A few weeks ago I checked how much I made from Gumroad in my entire time of using it and was delighted to see I had crossed over $1 Million in sales.
I’ve been a top seller on Gumroad for the past 4 years straight.
Needless to say, I know what I’m talking about when it comes to making money from Gumroad.
Here are the big pieces of advice:
How to Make 1 Million Dollars With Gumroad
1) Build an Audience
Your audience is your source of customers.
Getting customers is the most important thing for any business. Where do you get your customers from?
A physical shop has billboards and walk-ins.
A digital shop has two options:
- Organic traffic (eg. your own YouTube account, X account, etc.)
- Inorganic traffic (eg. paid ads)
Paid ads cost a bunch of money and require you to be very good with copywriting and marketing, so most of you will need to go the organic traffic route.
This means you need to build an audience.
This can be on any platform of your choice – X, YouTube, Instagram, Rumble, or somewhere else.
What’s important is that people should get exposed to you, your brand, and your content.
Look at the biggest creators on Gumroad.
What do they all have in common?
A big audience somewhere.
In my case I have ~400k followers on X, a blog that gets hundreds of thousands of readers, and a fairly big email list.
Build your audience. It’s one of the biggest assets your business has. Any platform is fine – just get started.
2) Credibility, Authority, and Trust
This is also really important because having an audience alone is not enough. You need to make sure the content has three things:
Credibility – Your content has to show people that you know what you are talking about.
If you are talking about fitness, be fit. If you are talking about getting rich, be rich. If you’re going to talk about relationships, it needs to be clear that you have real life experience.
People don’t take out their card to pay someone who they think has no business even speaking about a certain topic.
Authority – Your content has to be authoritative. People have to know that you are an expert in your field.
Don’t say “I think I can maybe perhaps help you”. Say “I can help you”. Big difference. Tell them why you are the expert and why they should listen to you. Make it clear that you have top tier knowledge on the topic.
People want to have their problems solved by experts. People don’t take out their card to pay someone who lacks authority and isn’t an expert.
Trust – Use your content to demonstrate to people that the product actually works and does what it claims to do. If people trust that your product will solve their problem, they will buy.
No one takes out their card to buy something they think will not work (to state the obvious).
3) There’s only one type of product that sells: Products that solve a problem.
If your product doesn’t solve a problem, it won’t make a ton of sales.
For example, take my product Live Intentionally. It’s a 90 day self-improvement guide that helps people be more disciplined, lose fat, wake up early, and develop better habits. Is the product solving a problem for the buyer? Yes.
I’ve made 12,500+ sales on Gumroad for that product.
On the other hand, if I had made a product called “The history and theory of discipline” I would probably had made less than 10% of sales. Because that doesn’t solve the customer’s problem.
Another product from my store, The Complete Web Design Course ™ has made over $100k in sales. It’s a product that teaches you graphic design and also shows you how to get online clients and make money with it.
Is it solving a problem? Yes. It’s the solution for people who want to build an online business but don’t have any high paying skills and don’t know how and where to get clients even if they had the skill.
Solve a problem your audience has. People will pay for that.
Don’t make products that are general and don’t help the customer directly. Those are fine as $10 paperbacks but no one is paying hundreds of dollars for them.
That brings me to the next point:
4) Make sure you price the product right.
The price for a product depends on the kind of product it is, how much value it has, and how much effort you constantly put into it.
$20, $200, and $2000 are all valid price points if the value in the product is more than the price.
For example, my product The Art of X costs $297 for its top variant. (At the moment. I increase the price from time to time as I add new updates and increase the value in the guide.)
I wouldn’t make it cheap because I update the guide constantly (thus I keep investing my time into it), I know the product will help the customer make much more than the sticker price they pay me, and I offer a long 6 month money back guarantee in case the product doesn’t work for them.
On the other hand, I also have a $19.99 product because it needs no updates and is a simple PDF compiling some old emails that I originally sent out for free.
My advice: Build higher price products so you have the $$$ to provide great service and also make some good money yourself.
If you build a product that’s only worth $10, you need 100,000 customers to make one million dollars.
If you build a $500 product, you only need 2000. This is far more manageable.
