The Gumroad Blog

Gumroad now auto-enables HTTPS on custom domains! Add a custom domain for your Gumroad profile that is more secure, that browsers will recognize as more trustworthy, and that will lead to higher conversion rates for you.

You can add a custom domain in your advanced settings.

Previously, it was only possible to refund customers in full. Now, we’ve made it possible  to issue partial refunds! Use this to give post-purchase rebates, offer discounts for certain actions, correct shipping charges (in the case of a local pick-up, for example), and more!

You can issue partial refunds from the customer drawer. Enter the amount you’d like refunded and hit the refund button. If you’d like to refund them in full, just click the green Refund fully button without entering an amount. 

With posts, you can now use Gumroad as your blog as well as your storefront! Just select “Post to profile” when creating a post. Above and beyond other services, you can also add attachments your readers can download.

All of these posts will sync across three places: emails, your customers' libraries, and your creator profile. You can use them as components of a course, regular blog posts, a premium email newsletter, and more.

What does this mean?

It means that the simple grid of products that was your creator profile at the beginning of this year can be transformed into your storefront, blog, newsletter, and more.

It also means that posts are not only for your existing customers and followers, but for prospective ones too.

Posts show up on your profile:

If at any point you want to edit or remove a post, you can do that. You can also add existing posts to your profile.

Each post comes with its own page that you can share:

And you can get analytics as well:

We're super excited about this. We want Gumroad to become the default, affordable, powerful-but-still-simple website for creators for a long time, and this is a big leap in that direction.

If you’re just starting to sell the things you make, you’re probably also starting to feel a bit overwhelmed by all the things there are to do. Early on, everything seems equally urgent --- so where do you start? That’s why we created this short to-do list to help you figure out where to prioritize your energy, so that you can set yourself up for long-term success.

1. Choose a name --- and lock it down. 

Once you’ve decided on the name you’re going to use for your creative business, it’s a good idea to register your usernames on social media as well as purchase a custom website domain. You might be thinking, Hold on! I’m not ready to start using social media or building a website… I’m just getting started, remember? It’s okay if you’re not ready just yet. However, it’s better to get the usernames and the domain you want early on, rather than wait to find out that your name has already been taken!

2. Set short-term goals. 

You might already have a long-term vision for your creative business. If you don’t? Leave that for later. All that you have to worry about for now is what you want to accomplish in the next three to six months. What do you want to achieve with your business in this time period? What are the milestones you want to hit?

Once you have a few goals, work backwards to set benchmarks for the next month, the next week, and for tomorrow. These benchmarks will help you track your progress and let you know if you’re on track to meet your goals.

A side note: While it’s okay (and totally expected!) not to achieve everything you set out to do, it’s also important to be serious with yourself about these deadlines. Since we set these standards internally, it can be easy to brush them off or let other things in our life (such as our day job, our family commitments, etc.) come first. But the more often you are able to deliver on your promises to yourself, the more trust you will build with yourself. When you can trust that you’re going to do the things you say you’re going to do, you’ll feel confident. It may seem that the secret to success is having a lot of discipline, but the truth is, discipline is all about building trust.

3. Carve out time to work. 

If you’re working another job while you’re trying to get your creative business off the ground, carving out time can be difficult. 

Get out your calendar and mark out at least 1.5 hours a day, five days a week, to focus solely on your business. The consistency is important, because when you consistently show up to be creative, you will start to build momentum (plus, creativity will become a habit!). 

It’s also important not only to schedule the right quantity of time, but to set yourself up to ensure you’ll also getting the right quality of time. During your hour and a half of focused work, silence your phone. Find a quiet place to work where you won’t be interrupted. Give yourself the space you need to truly focus. 

Most important of all, be sure to safeguard that time. Life will give you every reason and every opportunity to do something else with that hour and a half you’ve set aside for your creativity. Don’t give in. This is your sacred time to develop your craft and start creating a life that you love. Treat it as sacred.

4. Always be learning. 

Keep trying to improve your craft. Assume that there is always something else to learn. Take courses, read books, go to conferences. Collaborate with other creators in (or outside of!) your field, and see what you can learn from the way they do things. Ask for feedback from your customers. Be open. 

5. Stay organized. 

As business picks up, you’re going to need to be able to rely on a system of organization that works for you. This is a great time to start experimenting! If you’ve never been much of an organized person, a great place to start is with a simple calendar or planner. This can help you keep track of your deadlines and short-term goals and also the tasks that you’d like to get done each day. 

Experiment with online project management tools like Trello, Asana, or others. Try out online and paper calendars -- does it work better for you to see your calendar on your desk above you, or do you prefer to have everything on your phone, or both? Do you need to start each day with a fresh paper to-do list, or do you prefer to use Reminders, Evernote, or another to-do list app? 

