, you know, be smarter over time and hopefully lead to more sales, especially in the context of checkout where it would be easy for them to just add those to the cart as a cross-sell.

Yeah. And I think we will always, we probably will support more stuff that if people want to be able to say, hey, I have a new product, always in the top left, et cetera. But yeah, I think one, one thing I'm super excited about having a checkout page is that we will soon have checkout settings as we currently don't have that section. And so. So you'll have one place to manage your discount codes or custom fields, shipping, which is how I think people generally think about their store instead of right now you have to go, every single product has discount codes, has custom fields, has shipping. In theory, if we kept that the same, every product would have more like this recommend. It would just get more and more crazy. And yeah, we're gonna, we're hopefully gonna be able to move all of that into a single place, hopefully in Q1 of next year. Pretty excited about this.

Yeah, this one should be a good— and then this would lead to not only with cross-sales here, but then eventually upsells. So being able to say, hey, we have this with the Minus Entrepreneur, you buy this and you can also add this for a cheaper price or for free or whatever. So I think those two paired together are gonna lead to, to, to more sales, hopefully. So that's the checkout section. And now we have shared teams, which I think will be really interesting, especially for creators who have products that require a lot of different kind of moving parts and being able to bring in and invite people that handle in very specific specific rules. So going in here and in your settings page and be able to go and add team members very easily just with their email and then choosing that role as an accountant where it's more just about read-only access. That could be a tax accountant or bookkeeper being able to have read-only access. Admin can do everything. Support would just be, especially if you're at high volume, being able to have someone that really just run kind of full-time support within your Gumroad account, which I imagine would be super helpful. And then marketer is really just in charge of updating product names, previews, and descriptions. So I think this will be, and it's, there's not much to it. It's really just about adding these team members. Again, you also have a lot of these invitations to make it really easy to invite these people. I know there can be friction when you're inviting different team members on different things and them not having the right link and things like that. Gumroad takes care of all that for you. Being able to send these invitations that are super clear, be able to accept that invitation and go right into Gumroad as that particular role. So they're not just signing up and they and you have to go manually make them that role. So I think it just based on the different roles, I think it'll handle pretty much every use case that you would need for a team supporting you in your Gumroad business. So I think that was it for me.

I think the other thing that teams could lead to, and this is a very popular feature request, is split payouts and split revenue, right? So imagine this is mostly for support, accounting, marketing, et cetera. Hey, this person is, does support, but they also get 10%, right? And building that all into Gumroad, having that UI again, like having that real estate to be able to do that is gonna be pretty awesome. I also think the thing that we don't talk too much about is all of the technical debt that we have been getting rid of. Gumroad, as I mentioned prior, like we, we have had an up and down journey. We've had a very small team for a bunch of years. Now we're, we have a nice team of about 20 and the tech stack is just so much better than it used to be. Cuz imagine like 2015 to 2018, like basically didn't do anything. We were using jQuery and Flight, which is like a framework that Twitter built that they don't even use anymore. And it's, things are a lot better. We're able to move a lot faster. We're able to ship a lot more features. And that, that work doesn't, doesn't always show up in these meetings. If you wanna check it out, just view source and you'll see it. You'll see it. Awesome. Now I wanna talk about Flexile. Flexile is something that I've been thinking about since basically, I don't know, for 5 years, 6 years, like way before COVID Because as I mentioned, like since 2015, Gumroad has been run with virtually no meetings, no deadlines, or I should say few deadlines. And no full-time employees. We work in this like ad hoc contract basis. The sort of, I've written about this, you can check it out, no meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees on my personal website. But the sort of TL;DR is that we're like an open source project like Rails, except we're not open source and people get paid. So it's, we just work on GitHub and Slack and Notion. But of course, like money, right, is part of this. And so we wanted to basically productize our internal process. So our internal process was basically our contract CFO Steven and a bunch of PDFs and HelloSign that we still use and like bill.com, which isn't really meant for tenanting. It's like mostly for vendor pay. Anyway, it's like a kind of just like a, like that, that meme of conspiracy theory person. And anyway, so we wanted to productize it, make it really awesome. One great thing about Gumroad is I just think it, it's just simple and beautiful and it's like fun to use and it makes complex stuff simple. And I wanted to do the same thing for a product that I get, have to use build.com. It's not my favorite, not my favorite product. And so yeah, that's what we do. Flexile is a product that productizes our internal process so that companies who wanna run more like Gumroad can do very