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Gumroad seller experience?

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PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
For those of you that sell tutorials / tools / brushes / etc. on Gumroad, what's the experience been like for you? Has it been worth the time/effort put into the products your selling? What about those that are listing things for $0 (ie. 'Pay What You Want' ), do people ever actually donate / pay for them?

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  • beefaroni
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    beefaroni sublime tool
    Hm, since this thread never got off the ground, I figure I'll share my limited experience.

    I spent a decent amount of time making a gun reference pack that I thought would be pretty helpful. Sharp photos, good texture ref, etc. Ended up charging $4 for it and had about 8 sales. Not too great overall.

    I think Gumroad is more beneficial when you're an established artist and have a large facebook / other following. The links are shared around social media quicker and it seems like they would make more $$ as a result. 

    I'd love to hear @Jonas Ronnegard  experience with Gumroad. It seems like your new uploads are always trending online. 

  • Jonas Ronnegard
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    beefaroni said:
    Hm, since this thread never got off the ground, I figure I'll share my limited experience.

    I spent a decent amount of time making a gun reference pack that I thought would be pretty helpful. Sharp photos, good texture ref, etc. Ended up charging $4 for it and had about 8 sales. Not too great overall.

    I think Gumroad is more beneficial when you're an established artist and have a large facebook / other following. The links are shared around social media quicker and it seems like they would make more $$ as a result. 

    I'd love to hear @Jonas Ronnegard  experience with Gumroad. It seems like your new uploads are always trending online. 

    As Beefaroni says having the backing and following from the beginning is very important, Gumroad isn't a magic site that makes you sell more.
    For me I have quite a good number of followers on my facebook page and artstation which I think has helped a lot. But one thing that makes me want to use gumroad over others is the mailing system, For a small fee a month I can send out updates on new stuff to anyone that have bought or downloaded any of my content, which is a big plus.
  • nyx702
    Right now I basically host my scripts on Gumroad. My experience has been great so far. I primary use it because it will send out emails when I update to everyone who has downloaded/followed it. Before I was just relying on forum posts/social media. I tracked the downloads from my site and compared to Gumroad they are roughly the same or greater. 

    All my stuff is free however so that skews my perspective. My objective is not really to make money or make products specifically to sell on Gumroad. Previously I had a page on my site with a Paypal donation button. In 2 years I got 3 donations I think? After switching to Gumroad the donations significantly increased. I rarely plug/market anything so that is all just people stumbling across it on Polycount/Google. The metrics are nice but they lack some of the advanced features I was using on my personal site. You can see where they came from but no search word info (as of the last time I checked.)

    I will say that the UX is kind of wonky and the whole switching between a "buyer" and  "seller" for your account is weird. The loss of visual control is annoying too. It's not really the best platform to showcase scripty/plugin stuff. It's not a deal breaker to me because I only look at it like once every three months. 
  • Joost
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    My experience with Gumroad has been great so far.  A lot of my products are pay what you want because I firmly believe that if you create a good product people will pay for it. My biggest complaint is that sales drop significantly if I don't release any new content for a while ( As they have in the last few months.)
    I think it's also very important for people to realize that this is not a get rich quick scheme, at least not from my experience. If I work it out to an hourly wage it's definitely less than I'd be earning working at McDonald's. 

    My biggest donation (!) was $200 from someone in China, which was shocking to say the least.

    I feel a bit weird doing this but I've decided to share my full sales statistics so that maybe someone out there can learn something from them.






  • Jonas Ronnegard
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    Joost said:
    My experience with Gumroad has been great so far.  A lot of my products are pay what you want because I firmly believe that if you create a good product people will pay for it. My biggest complaint is that sales drop significantly if I don't release any new content for a while ( As they have in the last few months.)
    I think it's also very important for people to realize that this is not a get rich quick scheme, at least not from my experience. If I work it out to an hourly wage it's definitely less than I'd be earning working at McDonald's. 

    My biggest donation (!) was $200 from someone in China, which was shocking to say the least.