Have a customer sign up a day too late to get an update? Or added a new email and want to send it to only some of your previous customers? Now you can!

View any updates a customer has missed and send them right from your customer management dashboard.

Got too many products in your library? You can now archive products you're finished with! Just visit your library and click "Archive" on the top left of any product.

You can now select which tags are visible on your profile.

Your top five selected tags will appear in the filter sidebar, with a “load more...” button that will show the rest.

Julia Evans makes zines. But not just any zines -- she makes zines that explain complicated computer programming concepts in simple terms. In 2015, after watching The Punk Singer, a documentary about punk and riot grrrl zine culture, she realized that zines could be a fun way to explain programming concepts: 

“I was really excited about a program called strace,” Julia says. “So I wrote the zine with a Sharpie, printed out 200 copies, and gave it out at a conference talk I was giving. Everybody really loved the zine, so I kept going.”

We asked Julia five questions about being a creator. Here’s what she had to say:

Gumroad: Why do you make zines?

Julia: There are a lot of things I’ve learned in my career (strace! How Linux works! Computer networking!) that I feel are both REALLY IMPORTANT, and I think took me WAY TOO LONG TO LEARN. I didn’t learn what a system call was until I’d been programming for 10 years! I didn’t know how DNS worked for probably 12 years! It took me SO LONG to figure out how I was supposed to work with my manager. What’s up with that?! Why did nobody tell me?

And it makes me kinda mad every time I meet an engineer who’s missing some important basic information that would really help them because they’ve never seen a good explanation of it. A lot of these important things are also honestly not that complicated -- once you know them, you can explain them to someone else really quickly. For example, I showed someone how HTTP works in a café the other day and explaining the basic idea took, like, 60 seconds!

So, my goal with my zines is to explain things that have a reputation for being “hard” (but are actually easy!) in a simple way. I really believe that most computer things aren’t really that hard, they just need to be explained well.

G: What is the most rewarding part of doing education work? The most challenging part?

J: I love hearing aha moments from my readers, like “Wow, I’ve been working in this field for 20 years, and I never knew bash could do that!” or “Oh, THAT’s how content delivery networks work! That’s so simple!”. To me, teaching is sort of like a puzzle -- I really like condensing a complicated tool or idea down to the very few basic points you need to know to get a lot of different kinds of tasks done.

Finding the right thing to write about is always hard -- I’m always on the look out for things that people on Twitter are saying they find hard or confusing.

G: How do you get yourself out of a creative rut/writer's block/feeling unmotivated?

J: The way I wrote Bite Size Linux was I decided I was going to write a comic and post it on Twitter every day in April, no matter what. I didn’t quite manage “every day”, but I wrote 20 comics in 30 days and got the zine published by the end of the month. Making rules like “I need to publish something every day” really helps me.

I’m doing the same thing again right now with a zine about the HTTP protocol  -- I get up every morning, write a page about how HTTP works, and post it on Twitter.

G: Why Gumroad?

J: I really appreciate how fast publishing a zine on Gumroad is. The last time I published a zine on gumroad, I uploaded the PDF, uploaded the cover, that took maybe 10 minutes. 15 minutes later, somebody had already bought it, printed it out, and tweeted a picture to me of the printed-out zine on their desk.

You can’t get from “I hit publish on the Internet” to “Someone across the country has a print copy on their desk” in 15 minutes with traditional publishing!

G: What have you learned about running a business?

J: Originally, I didn’t sell my zines -- I gave them away for free (and the first 5 zines I wrote are still available for free at https://wizardzines.com!). For a long time, I was really scared of selling my work for some reason -- I was really used to writing my blog for free, and the idea of charging money for something I’d written felt really weird to me.

It turns out that people are really happy to pay to support great work, and literally nothing that I was afraid of happening has happened. Instead, 2 really nice things have happened: first, I take the work more seriously (I spend more time on it and work harder on the polish), and I’ve also noticed that my readers take the work more seriously (because they paid for it, they’re more likely to actually print out the zines and read them and learn from them, which is what I want!).

At this point I make enough to live on from selling zines which I think is really incredible -- for a long time I thought education work in tech wasn’t valued and that it wasn’t possible to make money by teaching people, but I was wrong!

G: Do you have any good tips to share for staying motivated, meeting goals, or boosting sales?

J: I’m a huge fan of doing things one baby step at a time. I’ve been working on this project a little at a time for almost 5 years now, while working full-time as a programmer and also spending a lot of time writing a blog. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned:

Start at the intersection of what’s needed and what’s fun. I wrote a zine, printed it out, and gave it away at a conference. People liked it, and I decided that it was fun. This gave me the motivation to write another one.

