Sahil Lavingia is a seriously talented guy. At 18 and as a freshman at USC, he deferred after the first semester and joined the Pinterest team as one of the original founding team members having developed their iPhone and iPad apps. That's a story for next week. In August 2011 he left Pinterest (what!?! This better be good) to start his own company called Gumroad.
Gumroad is attempting to making transactions as frictionless and simple as possible. Instead of complicated forms and pay walls, Gumroad's clients send out a link like this, and their customers can purchase the digital or physical good immediately. There's no account signup, no cumbersome approval process, just click and buy.
The system is designed to thrive on social sharing hubs like Twitter and Facebook. "Our goal is to make selling stuff as easy as sharing stuff. Sharing a picture or selling something should be the same. It should be as easy as Bit.ly" Sahil said. If a designer wants to sell an asset they've created, or a musician wants to sell a song, they can tweet it out and bypass the distribution channels that take a 30% cut. Could Gumroad get Kanye West to stop using iTunes to release his music in favor of distributing it himself using Twitter? Probably not because the value iTunes will provide to a brand like Kanye is still major. But I could see a small indie band with an existing following using it immediately.
It's unlikely you will find a more simple way to pay for something. This is good and bad. Simple is great, but for a payments platform that may mean more fraud. With no address fields or Paypal-like verified payers, there's definitely more risk. But it's a risk I'm willing to take. I am so tired of Paypal and other existing payment solutions that this product is a breath of fresh air.
Now 19, Sahil is also the type of entrepreneur you want to root for. The guy walked away from Pinterest and the stock that he would have received because as he put it, "working on something that you created yourself is so much more fulfilling than working for someone else." Having designed Pinterest's mobile applications, you'd think he would go mobile first, but he wanted to build a money making web-based product first. "Having customers use your product feels great, but you can’t imagine how much better it feels when someone pays for it.” Well said.
Gumroad's angel funding is from the top angel investors in Silicon Valley. Why take money on a potentially profitable product? Sahil says he took money "because then I didn’t have to worry about it and I could focus on the product." Currently the team consists of just him, but he plans to hire more team members once there is a need for them.
----------------
The link goes to a landing page to buy the item.
Customers easily enter their payment details.
The virtual goods can be emailed or downloaded via link.