    I feel a bit weird doing this but I've decided to share my full sales statistics so that maybe someone out there can learn something from them.






    off topic but Joost what is that second screen from? that kind of data would be a dream come true for me.
  • RyanB
    We need a Free 2 Play model for tutorials.  Watch an ad, get five minutes of tutorial :)

    (I actually think it would be a killer money maker for artists)

  • Joost
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    @Jonas Ronnegard It's from a spreadsheet I made in google sheets. You can have a look at it here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OIk4GsNIzwSK2EjHSp4YrkfxwKmNxBBi-xCSJ8wBSgI/edit?usp=sharing

    You do have to enter all of the information manually so it's not ideal. It would be awesome if Gumroad could implement some more advanced stats.
    I'm not an expert with google sheets so there's probably better ways of doing some of this stuff. 
  • Jonas Ronnegard
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    Joost said:
    @Jonas Ronnegard It's from a spreadsheet I made in google sheets. You can have a look at it here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OIk4GsNIzwSK2EjHSp4YrkfxwKmNxBBi-xCSJ8wBSgI/edit?usp=sharing

    You do have to enter all of the information manually so it's not ideal. It would be awesome if Gumroad could implement some more advanced stats.
    I'm not an expert with google sheets so there's probably better ways of doing some of this stuff. 
    was it a template or did you create it yourself? do you mean you write everything yourself or does it calculate earnings per view based on total sales and upload date data?
  • Joost
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    @Jonas Ronnegard I created it myself. I enter Views, downloads (sales) and earnings and it calculates the rest. Then I update all of the products when I feel like having updated stats. It's all pretty simple really. But it would definitely be great to have on Gumroad.
  • Meloncov
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    Meloncov greentooth
    RyanB said:
    We need a Free 2 Play model for tutorials.  Watch an ad, get five minutes of tutorial :)

    (I actually think it would be a killer money maker for artists)

    Putting your tutorials on a monetized YouTube channel pretty much is that. It'd be very hard to get the view counts that'd translate into a significant amount of money.
  • PixelMasher
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    PixelMasher veteran polycounter
    A lot of internet marketing that is successful, people build and audience then monetize it once they have their audiences trust. putting out a couple freebies or mini tuts will get your name out there and people digging your content if you are providing value, then people are much more likely to convert and support you when you do a larger release. its a business model that works pretty well for a large majority of niches. people are a lot less likely to view you as a value leech trying to hustle to them, and more likely to become fans. read up on 1000 true fans for more info on the subject
  • AtticusMars
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    AtticusMars greentooth
    As Beefaroni says having the backing and following from the beginning is very important, Gumroad isn't a magic site that makes you sell more.
    For me I have quite a good number of followers on my facebook page and artstation which I think has helped a lot. But one thing that makes me want to use gumroad over others is the mailing system, For a small fee a month I can send out updates on new stuff to anyone that have bought or downloaded any of my content, which is a big plus.
    Are you paying for the advertisement banners you're getting on ArtStation (and is it worth it/is it helping?)
  • Jonas Ronnegard
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    As Beefaroni says having the backing and following from the beginning is very important, Gumroad isn't a magic site that makes you sell more.
    For me I have quite a good number of followers on my facebook page and artstation which I think has helped a lot. But one thing that makes me want to use gumroad over others is the mailing system, For a small fee a month I can send out updates on new stuff to anyone that have bought or downloaded any of my content, which is a big plus.
    Are you paying for the advertisement banners you're getting on ArtStation (and is it worth it/is it helping?)
    probably not really worth it for me as it's quite expensive, I have too few products for it to be really worth it, but I got a good deal so I took it as a test and an investment for future products.
  • PixelMasher
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    PixelMasher veteran polycounter
    Preface: this turned out to be a much bigger post than I expected :P I won't go too much into it but I am using similar techniques in internet marketing in other niches (non game industry stuff) to make quite a decent bit of side passive income outside my day job, so these concepts work, and I'm not talking outta my ass :P 

    I would HIGHLY suggest experimenting with facebook ads, either for creating a fan page or directly to your gumroad. You can get views/clicks for only a couple cents if you optimize them correctly. I would probably go for a facebook fan page, it will probably be cheaper, and then you are capturing an audience you can advertise to over and over, with your new content showing up in their feeds all the time. over a few months you could probably build an audience of several thousand fans at least if you hustle it right. And there are more fresh people looking to learn every school semester for game art...