easily. And some Easter eggs in the logo, obviously it's an F. It's also two calendar days next to each other. The blocks are flexible, different, which is some, something that we want to uniquely enable. And then there's also a hidden F, which is harder to see when it's like white on black, but you can tell there's like the shadow of a block. So imagine like this kind of 3DF block and the white is one side of it. If you can see that once you see it, you can't unsee it, but it took a while to see it the first time. And similar to, similar to the, to Gumroad, I want to actually show people like what we have built. I think that's the best way to actually, yeah, show progress. And so we're gonna pass it off to Helen's gonna show us like what it looks like when a company onboards onto Flexile. Then Raul's gonna show us and invite a contractor and then Raul's gonna pretend to be that contractor and go through the onboarding experience for that contractor and submitting a PDF invoice. And then Helen will approve it and you'll see the, hopefully the end-to-end flow of of a company getting set up, getting a contractor, and then the payment, all that kind of stuff will happen. And then Maya is gonna show, show off our new time tracking UI. And so currently you still have to go through this PDF process, but we're hoping that Flexile will enable some more verticalized stuff with a kind of internal or like a native timesheet UI. So I will hand it off to Helen to kick off that screen share. All right.

Hi everybody. Share. Can y'all see that? I hope so. Good. Here we go. I have invited my new company, Helen Inc., to join Flexile, and I, the administrator, have received this signup link with instructions. So let's go through. So the onboarding process is quite quick. It's just 3 steps. First, I need to create a password, then provide my name and my company's business address. And finally, I need to provide an API key to my Wise account. For folks who don't have a Wise account already, we have instructions here and here for how to set that up, and we can always help out as necessary. Once I've done that, my Wise account is connected, and that's the account that will actually be paying out contractors, at least in this first iteration of Flexile. So that's it. I'm onboarded. I have no contractors yet, so let me invite my good friend Raúl. He will be an engineer, and let's say he's starting January 1st of next year, although I could backdate that to earlier. He is in Romania. So having provided all those details, you can see that a consulting agreement is created with the correct effective date, company, and so forth. One thing you might not be able to tell is that there is— there are some differences in the legal language depending on the country of residence. That's the lawyer's job. So now I can go ahead and sign this myself. I could download it if I chose to, but for now I will just send it over to Raul. So he should now have an email for him to go through the onboarding process himself, and he will show up here for me as invited but not yet onboarded. So that is company onboarding. I'm going to kick it over to Raul who will go through that. We'll create an invoice and then I'll jump back on approve and get him paid. Awesome.

All right. Hello everyone. Oh, let me just share my screen. I got Helen's invite. I'm invited to Helen Inc.'s team for the role of engineer. I can see the compensation, start date, average hours I'm going to work through, and I'm just going to review and sign up. And in 5 steps, I'll be just ready to go. So let me just set the password over here. Next, it's the personal details. So it's my full legal name, the preferred name that will be visible to the team inside Flexile, and I have to set the country of citizenship, which is needed for contracts, and offers to step number 3. Which is billing information that's, that will be included on the invoices and tax documents. I'm just gonna put in here my address, state, and postal code. And in order to get paid for the invoices that I submit, I just have to set up my bank account details. I can choose in which currency I will be paid over here. If I want to be paid in USD, that's fine. I'm just going to paste in here my bank account number. And the billing details are pre-filled from the previous step in step number 3. We're just going to save this and move to the last step, which is the contract that Helen already presented as part of the company.. And as you can see over here, you can just go through it and you're not allowed to sign it immediately. So in order to be able to sign it, you just have to skim through it, go to the end of the contract. It's, let's say, a small block in order to make sure that people actually go through the entire contract and they've read it through. So you can just double-check here all the details, like the name, the legal entity. Email address, country, and the compensation, $100 per hour, $20 per week, which looks fine. And once I'm at the bottom, I can just click, add my signature, and if I want, I can download the PDF right away, which is signed by both parties, or I can do that later once I'm already in the system. So I'm just gonna do that. And I'm ready to go. And in here you can see there's documents page which has the consulting agreement signed by both parties. If I want to, I can download that right away. But let's say I've already worked a month and I want to create an invoice. So I can just put in here like software engineering services Since it's 20 hours per week, that's going to be 80 hours. It's already calculated. You can see it already includes all the information that went through the onboarding, and I'm just going to upload the sample invoice right here and send it over to Helen. And that's about it. Yeah, I'm moving forward. I'll just hand it back to Helen so she can present to you the approving part of the invoice and the payment.