Just make sure the value in the product is a lot more than the price tag. You want people to be delighted with what they purchase and give you great reviews.
5) Build a variety of products.
Gumroad lets you sell a whole bunch of different types of products like ebooks, video lectures, entire courses, calls, consulting, etc. so don’t stick to only one or two products.
If your brand is good and your information is valuable, people will buy more than ebooks from you.
They might want to buy a video lecture or a seminar, or pay you to join your private community.
Many people will want to pay you for a 1-on-1 call with you – so if you have the time, have a paid consulting option.
You should also build a free product. They are useful for building your email list (more on this later).
6) Collaborate with people.
You don’t have to create everything yourself and to be honest, it’s impossible to have a diverse range of products that you built because you cannot be an expert at everything.
This is where collaborations come in.
This is a useful feature built right into Gumroad.
Two creators can create a product, decide on a profit split, and Gumroad will automatically split the money from each sale and give to each of the creators their share.
For example, take one of our products The Complete Graphic Design Course™. It was not created by me but by my web designer Sean who makes $200k+ a year from his design business.
This product has generated almost $25k in sales in just a few months in launch. I could not have made it by myself because I don’t know much about graphic design. Sean on the other hand does this every day and knows how to get clients.
He provides the expertise and the knowledge, I provide the audience and the marketing, and Gumroad automatically splits the profits and deposits them in our accounts.
We don’t have to do any complex accounting work. Gumroad handles it all for us.
It also takes out the scope for disputes and misunderstandings because Gumroad acts as the trusted party in the middle who does everything. It doesn’t get any simpler.
If you have an audience, find experts and collaborate with them to build useful products. If you are an expert in something but don’t have an audience, find someone who does and build with them.
It’s that simple.
7) Have affiliates.
Affiliates mean that you allow other people to market your products and generate sales for you. In exchange, the get a cut of the sale.
If you do not have an affiliate program, the sales of your product will be limited to your audience (and Gumroad Discover but that’s a different article for a different day).
With an affiliate program, you can allow other people to show your product to their audiences. They make money and you get access to entirely new people. Win-Win.
The standard commission rate most people offer is 50%. This is on gross sales (i.e. on sales price, before any fees). With the Gumroad fee being 10% + payment processing fee(~5%), you keep around 35% of the sale price.
If you want to keep a higher portion of the revenue, offer a lower commission rate.
If you want people to promote your product more, you can offer a higher rate. For example, my affiliate program offers commission rates as high as 75%. After Gumroad and credit card fees, I only keep around 10% of the sale price but I view it as a brand marketing expense.
That said, I have ~2000 affiliates who help me generate a lot of sales and get me tons of eyes on my brand.
Gumroad makes having affiliates EASY because signing up is as simple as filling out a form (you can check it by clicking the link to my affiliate program).
They automatically do the tracking, split the commission, and pays the affiliate on autopilot every week.
Back in the day you had to do payouts manually which was fairly complex because you’d have to track and account for refunds, pay different people via different payment methods (often in different currencies), etc.
Gumroad takes all of that effort over and makes it really simple for you to start making affiliate sales.
Important: Make sure the product you’re selling is REALLY high quality. So much so that not just you can sell it proudly, but make it so good that other creators can sell it to their audience with confidence and pride.
8) Keep your products piracy free.
If your products are being pirated, you will lose money. There’s no arguing about it.
You need to regularly check Google (I mean every day) and promptly file DMCA notices to get the piracy removed.
If you don’t, you will lose as much as half your revenue to piracy because many people will download your product for free and then have no incentive to pay for it.
Piracy protection WILL increase your sales. So take out time and do it regularly.
The alternative to doing it yourself is using a piracy protection company like Copyright Samurai.
(Full disclosure: I’m a founder of Copyright Samurai. It was originally created by me to protect my own products from being stolen. Because all the Gumroad sellers in my network also wanted the service, I made it into a company).
9) Run discounts.
Run discounts from time to time.
I’ve seen some sellers who never run a discount because they think it hurts their brand value but this is a mistake.
When you do a discount, you capture a whole bunch of pent up demand. Many people who were “considering” your product end up buying it because of the discount.
