Nathan Barry’s Lessons Learned Earning $355,759 through Gumroad

http://blog.gumroad.com/post/73421524134/nathan-barrys-lessons-learned-selling-355-759-on

by sahillavingia • 13 years ago

41 16 13 years ago

blog.gumroad.com

dojomouse5• 13 years ago

'In his well-crafted pitch to get me to consider using Gumroad he ended with, “and the UX is exponentially better than other marketplaces.”'

If someone tells me their thing is 'exponentially' better than something else, I tend to put them in my 'hype merchants who use words without worrying what they mean' box. Whic isn't a good box.

nathanbarry2• 13 years ago

Good thing Ryan knew his audience: great UX is something I really care about. So I gave it a try and he wasn't exaggerating. The UX really is that much better than any other platform I had tried.

austinhutch• 13 years ago

I think dojomouse is referring to the idea of "exponential" being something quantifiably provable and it being used in this instance without anything actually being "exponential".

dojomouse5• 13 years ago

It's not about whether UX is important or not - and I agree it is. It's about what 'exponentially better' means. Which is to say, nothing technical, and hence something buzzwordy without a solid foundation.

It doesn't detract from the product I'm sure. But he could just as easily have said 'vastly superior', and so doing not made me go 'Danger, danger, casual disregard for meaning ahead'. Especially since disregard for meaning is a bad thing in UI design.

djb_hackernews• 13 years ago

There is a lot of really great info in this post, well done Gumroad.

My question to Barry would be: Given that multiple packages increased revenue 3x, how much extra work and time did it take to produce the extra materials?

I've never done anything like that, but I'm imagining it being a lot more time, effort, and money to put together useful supplement material and create video tutorials.

nathanbarry2• 13 years ago

It's definitely a lot more work, and since I hate tracking time, it's hard to quantify.

The book is the majority of the work. I would guess that adding multiple packages increases the amount of work by 50-75%.

cordie• 13 years ago

I'm just starting on my journey with products and Nathan's produced so much content that I can look to for advice. I couldn't imagine the difficulty without having those available.

Congrats Nathan.

kroger• 13 years ago

Indeed. His newsletter is chockfull of great content.

joelrunyon• 13 years ago

Congrats Nathan!

1 big glaring thing I've found with gumroad is that it doesn't integrate directly with email providers. I think you can hack the functionality with zapier or similar services - but I'm really surprised there are no direct integrations.

Nathan Barry’s Lessons Learned Earning $355,759 through Gumroad

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