Okay, so here we go. So I've got this invoice from Raul to approve. We do currently require 2 admin approvals on the backend in order to, to actually pay out. So as you can see right now, there have been no other approvals. So this button says approve. However, I'm gonna do some little coding magic here and create an approval. Now if I refresh the page, you can see it went from approve to pay now. So my Mythical admin Jane approved it. So now I've paid Raul. It shifted from open to closed invoices, approved invoices, and Raul should have received an email saying that his Wise payment is en route. Awesome.

That's it. So many of these B2B products, you have to like schedule a call to even get a look at what the product even looks like. So now everyone can see exactly how Flexile will work. It'll be better by the time you use it, anyone else uses it. I think we're constantly improving it, but yeah, exactly. It's not vaporware, it's real. Awesome. And it's gonna get even better. Maya's gonna talk a little bit about, yeah, what we're up to next with time tracking.

Hi. Yeah, so as you just said, we're gonna keep improving it and we're currently working on a new invoicing flow because anyone who's been a contractor before knows how much paperwork there is to do with PDF invoices and all sorts of invoice generators and managing all that and tracking your time in one software, then extracting it to another software where you generate your invoices and you have to keep them all in one place. And it's just a bunch of work to keep everything managed. So what we've wanted to do in Flexile is to keep everything in one place and offer a new UI to properly manage that. So let me see if I can share my screen properly. You should see my screen now, hopefully. Yep. Okay. So this is still a work in progress, so don't hold it to the same standard of the things you've seen so far. But just to give you a bit of an overview, this is a completely new UI. You see there's a new menu item here. For time tracking. And this is where, as a contractor, you'll basically keep track of everything that you do when you work. You have a calendar for every month. So as I keep going forward, there's more— there's basically, as you work, you're going to start entering your stuff here. So say I'm a contractor, I've been working on software engineering 'as well as,' and I can also add more tasks. So I can, for instance, say, 'And today I've been part of a board meeting as part of my work, and it's taken me about an hour, let's say. And I've also done some software engineering, so let's add like another 5 hours here.' And then, I don't know, let's do talking to designers, and we'll do that for another, I don't know, 2 hours here. And as you start entering tasks, you just start assembling what you've done over the week. And we can also say it's the next week now, and here I do another 5 hours, and here I do 6 hours. And as I enter my tasks, you can see up top it shows me how much I've worked, how much I have yet to go, and then I can click Finalize Invoice, which means I no longer have to think about generating PDFs or keeping track of this anywhere. It just gives me a full overview of what I've worked on so far, auto-generates an invoice ID for me, and just everything that I've done so far, it'll keep track of here. As you can also see, I no longer have to upload an invoice because as I click Send Invoice, which probably works. Yes, then we go to invoices that I've sent. We see here the new invoice, and everything that I've just done is now listed, and we can even download the invoice PDF that's now pre-made from scratch. You don't have to worry about making a template for yourself or using a generator. It's all in Flexile directly, and you can use it just out of the box. And as I go back to time tracking, all of these entries will now be marked as disabled because I've built them already, so I can't change them. But I can still add new tasks to it if I want to in the next month. And like, for instance, here. And then it'll allow me to generate another invoice if I so choose. And the goal of the whole thing is to basically to just have everything you need to manage as a contractor in one place, so you don't have to use a bunch of tools to manage your work anymore. But we'll still support both flows, at least for the time being. So if you already have everything in place, like you use, I don't know, Toggl, and you put all of your— you track your time there, you download an invoice there, you can still upload it into Flexile. But as you start using Flexile and you realize, hey, maybe it would be more convenient to just have everything in one place, then you can do that too.