Just make sure you’re not discounting the same product repeatedly in a short time frame.
For example, if you have 3 products – do one discount per product every month. This way each product only gets discounted 4 times a year. This doesn’t hurt your brand’s value… at all.
Even the biggest brands run sales so I have no idea where the idea that a sale hurts brand value comes from.
Also you should run sales on important spending days of the year like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, New Year, Diwali, etc.
All brands run sales around these dates and people save up money to buy products for a discount around them. It is foolish to not participate.
10) Have a few free products.
You need to have a few free products on your profile.
They allow you to:
- COLLECT EMAILS. This is so important for any business. They are your source of leads. Your email list is your most important asset and you should always build it as much as you can.
- GET PEOPLE A TASTE OF YOUR PRODUCTS.
So many people will download one of my free products and then buy my paid products.
By the way, a free product doesn’t mean you half ass it and make something low value. The free product has to be high value just like a paid product.
If you don’t get it, download my free e-book on Gumroad No-BS WiFi Money and see for yourself how much value is packed in it.
It also helps to have free products in different niches. For example, I have another free product in the health niche No-BS Guide to Diabetes which helps diabetic people live MUCH better lives.
People read them, find them valuable, and then buy my paid products which are even more valuable.
I also get their email address so I can send them more content and connect with them later.
Free products are amazing and you should create some.
Pro tip: Gumroad lets you create “pay whatever you want” products. This is perfect for free products because it allows people to give you a small payment if they choose. Not everyone does it but you’ll be surprised how many do. Gumroad has all these little features that add up.
11) Have a good money back policy.
Have a money back policy. I see some people selling “no refund” products on Gumroad and that’s bad for sales.
I understand that it’s necessary for certain types of products (like timed consultations) but for most products, it shows that you are not confident in what you’re selling and think that many people will want refunds.
My recommendation is that for products that have a small price tag, a “30-Day No-Questions-Asked Money Back Policy” is the way to go.
For higher value products, there is potential for abuse as some people might see it as a way to get a few hundred dollars worth of a product for free, so you should offer conditional refunds.
This means they get a full refund if they fulfill some kind of criteria which involves the customer showing that they’ve done the work and actually tried the product out.
For example, for The Complete Web Design Course ™ we ask them to send us a few websites they built and some pitches they sent to potential clients.
This type of money back policy is perfect because it protects you from buyer fraud and protects honest customers from making a purchase that doesn’t yield results.
By checking websites the buyer built and the pitches they made, we can confirm that they actually did the course and they didn’t make money, so of course we want to give him his money back (we don’t want to make customers unhappy).
If your product is good, your refund rate will be low. 3% is average. Ours is less than 1%.
A high refund rate means something is wrong with your product or your pricing. Instead of removing your refund policy, you need to work on the product and increase its value.
12) Use good copywriting.
Learn copywriting. It’s one of the most valuable skills on the planet.
For one of our Gumroad products, we found that our conversion rate was 0.5%. We worked on the copy and made it much better. The conversion rate improved to almost 3%.
We were now making 6 times more money on the exact same product by just changing the copy.
Copywriting is just that important. (By the way, for those unaware, “copy” means the text on the sales page).
If you have no idea what you’re doing in the copy department, read How to write a High Converting Gumroad Sales Page written by my friend and copywriter Ash. She wrote the copy for 5 of the top 10 selling products on Gumroad so she knows what she’s talking about.
13) Ask customers for reviews.
This is HUGE. You’ve got to ask customers to give you a review.
Look, some people will leave you a review if you don’t ask them but most won’t.
You can triple your reviews from people if you just ask them to leave you a review.
Every time a customer asks you for help, or reaches out and tells you how much they like your product – ask them for a review.
Hey – thank you man. I’m glad you like the product. It would be super cool if you could leave me a review on Gumroad.
Just this one line will get you so many reviews.
My products have 1000+ reviews on Gumroad. Why is that the case? Because not only do I produce great products, I also ask for reviews.
Where possible, ask people to leave you a text review. For example, here are some for my product The Art of X:
The good thing about Gumroad is that only verified buyers can leave a review (unlike Amazon) so people looking at your sales page can actually trust them.