Be willing to put in the time and work. From 2016-2018, I published six more zines. I also ran a tiny Indiegogo campaign to ship 100 zines to people. I handwrote all the addresses and licked all the envelopes myself.  

Put in the details that make you stand out and look professional. For the crowdfunding campaign, I got a custom “strace” stamp printed to stamp all the envelopes with. I also started hiring illustrators to illustrate the covers (since I can’t actually draw to save my life!). I registered a custom domain (wizardzines.com) and started a mailing list called “Saturday Comics”.

Know your value. I started giving away zines in my talks at every conference I spoke at. But instead of paying to print them myself, which was getting expensive, I asked the conferences to pay for printing instead. Then, in April 2018, I finally decided to start selling my zines instead of just giving them away.

Santiago “PitPit” Esparza has been making webcomics like his SPAIN TRAVEL DIARY since 2016. His motivation was the medium’s inherent challenges:

“It seemed impossible to me, telling a story or joke in a few panels. But I still tried to do it and haven’t stopped since,” Santiago says. 

We asked Santiago five questions about being a creator. Here’s what he had to say: Gumroad: What’s the most rewarding part of doing creative work?

Santiago: The most rewarding part of creating something is the audience reaction. I really think that if a person feels your art to a personal level, you get a profound connection from creator to reader.

G: How do you get yourself out of a creative rut/writer’s block/feeling unmotivated?

S: Everyone has bad days, but the only way to get out of an art block is forgetting that you have it. If you can’t think of anything to write, then write about something that happened to you earlier that day, or if you can’t think of anything to draw, then just draw whatever is in front of you. Or just go outside and get distracted.

G: Why do you create webcomics? How does your creativity help you achieve your purpose in life?

S: I think my main goal is to create good stories and share them with as many people as possible. Whatever I do creatively is in that mindset.

G: Why Gumroad?

S: Gumroad has actually helped me a lot because there are a lot of artists that I admire that sell tutorials, brush sets and pretty much everything you need to get started.

G: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

After watching thousands of creators find success doing more of what they love with Gumroad, we got jealous.

Gumroadians is our creative outlet. We want to tell stories about creators, and the problems they face on a daily basis.

You can now listen for purchases being made within the Gumroad overlay and embed widgets.

Here is some sample JavaScript on how to do that:

var gumroadSaleListener = function(ev) { if (ev.data && JSON.parse(ev.data).post_message_name === "sale") { document.getElementById('post-message-data').innerHTML = ev.data; window.location.href = 'https://google.com'; } }; window.addEventListener('message', gumroadSaleListener, false);

That’s it! As long as the Gumroad JS is included in your webpage, you can listen for `sale` events and react accordingly. For example, you could redirect the user to a custom thank you page.

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To recap, we have launched:

a zipper JS include (just 8 kb)

this new PostMessage hook

more API endpoints for subscriptions, refunds, and disputes

ability to subscribe without creating a Gumroad account

All to make it easier to build custom experiences with Gumroad!

Over 25% of purchases on Gumroad happen on a creator's website, with a custom integration. We hope that as creators grow and want more custom experiences, we will be able to scale with them.

Yesterday, we shared on Twitter that we do not remove creators from Gumroad if they disagree with us:

We may disagree with some of our creators. Actually, we know we do. But we're not going to deplatform them for it.

Several times a week, we are asked if we ban people we disagree with. The answer has always been no. There are a variety of activities and products that are not allowed on Gumroad, but disagreement with our team, company, or CEO is not one of them.

This tweet meant to clarify our answer to this specific question, but because of our unfamiliarity with the context of 'deplatforming’ and how it is used, we caused only more confusion and stress for our creators. We’re sorry for that.

This blog post serves to dispel the vagueness of our tweet and clarify our positions.

First off, we want Gumroad to be a platform for various sorts of creative expression. However, that does not mean we tolerate all types of content. We never have, and never will tolerate: targeted harassment, abusive or threatening speech, or other prejudicial material (e.g. promoting Nazism).

If you share, promote, or sell these ideas on Gumroad, it is a violation of our Terms of Service and will result in a suspension:

(iv) promotes or encourages discrimination based upon race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age;

(vi) or is abusive towards other people;

Another type of content people often complain about is sexual content. To be clear: sexual content is allowed on Gumroad (including illustrations, comics and erotic prose), though NSFW products should be tagged as such.

Explicit pornography is not allowed on Gumroad, due to policies from our banking partners. You can read about that on our page about adult content.

We hope that this clarifies where we stand on these issues. Going forward, we will make sure our tweets are more precise. While we haven't changed our policies, we can certainly communicate them better.

You can now add multiple images to everything on Gumroad, including:

Product descriptions

Email updates

Workflows

Ratings stress you out? You can now turn them off for your products! (This turns off the display. Your customers can leave them privately, and you can turn them back on if/when you wish.)