Yeah. And if you're already maybe billing somebody on Flexile and you have a new client, maybe you can convince them to use Flexile for that. And we'll make it really easy for people to have multiple clients over time too. Awesome. Okay. Sweet. I'll take over again. This is, I just put quickly put in the email that we're all Raul got, so success, it worked. That payment is en route. And so basically everyone's seen like the end-to-end sort of product invoicing experience. We have more stuff, analytics, the time tracking stuff will go live soon. But yeah, I think I'm super excited. I think there's all these things that I wanna do that I think will make working at Gumroad even more, get all of the stuff that isn't necessary, right? So hopefully now people don't have to worry about downloading Apple Pages and like using the invoice template. And then I have 10 different kinds of PDFs that I have to look through and each one is different. Over time. I think if we can build a really great product, people will start to just use this and it'll be there. I can imagine things like maybe it autofills the stuff that from, it knows your GitHub account, so maybe it just autofills that timesheet when you did sort of all the stuff you've, of all the tasks, and then you just have to enter in like the hours instead of 10 minutes, it takes 2 seconds. And so I'm pretty excited. I think there's a lot of opportunity to improve things. I also think, I also think that this isn't really an issue for Gumroad because we hire, we're lucky in which we have a large audience. We can be very selective about the people that we hire, so we have an insanely high-quality team. A lot of people maybe aren't as lucky and want more oversight or want to be able to like work in this way. But a lot of people tell me like, I don't trust people. It's kind of like what people would say about remote work, maybe in like 2018 or something. And I'm hopeful that Flexile, without being like surveillance software, I don't want to ever do that. But we figure out what is the right middle ground to allow people to have that flexibility and then to have a sense of trust. And I think a lot of that comes from transparency and clarity, right? Just knowing what work's happening, when is it happening, who's doing it and all that kind of stuff means that you don't, that's how you avoid meetings, right? That's the secret sauce to avoiding government meetings is just lots of transparency and clarity in what everyone is doing. And hopefully Flexile makes that even easier for folks. I could even imagine we do these weekly updates like at the end of every week and it's really, I like 'em, I think we'll keep doing them, but I could imagine you might get an autofilled version of from Flexile of these are the things that you did this week, right? And then you can always edit that and pull things from GitHub or Notion And there's a lot of fun stuff. I think once now we've built our own tooling, we can actually do this stuff instead of just say, oh, I wish Bill.com supported this. So just a sense of, I talked a little bit about what's coming next for Flexile and you can guess, but a couple other things. One, I think there's a huge opportunity to turn this into kind of a talent marketplace. As I mentioned, Gumroad has a large audience. We get to be super selective, but a lot of companies may not. And so being able to build a place where, you know, for people who are looking for this kind of work, which is remote first, async, people can work from anywhere. You don't have meetings, you don't have to give up your calendar. All that kind of stuff. You don't have to work 40 hours a week, et cetera. I think that there may be room to build liquidity, right? To actually create both on the company side. I think people are always looking for more companies that are offering this way of working. And then also on the contractor side, engineers, designers, support people, fraud, risk review, product, et cetera. So I'm excited, I'm excited to be that hopefully over time. And then equity being built in, I think is really key. I mentioned it in the beginning, but at the end of the day, I think we are building hopefully a product and now two products that we think are going to be very valuable, building real kind of equity asset value. And I think equity is a big piece of that. So far, as I've talked to most people in the sort of more of the bootstrapping side of things, mostly the founders have 100% of the company or 50% each or something like that. And then the company sells for $1 billion. And what I want is I want a world in which everybody gains from that. And that just hasn't really, really happened. And there are, there have been events like crowdfunding is something that we took advantage of, but I think really building it into the core of, hey, it should just as easy as time tracking. It should be just as easy to say, hey, Hey, everyone that, you know, bills $100 an hour gets 10% in equity or 100% equity or whatever the ratios are. You should be able to decide that. And then Gumroad or Flexile should be able to take all that painful, annoying PDFs that you have to deal with and not have to worry about that stuff anymore. So if you're interested in learning more about Flexile, you can go to flexile.com. We're gonna launch a new website soon, but for now we have a nice splash. You can sign up for the waitlist and I will send an email out to that list