How I would grow gumroad.com

This is the second blog post in the “How I would grow” series. The first one is about how I would grow getrewardful.

This blog post is about reinventing the discover page over at Gumroad, a site that allows creators to get paid.

The goal is to bring in more money for creators by driving more eye balls to their products in the discover page.

The page is pretty static at the time of writing this, so the first thing I would do is to bring in e-commerce dynamics like social proof, or “this was frequently bought with”.

Gumroad should already collect a lot of data from their search bar, and also from what people are buying – they should use this data to do this.

They can cross-sell customers in the app, but also using emails. I bought different things from Gumroad over the years but I didn’t get emails like: “Hey, since you bought X, you might be interested in Y” or “Hey, X creator also has Y product”.

Next, I would make it easy for customers to buy. An example of this is: Gumroad shows products in different currencies, but I, a customer from say, the US, don’t necessarily know what R$80 is. I would 100% do the conversion for the customers and display prices in their currency.

Gumroad can get the customer’ currency from the onboarding, or from geolocation, or just simply do US$.

Next, I would create collections: show customers the best sellers, or just the new stuff in dedicated areas.

Gumroad could also create “paths”, featuring similar products in dedicated areas to appeal to customers’ aspirations. Instead of having “Best selling in Film & Video”, you can have a “Master Photoshop in 30 days” path. Clear objective, and definitely more appealing.

Here is how Apple does it:

I would also use the power of stories, with a “featured creators” section. This is a mock-up I made real quick:

All the suggestions I made are good advice in order to offer people what is already on Gumroad.  What if people don’t know what they need? What if that thing is not on Gumroad yet?

That leads me to my final advice: looking at trends (I’m very biased here as I run a trend discovery platform).

I would try to understand what people are searching/discussing online. If that thing is not in Gumroad’s inventory yet, I would go recruit creators around the missing product.

It’s a win for the creator and a win for the buyer.

Thanks for reading.

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