On other platforms people think “fake reviews”. On Gumroad, they know the reviews are real because only buyers can leave them.
All you have to do is open your mouth and ASK.
In life you have to ask for what you want. People are busy and even if they like your product, they won’t specifically take out time to write you a review. This is true even if they think very highly of your product.
But they will do it if you ask them to do it.
Reviews give people confidence in your product. Someone who sees lots of glowing reviews on your sales page gains trust in the product being able to solve their problem.
If there are two heart doctors and one is recommended by everyone, and no one has a word to say about the other – who do you go to? Of course the former.
It’s that simple. Get reviews.
Gumroad allows people to collect reviews natively so ASK PEOPLE TO GIVE YOU REVIEWS.
If I could hammer this into your head I would. So many creators think they will look bad if they asked for a review but that’s just silly. If you made a good product that delights the buyer, of course he wants to help you. Just tell him how.
14) Learn how to do a good launch.
You can launch a product and make $500 in sales. Or you can launch the same product and make $30,000 in sales.
I’ve done both. The difference is the launch strategy.
Everyone and their mama think that if you have a huge audience and just create a product, it will sell. While this might be true for the long run, you are setting yourself up for a shit launch.
There are thousands of creators on the internet, and just because you showed up one day and said you have a product does not mean everyone’s just going to line up and buy from you.
You will get sales if you have an audience, but you will be disappointed if you don’t have a LAUNCH PLAN.
Let’s take a look at this tweet. This guy has 350,000+ followers.
He launched an ebook and was disheartened to see that it didn’t make much sales.
I asked him what he did for his launch and he said:
“I posted and pinned a tweet a day up my timeline and a space.”
In other words, he barely put any effort into the launch.
He built:
· NO HYPE OR ANTICIPATION
· NO AWARENESS OF THE LAUNCH
· NO PROOF OF COMPETENCE
He just made a tweet, pinned it, did a space, and thought his 350,000+ followers would line up taking their cards out to pay.
This is not how the world works.
To do a good launch, you have to build up hype, anticipation, awareness, and proof that you know what you are talking about.
In fact knowing how to launch a product is so important that I built a full product detailing my own personal launch process – it’s even got all the emails I use that you can reuse if you like. This launch process has been used countless times and it works.
You don’t have to buy it but you do have to remember that just showing up with a product one day IS NOT ENOUGH.
You must build awareness. You need to show people that you are an expert. You have to let people know that your product is coming.
See – we all know a new iPhone is going to come next year. But Apple still does a launch process where they build up hype and awareness. Why? Because it WORKS.
You MUST do a planned launch. Do not show up one day and be like “here’s my product now buy it”. Be smart about it.
Plan your launch, do the marketing, build awareness and hype, and then launch.
Don’t be the average noob who does the launch first and then the rest of the marketing work.
Launch is really important. Even for big products like the iPhone a big chunk of the sales come at launch. If Perplexity is to be believed, then 20-25% of iPhone sales happen at launch:
15) Use Upsells.
Gumroad lets you do upsells. An upsell is when you sell one product but add another product at the time of checkout.
Gumroad has an in-built feature that lets you do that:
Basically sell a product, and at the time of checkout offer them another product at a discount (or upgrade to a higher version of the product).
They are usually used to sell related products. For example, if you are selling a product related to lifting for $90, then you can upsell a video on stretching and mobility for $35.
Lots of people buy the upsell product if it’s relevant. Think from their perspective. They have their card out already. They are going to buy something. If they see another interesting thing, why not grab that at a discount as well?
Whoooo that was one long post.
Hope you found it valuable and informative.
If you did and would like to hear more from me, you can sign up to my newsletter by clicking here.
Until next time.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman
About the Author
My name is Harsh Strongman and I am the author of Life Math Money – The #1 Self-Improvement Website for Men on the Internet. I am a Chartered Accountant and a Computer Scientist by education. I own multiple SaaS companies, a tax and law consulting firm, and an affiliate marketing business.
On my website I cover all the lessons I learn from my life so that you can have an unfair advantage in life and don’t have to figure everything out the hard way. To describe it in one line, you learn what the schools won’t teach you: health, personal finance, internet business, social skills, dating skills, and more.