probably on Monday next week. Week and start doing Zoom, Zoom demos. You've already seen the, but you've already seen some of what you'll get. But yeah, I would love to get more feedback and get people using the product, which I think is the next step for us. And then I wanna talk about Gumroad Inc. A little bit. And yeah, what is this? So th— this is a chart that I think is super key. We've been through a bunch of different phases as a company and as in the sort of the market. And I think that this is like a really important concept to understand, like why are things valued the way they are, right? Ultimately, a lot of the folks tuning in here are investors in Gumroad. They participate in the crowdfunding round. Maybe you're a creator and you became an investor. Maybe you're just curious, how do people value businesses? And I think this is basically the traditional way of doing it. And we've been living in this kind of weird world of 0% interest rates and that we haven't had to focus on this equation, but it is pretty darn important. And just to keep things simple, I know I mentioned I wasn't going to do too much math, math, but basically the net value of an asset is the cash flow that it's generating minus the discount rate of that cash. Meaning if you're not getting it, a dollar today is a dollar in your hand is worth a dollar, right? Generally, you can go spend that. It's a dollar. But if I said, I'm going to give you a dollar a year from now, you might say, that's actually, that's not worth a dollar to me. And depending on who you are, it might be worth 50 cents. It might be worth nothing.. It might be worth 99 cents. If you're, I don't know, a super gambler, it might be even worth more than a dollar because you're, you want the, it's like the illiquidity is a feature more than a bug for you. This is the way to think about it is Gumroad as a company is going to generate cash flow over time. And every year it's going to generate, let's say some number. And for the life of the company, imagine a bell curve of at some point in the future, hundreds of years from now, dozens, at some point Gumroad will no longer exist. It'll be a zero, for whatever reason, the sun consumes the earth and all of those, the area under the curve, like all of those dividend, effectively all of that cash flow payouts added up minus the discount rate of getting that cash on a delayed basis is the value of Gumroad, right? So for example, when we raised money at $100 million valuation, the sort of underlying layer to that is that Gumroad over the course of the next X years will generate $100 million in profit, dividend it back to investors, and ideally more than that because everyone is applying their own discount rate to that cash flow. At the end of the day, this isn't something that a lot of people talk about because 0% interest rates means that basically everyone's trying to invest. People aren't thinking about profits and they're thinking about growth and they're investing at $100 million valuation, not because of this math, but because they think, oh, they can, it's going to be $200 million next year or $300 million next year. And there's nothing, I think, inherently wrong with that for certain kinds of businesses. But as you noticed, like we had some crazy growth, we're leveling out now. I think we'll get back into like nice linear growth, but I think it's a good time to just say, what should Gumroad look like? What's sustainable? We have this new product, so we're gonna invest more and more resources. Still get to make that kind of riskier bet. But this is, I think, the way to, to look at Gumroad over time and really all companies over time. And a lot of people I've talked to don't want to, right? Because at the end of the day, like these, these numbers can get really large when you have 0% interest rates. And a lot of people look at this and they say, okay, why is this happening? Why are valuations going down? And they look at this chart and they say, oh, it's because we had this unique moment in COVID, which drove everything up, but we'll actually get back there, right? Because it used to be much lower, close to 0% for basically the last decade or two. That's not reality. Ultimately, if you look back at history in the US, the interest rate has been much higher historically. And so it's more likely, I think, than not that we hit like a sort of 5% and stay there, which basically means that going back to that discount rate, that every dollar you have now is worth $1.05 compared to, compared to a year from now, because you're able to generate that return, which you weren't able to with the bank in 2020 when these interest rates were effectively zero. And so at the end of the day, now all of a sudden, I think people are going to start looking at the math. It's like gravity has been reinserted back into the system. Like you can think of the law of gravity as the sort of Fed fund interest rate, Fed fund rate, and gravity goes up as that rate goes up. So you just have to, you have to like have a really strong business to be able to thrive more and more as the interest rates will continue to go up. And so how are we reacting to it? I already talked about the fee thing. We've also made some internal changes. We did shrink the team, as I mentioned. So we went from 40 to about 20, and we also reduced comp on a cash basis. So I want to talk about this because I I think it's easy to like tweet about