#237 – The Minimalist Entrepreneur with Sahil Lavingia of Gumroad

What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from ndhackers.com, and you're listening to the Indie Hackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these Indie Hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. I'm here with Sahil Lavinia. Sahil, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. Always excited to do this. Excited to have you. I'm here with your book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur. Got a copy with me, How Great Founders Do More With Less. First question I asked everybody who writes a book is why did you write a book? You could have a newsletter. You could I mean, you've got a huge Twitter presence. You could be blogging. Why why book? Yeah. Well, certainly, there's nothing unique to the book in the sense that, you know, everything interesting and smart that I have to say, I want that stuff to reach as many people as possible. So that's you know, my Twitter is kind of, like, the best place for for all of that. But I think that, I don't know, like, a book is is just different. Like, I think there's something nice about having an artifact that I can kinda point people towards and say, hey. You know, if you are interested in my sort of thoughts on sales, marketing, hiring, culture, basically, anything, you know, that that has to do with building business and starting starting a business, I guess, most importantly, I want there to be kind of a single place that people can go and get it. Right? And I find that, like, Twitter and emails and all that stuff, I think, is great, but it it's it's the opposite of timeless, I find. Like, it's kinda very relevant, and it's great for getting distribution in the moment. But I wanted to write something that, like, 10 from now, people could look back and say, okay. This is so, like, useful stuff. But, honestly, it was, like, it was hard. I mean, like It is hard. I've never done it, but it's kind of why I haven't done it. I'm like, that seems hard. The returns are not as obvious. Right? Like, I think there are some examples of, like, the, like, atomic habits. Mhmm. It is probably the most successful book that has kinda come out of our corner of the universe, you know, for in the last, like, kind of five years or so. And then maybe, like, the psychology of money recently by Morgan Housel has also done very, very, very well. But even then, like, they don't really compare it to, like, if you're attack like, you know, in terms of money, in terms of reach, in terms of distribution, like, it is, like, it is this interesting weird thing to wrap your …