Nathan Barry’s Lessons Learned Earning $355,759 through Gumroad | Hacker News Reader

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

blog.gumroad.com

41 pointssahillavingia16 comments

'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.

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.

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".

Exactly!

And someone who says "Exponentially better" rather than "much better" is the kind of person who might have a button marked "proactively validate" rather than "confirm".

At the same time, it's hard to get enthusiasm across in emails. I'm no poet. I just get put off when I'm reading a pitch and mentally trip on some out of place phrase.

Sorry, I was using the term exponentially to mean "a huge increase" in the same way people tend to abuse the term "literally" when they really mean "figuratively." Our math PhD on our data science team just gave me a thorough scolding. You'd like him. www.gumroad.com/jobs

nbd, I wouldn't have written it if I'd have known it'd dominate the comments section like this. I probably would like him, and I would probably like Gumroad too if I used it - it looks well conceived and executed.

Don't let me grinch your day.

And if grinch is actually a poorly defined term that's slipped into common usage and I'm applying here incorrectly... irony.

Forget provable - better/worse UX is not even quantifiable, it's a qualitative (often subjective) statement.

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.

Out of all the things to focus on in the article it's that?

Nope. There are lots of much more interesting things in the article. That's just the one that jumped out at me as I read the first paragraph. And it's already got more screen space than it probably deserves. Onwards to other topics!

Much more interesting? Mathematically more interesting!

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.

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%.

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.

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.

Indeed. His newsletter is chockfull of great content.

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