How To Make a Fortune on Gumroad in One Week
The missing guide
Tales of success inspire, but success often hinges on untold circumstances.
This morning I “accidentally” clicked on another “How to I made $3561 in One Week on Gumroad” article. I couldn’t resist but skimmed the entire thing because I had a hunch: It doesn’t talk about how the author made $3561 on Gumroad, but how anyone can make that money on Gumroad.
Huge difference.
Let’s forget that ChatGPT generated the article, and it contained nothing that we don’t already know:
- Find a niche
- Research the market
- Create a high-quality product
- Set Your Pricing
- Promote your products
So if it’s this simple to make $3k on Gumroad in a week, why you didn’t do it already?
Oh, wait, I know! Because these are not the actual steps to making money on Gumroad, but these are.
Contribute To a Niche
Finding a niche doesn’t say much about what you actually do once you find this niche of yours.
You become part of it. Contribute to the topics that are frequently brought up. Help people who just joined and learn from the seasoned pros. And make it about them. Instead of saying, look, here’s what I made, say, here’s what I made to help you do X. Help is the ultimate contribution you can give to a niche and where everything starts.
Build Credibility
Use your real name — people will remember it! You’ll see this advice often when researching building personal brands on Social Media. As you help more people, they’ll learn your profile picture and name and associate it with credibility.
This is why I run as Akos instead of G0blin_Commander64 and have my face as my profile picture instead of some 8-bit art. It’s easily recognizable, and when people see my name and face in their feed, they know they’re about to expect something about writing and community building.
Provide Value for Free
Your first step to making any money on Gumroad is making $0 on Gumroad. Build a free product you wish existed when you started, and give it away for free.
My first product on Gumroad was a searchable, well-organized collection of my Twitter threads:
Before I retired it last year, it got me 393 emails. That’s 393 people you can pitch your first paid product to.
Social Proof
Agencies have testimonials on their website. Products have reviews on Amazon. Where do you keep your reviews?
Save all positive feedback and keep them organized. On Twitter, I have a bookmark folder for shoutout tweets where I save tweets thanking me for something I made and how the person benefited from it.
In my Inbox, when I get an email providing feedback about my product, I tag it so I can easily find it when I need social proof.
Sell
If you ticked all the above boxes, now is the right time to create a product that provides substantially more value than your free products. You don’t want to sell some junk to the people who already trusted you. Credibility is tough to build up, and it’s easy to destroy.
I launched my first paid product in 2022 and made some money with it, but what I learned from the process is worth more. Here’s a Twitter thread where I summarised everything:
Conclusion
It’s not as easy as ChatGPT makes it look like. For some people, the making $Xk moment comes after years of dedicated work and sacrifices.
Of course, nothing compares to the feeling of making many in your sleep.
Thanks for reading this, and I wish you luck on Gumroad!
- Akos
I publish articles on writing, audience building, and personal development once or twice a week. Join 350+ others reading my newsletter at akoskm.substack.com.