    Quick brainstorm of how i would do it. In your fb ad, target a bunch of different cg related groups focused around game art and modding/indie dev, and also ones for people who like things such as the art insitute etc. that way you are pretty laser focused on your target audience rather than just a general settings that facebook will try to do. set a budget of like 10-20 bucks a day and let those ads run for a week and see what the numbers are like. the longer the ad runs, the cheaper clicks get as well, so leaving it for a week, you might be getting clicks/likes for say 40 cents at first, but after about 5 days they will probably be far cheaper. you are already offering free content which will grab people, and you might even get a couple donations. but the main thing is capturing that audience you can advertise to at a later time. even if this completley fails, you are only out 100-200 bucks, and if you are already generating income from random visitors/donators like joost is, this is almost a no brainer, in his case I would probably double those numbers easily.

    then what I would do is make a bomb ass in depth tutorial, like the one the guy did for the sci fi office environment. make the minimum purchase price something like 20-49 bucks and if you have a fan page with say 3k people who like what you are doing....multiply that by your conversion rate and you should have a decent idea of what you could make. here is a quick example:

    release a product at $35, lets say your conversion rate for your fb fan page is 10% (pretty conservative) and you have 3000 people who you are directly advertising to now, who already like your stuff and know you put out good shit. well do the math.... 3000 fans x 0.10 conversion = 300 sales (low estimate) x 35 bucks (which in reality is cheap as fuck for amazing content) = $10.5k when launching a new product based off a fan page alone, never mind organic shares and sales. In this example 35 bucks is extremely low if the content is amazing. People regularly pay well over a hundred for online courses, and I know of some that are charging over $500 for a course and raking in the cash. The content has to be amazing though and you cant look at this as get rich quick.

    if you ask me that's a pretty gangster ass side hustle that will keep generating passive income in the long term as well, especially as you put out more and more. Most successful people who publish books on kindle are making money off the long term when they have a library of content people go and buy all of them after discovering the content producer. 

    little rambly and losey goosey with the numbers but in my eyes thats conservative for a side hustle project with very little effort in marketing. you could probably even fine tune your fb ads over time so you are spending say 500 bucks a month in ad revenue, but making huge returns off it. I could get more into it but those are the basic concepts. even releasing 2-3 big products a year, you could have total freedom to work from wherever you want in the world, like say live in thailand for 1k a month expenses, banking the other 9.5k into a savings account. Only thing is, you have to take action. 
  • Joost
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    Interesting post. I experimented with Google ads for a while but I never managed to get my cost per click to be significantly under my earnings per click. I didn't have any accurate way of measuring the actual conversion rate and EPC through Google adwords but by entering the data in a spreadsheet it seemed like people who clicked on google ads were less likely to donate than people who find my content organically(Which makes sense.) I've never used Facebook to promote anything, do you think it would be worth setting up a "fan" page for my personal situation? One thing I have found very useful, if not essential, is the mailing list in Gumroad. 

    Another interesting stat: I have 1 product on the UE4 marketplace and currently it's earning me about the same revenue as all of my products on Gumroad combined!  Because I haven't released any new products on there recently.  That just shows how important discoverability is.
  • mediochrea
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    mediochrea polycounter lvl 10
    Slightly (totally) off-topic, but while the seller experience seems to be decent, the buyer experience on the other hand is the opposite. Abysmal download speeds, no way to search or categorize your library, constant logouts, no way to view recent tutorials from authors that you're subscribed to except from emails, I could go on. And it's been like this for a while. I really hope that Cubebrush takes the market from Gumroad, they seem to be gearing their service towards everyone, not just the seller.
  • Jonas Ronnegard
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    Slightly (totally) off-topic, but while the seller experience seems to be decent, the buyer experience on the other hand is the opposite. Abysmal download speeds, no way to search or categorize your library, constant logouts, no way to view recent tutorials from authors that you're subscribed to except from emails, I could go on. And it's been like this for a while. I really hope that Cubebrush takes the market from Gumroad, they seem to be gearing their service towards everyone, not just the seller.
    It's true that gumroad has very few options for buyers, it was not long ago the search function appeared so I'm hoping that's just the start.

