Gumroad Case Study
A great platform built for new beginnings
About the project
Gumroad is a leading e-commerce platform that allows creators to sell products directly to their audience. Gumroad is used by creators and entrepreneurs to setup their own landing pages and sell their products.
In Feb 2017 Sahil contacted BigBinary to allow creators to put in their own Stripe and paypal accounts. In this way Gumroad would become a pure SaaS.
Approach
When Sahil contacted BigBinary then Sahil was the only person working on the product. Through various calls we understood what needed to be done and we started working on the payment integrations.
Payment Integration
Working with Stripe was pretty straight forward. However working with Paypal was tricky. They had just released a new version of their software and it had some edge cases. The documentation was also not fully updated. We had to get on calls with paypal folks multiple times to sort things out.
Web development
Besides the payment integrations BigBinary worked on a number of code improvements and new features. Webpack was the new kid on the block but it was gaining both popularity and maturity very quickly. We worked on switching Gumroad from RequireJS to webpack. During this period we published following two blogs which came out of our engagement with Gumroad.
Praise for BigBinary
on Jan 7, 2021 Sahil wrote a blog about how he runs Gumroad without any meeting, deadlines or any full-time employees. In this blog Sahil mentions the following.
Instead, I found an Indian firm called BigBinary and hired a few engineers as contractors. These contractors saved the company. They fixed bugs and maintained the site while I answered support tickets, designed features, and wrote about new initiatives.
Sahil Lavingia CEO
"BigBinary has been a huge asset for Gumroad. They've helped us ship features we wouldn't have been able to otherwise. If you’re looking for a ruby/rails-focused dev shop, they have my full endorsement!"