Sahil Lavingia, a teenager from Palo Alto has designed a few apps before. They weren't successful. Soon, he started playing around with Photoshop. He made a pencil icon for another app.
He didn't finish that app. He thought that he could still make money on the icon because it took him a few hours to polish it. He thought about following designers on Twitter and putting the icon on a marketplace, but there wasn't a place for stuff like that.
It took him one weekend to come up with Gumroad. Gumroad was then a single Python file on top of Google App Engine. You uploaded your work, set a price, and then got a shareable link. At first, the payment was a fixed 7.5% + 25¢ from each transaction on Gumroad. Later, it was possible to choose between a few models. People started coming in. They needed it just as Sahil did.
First users came to Gumroad from emails. Sahil sent tons of them. He and his team searched for people potentially interested in Gumroad's services, and then cold-emailed them directly.