all the fun stuff and get rewarded for that, but also to be upfront about the less fun changes, right? And so we have reduced cash compensation by about 20% and we've increased equity bonuses. These are separate, they're related, 'cause I think it made sense to make all these changes in one shot, but equity is gonna go up to 100%. So basically the goal is that people can start to think about their equity component in Gumroad as a much larger piece, but not in the traditional sense of of, oh, I own this and it's a lottery ticket and it's going to be worth this. It should still be considered a bonus. It should still not be considered cash because it's not, but it should entitle you to dividends over time, just like a traditional company would. And so that's the sort of goal that I am pursuing. And I think this kind of aligns Gumroad and Flexile and equity and all these crowdfunding and all these interests, which is how do we actually build sustainability? And to me, sustainability means not looking for an exit, right? Like definitionally, right? If you're looking for an exit, It's like you're not in a place that you're excited about being in 100%. And so how do we build a business that's sustainable? And I think Gumroad, for a bunch of unique reasons, has an ability to offer something like this where we can build a business and we can hire folks and say, hey, and I know this is going to be not easy to do, but I think it's a really important shift. And we can talk about why. I know we've already gone over, but if people have questions, we can talk more. But imagine being able to think about, I'm going to work at this company for a year and earn $100 grand. That's awesome. But that I'm also gonna get a piece of the company and that piece of the company is entitling me to $10K a year for life, right? Or $5K, whatever the math may be. And if you think of all of, I think a lot of what we're trying to do and a lot of what software is trying to do is automation. It's like anti-work, right? We're trying to do the, like the manual work until we don't need to do it anymore. The issue with that is that imagine you're a software engineer or it can really be anybody, a support person, I think it's the same thing, but you do a bunch of work that drives a ton of value for Gumroad and then you leave. And so all of the value you've created ends up accruing over decades to the shareholders and not to you because you don't get— your friends, you're not Jennifer Aniston in Friends, right? You're not getting your cut. But why not? Right? Why not? The truth is because of the whole 0% interest rates, we've ignored dividends and royalties and all these sorts of things. Like they don't come up in these conversations and they haven't for a long period of time. And maybe like we need to bring them back. This is the visual of instead of making one lump sum and then not, maybe you make a little bit less the first year, and then you make more every year after that point. And the cool thing is you're no longer working at Gumroad, right? You could work on Flexile, which may be a new company. You may work somewhere else, but ideally you're building up a portfolio of positions. Many of these hopefully available on like the Flexile marketplace, right? And so you can just say, hey, I want to work on these like 7 companies over the next 7 years and then build a cash flow. And then year 8, working is more of a choice for you than it may have been. And that is like a big core thesis of mine over time is is that generally people should be working less hours per day because yeah, I don't know, it, it seems like that would be a good thing. So anyway, that's all I got. I know that was quite a lot. I don't even know what the time is, 12:09, but I'm curious if other folks have questions, if anyone on the team wants to comment on anything. Otherwise we can wrap up. I will chop this up into a bunch of videos, put them on Twitter and YouTube, et cetera. Pricing to use Flexile is one question. It'll be, it'll be $50 a contractor a month, and then there's a nominal 0.05%, I think. Like transaction fee or like fulfillment kind of payment transfer fee. But it's really $50 a contractor a month is what we're doing. And then Pooza says, did I miss the numbers of Q4? I talked about the November '22 recap, so I'll post that slide on Twitter so you can easily see it. So I think that's what we'll probably do is do a monthly snapshot every board meeting, cuz the quarter's not over and all that kind of stuff's going on. And then Steven says, is the global affiliate 10% on top of Discover slash supply rate? So yes. Yeah, basically the Discover is on top of the, the standard fee. So our standard fee will be 10% and then Discoverable, if it's a Discover sale, like through our marketplace, or it'll be an additional 10%. So yeah, that, and we're gonna do a lot more actually on affiliates. It's still not a core piece of Gumroad, so hopefully we can upgrade it to a first-class citizen so everyone can use it really easily. You can go to Discover, you can like get a link to be an affiliate for somebody and share and it'll be like way better, maybe even more like lists. You'll be able to like feature your affiliated products in it. It'll all work, work pretty nicely. All right. Some other questions. Dividends to employees and yeah, every, everybody. And so the goal would be that, yeah, basically the way it's set up legally is that when you