    Cubebrush is good for buyers, sadly it doesn't have much for the sellers, and missing any way to interact with your customers. At the moment, what I make at cubebrush in a month I make at gumroad in half a day, hopefully they will give more options for sellers and sales will increase as it gets more popular.
  • ExcessiveZero
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    ExcessiveZero polycounter lvl 6
    Slightly (totally) off-topic, but while the seller experience seems to be decent, the buyer experience on the other hand is the opposite. Abysmal download speeds, no way to search or categorize your library, constant logouts, no way to view recent tutorials from authors that you're subscribed to except from emails, I could go on. And it's been like this for a while. I really hope that Cubebrush takes the market from Gumroad, they seem to be gearing their service towards everyone, not just the seller.
    It's true that gumroad has very few options for buyers, it was not long ago the search function appeared so I'm hoping that's just the start.

    Cubebrush is good for buyers, sadly it doesn't have much for the sellers, and missing any way to interact with your customers. At the moment, what I make at cubebrush in a month I make at gumroad in half a day, hopefully they will give more options for sellers and sales will increase as it gets more popular.
    I agree for Cubebrush I find the conversion rate is oddly much lower too, anyone here had experience with Udemy? because I have been looking at that as a tutorial option but I know they have a vetting process which is more barriers to getting it out there, but as an udemy user I have enjoyed the content on there.
  • Pizdos
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    Joost said:
    My experience with Gumroad has been great so far.  A lot of my products are pay what you want because I firmly believe that if you create a good product people will pay for it. My biggest complaint is that sales drop significantly if I don't release any new content for a while ( As they have in the last few months.)
    I think it's also very important for people to realize that this is not a get rich quick scheme, at least not from my experience. If I work it out to an hourly wage it's definitely less than I'd be earning working at McDonald's. 

    My biggest donation (!) was $200 from someone in China, which was shocking to say the least.

    I feel a bit weird doing this but I've decided to share my full sales statistics so that maybe someone out there can learn something from them.







    Interesting, and thanks for sharing this data.

    I am selling a part of my assets on Turbosquid, and frankly, i am not even close to what you've achieved as money. Congratulations!

    Also, I was thinking a system like a virtual store gives you visibility opportunity and help with sales, seems not. Or maybe Turbosquid is just over spammed with 3D stuff and is very difficult to be discovered.
  • PixelMasher
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    PixelMasher veteran polycounter
    on  a side note, for those who have created the content already, that is the hardest part done. Now you have an evergreen infomational product you can market and sell. looking into info product marketing and basics of internet marketing is the easy part and can significantly impact your personal level of income if you apply yourself for a couple months. 
  • Joost
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    Joost polycount sponsor
    I love Cubebrush as a site,it's got great potential. I do hope it manages to gain more popularity. I'll try to do my part in promoting it as well as Gumroad.

    Pizdos said:

    Interesting, and thanks for sharing this data.

    I am selling a part of my assets on Turbosquid, and frankly, i am not even close to what you've achieved as money. Congratulations!

    I believe openness benefits everyone! :)

    Again,I must stress that I put in a LOT of hours to create all of my content. But yeah I'm very pleased with the results so far. Especially considering the majority is from donations.

    on  a side note, for those who have created the content already, that is the hardest part done. Now you have an evergreen infomational product you can market and sell. looking into info product marketing and basics of internet marketing is the easy part and can significantly impact your personal level of income if you apply yourself for a couple months. 
    Thanks for the tip! I'm going to try to do a bit more marketing to get my products out there. 

  • PixelMasher
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    PixelMasher veteran polycounter
    Joost said:
    Thanks for the tip! I'm going to try to do a bit more marketing to get my products out there. 

    Nice man :) like i said, the hardest part that requires the most effort is over. look up some youtube videos on facebook ads, make sure they are late 2015/2016 and you should get some ideas flowing. the email list from gumroad is invaluable like you said, be sure to blast that each time you release a new product.

