Gumroad seller experience?
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?
Replies
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.
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.
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.
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.
(I actually think it would be a killer money maker for artists)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for the tip! I'm going to try to do a bit more marketing to get my products out there.
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.
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.
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.