issue dividends, you have to, yeah, you have to do it to everybody. Everyone has rights. And so yeah, basically that's the, I actually have a meeting with Cooley on Monday and the goal, my sort of primary function ambition and goal for 2023 is to do that, which won't be easy, by the way. We have 70, if you look at our cap table as a whole, we have a lot of people on it, maybe the most of probably in the top 10 private companies in terms of count. So it's a whole new problem that, that, or whole new old problem that we're trying to resolve. And so yeah, hopefully maybe that's a new product. Maybe that's the future of Flexile. Who knows? But yeah, excited to do it. How long do you think before year over year growth gets back into the double digits? We might actually end up hitting that. We'll see. December actually looks pretty strong, so maybe we'll even get there now and then 2023 should be back. But yeah, it's impossible to know at the end of the day. And I wrote an essay on this called Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion Dollar Company. But at the end of the day, no one knows what the market's going to do. It's like a crazy person is a good way to think about it. You can talk to them and buy and sell things from that crazy person, but based on, you should think of it on a transactional basis more than anything else. So yeah, hopefully, hopefully shortly. But the beauty is ideally we have, we have enough cash flow and all these things that we can still have an awesome team and ship products. Pay everyone really well, give people equity, give dividends, like all that stuff I think we should be able to pull off and doesn't necessarily need growth in order to do it. Growth would be awesome for sure and create more opportunities, maybe another fundraise. But I think if we can really show dividends, I think there may be a different class of investors, but maybe there'll be opportunities for secondaries in that capacity. So this is similar to how SpaceX does it. If the markets recover and there's a ton of excitement and we think we can go to an IPO and all that stuff, well, that's still an option. But I want to make sure that like we're not waiting, waiting around like everybody else is, right? Like we have a super unique advantage. We actually do a lot of GMV and revenue and unlike a lot of other startups. And I think now's a good time to show people our strengths. So yeah, how frequently? Every quarter would be awesome is the goal to do a quarterly recap. And really the kind of pseudo reason is like eventually we will be a public company in some shape or form, you'd think, right? That's the end path for a lot of things. And so why not act like it start getting into the habit. It's not easy to get your financials audited and makes your numbers look less good and all that stuff, but it's important. I'd rather do it now and then have to recalibrate like right before we IPO, which is what most folks do. Flexile looks awesome. Thank you, Craig. Does it sit within Gumroad Inc. as a product or do you think it becomes a new company? I think it probably makes sense as a new company because the customer base is not shared really at all. I think there's a lot of similarities and I think it's cool that we get to work on both. Both. And we have, it's software at the end of the day, but it probably makes sense as a separate company. So my goal is to, our goal is to get to profitable as a sort of Flexile, like it should reach product market fit, which means there's not churning customers saying awesome things, growth happening, all that good stuff. And if I feel like, okay, there is a, there's like a good chance that this is gonna work because most startups don't, right? Most startups that raise a seed round don't raise a Series A, et cetera. Right. And so I wanna make sure that when we do We're in a really good position. And then I think what we'll end up doing is similar to Gumroad, we'll probably do a crowdfunding round or something, and then it'll be its own company and it'll be secondary. So Gumroad will sell, Gumroad owns 100% right now. So Gumroad will probably end up owning 60%, maybe 20% would be an option pool for contractors who, whose contractors who work on Flexile. And then 20% will be like this crowdfunded amount, something like that. And that way there's a lot of interesting things here. Like maybe you work on Gumroad and you can work on Flexile., or maybe you have to work in government and then you get access to Flexcell, or if you want higher risk, more equity, Flexcell, if you want lower stability, I want to maybe provide some options. And I think that's, I don't know, I, I, I have all these ideas and I think, oh, it's such a pain to start a company in raids. But like, what if it was easy to just have 3 people work on something? And I think Flexcell might make that a little bit easier for folks. Yeah. Like spinning up contracts, you know, it's a pain. What if you could just use ours? We paid a good law firm a lot of money, so just use ours. And I think that's it. I think I got everybody. If you have more questions, you know where to find me in, in, in Twitter. But yeah. Yeah, hit me up and I will post this shortly. Thanks everyone. Thanks so much for the team. Ellen, Maya, Jack, Curtis, you didn't present, but Curtis had some good stuff. Next, next quarter, Connor, Paul, Raul, and all the awesome people that no longer working on Word are still awesome.