     I did some quick looking around and while I dont know his numbers a great example of how to use gumroad effectively seems to be Tim B. I think everyone has seen his tutorials by now, and he is using fb as well, dont know if he is running ads but has a fan page to help crush it! https://gumroad.com/timb
    follow this guys great example and im sure cash will come raining in.
  • Joost
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    Shinigami said:
    i dont quite like his highpoly modeling approach. His edges are way too sharp and have pinching too. All he does is use the chamfer modifier but a beginner wont quite know what matters in subd or anything. Dont get me wrong his work is quite impressive but still, looking at his stuff isnt very appealing to me. I moved away from his ak47 on sketchfab viewer. Most of the edges turned jaggy very fast. My 2 cents.
    I don't agree with that statement at all but regardless of that, it's completely irrelevant to this thread.
  • PixelMasher
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    PixelMasher veteran polycounter
    Shinigami said:

    i dont quite like his highpoly modeling approach. His edges are way too sharp and have pinching too. All he does is use the chamfer modifier but a beginner wont quite know what matters in subd or anything. Dont get me wrong his work is quite impressive but still, looking at his stuff isnt very appealing to me. I moved away from his ak47 on sketchfab viewer. Most of the edges turned jaggy very fast. My 2 cents.
    I was more referring to his ratio of free content, low price stuff and higher priced packages, as well as how he has links to a fb fan page to help build a recurring audience etc. 
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    How does gumroad deal with these $0 sales? I've read that they take 25 cents and 5% of each sale, but I have to wonder how that works when you can 'sell' for nothing?
  • Jonas Ronnegard
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    PolyHertz said:
    How does gumroad deal with these $0 sales? I've read that they take 25 cents and 5% of each sale, but I have to wonder how that works when you can 'sell' for nothing?
    they have a monthly fee that allows you to send mails etc, and the price you pay depends on the amount of customers you have including the free sales,
    I think I'm paying 200$ a month right now, and I think the highest amount you have to pay is 250$ after that they don't charge you more.
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    Sounds like it would be a bad idea to go all-in with the 'pay what you want' model then, as you could potentially (depending on how greedy your customers are) end up spending more in fees then what you make.
  • Jonas Ronnegard
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    well if you only have free stuff you should not sign up for that, but free stuff helps in getting an audience and in my case let's people sample my stuff before commiting to buy anything, so I think it's worth it, and I would probably hit the cap sometime sooner or later anyway.
  • Lucas Annunziata
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    Lucas Annunziata polycounter lvl 13
    Super awesome thread here, and thanks a ton Joost for posting your sales stats. This thread inspired me to start my own gumroad and I've been really impressed by the analytics, but especially the mailing system workflows. Do you get access to more advanced mailing features after you subscribe to gumroad? Specifically do you know if there is any way to A - B test your emails?
  • Amsterdam Hilton Hotel
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    Amsterdam Hilton Hotel insane polycounter
    +1 thanks to Joost, very interesting to see concrete numbers.
  • Jonas Ronnegard
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    Super awesome thread here, and thanks a ton Joost for posting your sales stats. This thread inspired me to start my own gumroad and I've been really impressed by the analytics, but especially the mailing system workflows. Do you get access to more advanced mailing features after you subscribe to gumroad? Specifically do you know if there is any way to A - B test your emails?
    The mailing system should work the same, but if you are a free user I think you are limited to 1 mail a month also I think you can't create unlimited workflows.
  • Joost
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    Thanks guys, hope it's useful! 

    I also just found out that apparently the fee for free users has gone up to 8.5% +$0.30 per charge. I was told that by Gumroad support so I assume it's accurate. If you have 10 people donate $1, as far as I understand it, you will pay Gumroad $3.85 (38.5%!)
    If I average out all of my sales between July and now I spent about 11.3% on fees. That's because a lot of my customers pay small amounts, as they're donations.

    So that's something to keep in mind.

    Cubebrush only has the 5% fee but any sales through the marketplace have a 30% fee.

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