Sahel Lavangia, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. You are the founder of Gumroad. You wrote a mega viral blog post earlier this year called Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion Dollar Company. So once upon a time, you moved to San Francisco. You were employee number two at Pinterest. You started your own company, Gum Road, and you raised millions of dollars from investors, even tweeted about how this is going to be a billion dollar company.

Fast. at Pinterest. You started your own company, Gumroad, and you raised millions of dollars

from investors. You even tweeted about how this is going to be a billion dollar company. Fast forward a few years. You took a much more endy hacker approach. You moved to Provo, Utah. You bought out most of your investors. And you just got to have focused on generating revenue, not trying to get to some billion dollar valuation anymore. And what's cool about this is you're doing it all with the same company.

One of very few founders, I think, to take the high gross startup approach and the Indie Hacker approach with the same business. So let's talk about that for a bit. What are some of the differences between these two lifestyles as a founder? And what are some of the things that have stayed the same? Yeah, it is sort of fascinating because most people,

you know, especially when you raise venture, one of the things that happens is you're stuck,

right? You're sort of with those people for the rest of the journey of the company. People

always joke that it's like harder to fire, your co-founder, your investors than it is to get

a divorce. And so yeah, it's kind of this strange

thing that happened to no credit of my own that I was able to sort of buy back mostly investors

and sort of like basically start from scratch. I think in terms of the differences, I would say

the number one difference is that I do not prioritize it above everything else. So, you know,

when I raised money for Gumrod, when we started

growing the team and all of that stuff, like Gumrad was the thing in my life, right? It was the

most important thing. It was probably, sleep was probably number one. Gumrod was probably number two,

exercise number three, et cetera.

You know, in my personal life and all of those things were sort of at the bottom.

And even my personal life, I sort of had architected it in a way that it was meant to further gum road, right?

All of my friends, meetings, how I'd spend my time, even if I wasn't at the office, was all about,

you know, sort of like, how do I sort of benefit gumroad, you know? And I felt like I had a

duty to do that. I'd raised a bunch of venture capital. You know, I'd raised $8.1 million

from, you know, sort of a list of Silicon Valley Angels and VCs and things.

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