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Gumroad is a platform that enables creators to sell products directly to consumers. Designer Sahil Lavingia founded the company in 2011 with the intention of making selling as easy as social sharing.〔Shontell, Alyson. ("The Most Interesting Teenager in Sillicon Valley" ), ''Business Insider'', 2 April 2012.〕 The company has received more than $8 million in funding.〔("Gumroad’s Crunchbase", Crunchbase )〕 Creators of all types, such as authors, comedians, designers, filmmakers, musicians, and software developers, use Gumroad to sell products directly to consumers, mostly digital content like albums, comics, ebooks, films, games, music, or tutorials. Gumroad is built as a plug-and-play product that offers payment processing, file hosting and delivery, marketing and communications tools, and consumption experiences for a diverse array of verticals.〔("Gumroad.com" ), ''Gumroad.com''〕 Lavingia has stated that his product philosophy is to ask what creators spend their time on making things, and then build features for Gumroad that do those above-mentioned logistics functions for them.〔("Gumroad Library for iPhone" ), ''Gumroad Blog''〕 Gumroad’s model is notable for the decentralized nature of its marketplace, placing the product emphasis on the relationship between the creator and consumer, instead of discovery. It is also notable for having a substantially lower fee than other commerce platforms (5% + 25¢).〔Flaherty, Joseph. ("Sell to Your Friends: New Startup Gumroad Makes It Easy" ), ''Wired'', 7 June 2012.〕 == History == Sahil Lavingia built the first iteration of Gumroad in a single weekend, in 2011. Lavingia, previously the first designer hired at Pinterest and the designer of the Turntable.fm app, was 19 years old at the time.〔Holmes, David. ("Who’s Next: Pinterest Designer Sahil Lavingia and His New E-Commerce Site Gumroad" ), ''Fast Company'', 25 April 2012.〕〔Tsotsis, Alexia. ("Gumroad Gets $1.1 Million From Chris Sacca, Max Levchin and Others to Turn Any Link Into a Payment System" ), ''TechCrunch'', 8 Feb 2012.〕〔Shontell, Alyson. ("The Most Interesting Teenager in Sillicon Valley" ), ''Business Insider'', 2 April 2012.〕 The idea came to Lavingia when he wanted to sell a photorealistic icon he’d created and realized that the amount of effort - even for an engineer and designer with a deep technical skill set - it took to sell an item directly to consumers was considerable. He decided to build a product that would make selling digital content as easy as sharing it.〔Holmes, David. ("Who’s Next: Pinterest Designer Sahil Lavingia and His New E-Commerce Site Gumroad" ), ''Fast Company'', 25 April 2012.〕 In February 2012, while still the sole member of the company, Lavingia announced a $1.1 million seed round from a notable group of investors including Accel Partners, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Naval Ravikant, Collaborative Fund, and Danny Rimer.〔Tsotsis, Alexia. ("Gumroad Gets $1.1 Million From Chris Sacca, Max Levchin and Others to Turn Any Link Into a Payment System" ), ''TechCrunch'', 8 Feb 2012.〕 Several months later in May 2012, it was announced that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers had led a $7 million Series A round for Gumroad. The investment was the first made by former Twitter engineering head Michael Abbott as a KPCB partner.〔Gannes, Liz. ("Kleiner Perkins Leads $7M Funding for Payments Upstart Gumroad" ), ''All Things Digital'', 7 May 2012.〕 On September 8, 2014, Twitter announced its first commerce product, the Buy Now button, in partnership with Gumroad.〔Brustein, Joshua. ("Explaining Twitter’s New ‘Buy’ Button" ), ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', 8 September 2014.〕 On September 30, Gumroad released its first mobile product, a utility iPhone app that acts as a mobile library for digital content purchased via Gumroad.〔Ifeanyi, KC. ("Online Marketplace Gumroad Launched An iPhone App" ), ''Fast Company'', 30 September 2014.〕〔DBW. ("New Gumroad iPhone App Helps Authors Sell EBooks Direct" ), ''Digital Book World'', 30 September 2014.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gumroad」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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