Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

> It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is, or how fast you ship features. The market you’re in will determine most of your growth. For better or worse, Gumroad grew at roughly the same rate almost every month because that’s how quickly the market determined we would grow.

This seems like a simplification, and perhaps overly fatalistic. A company's growth rate is a function with many parameters, and at most points, one parameter will be the limiting factor. An amazing product is (usually) a necessary, but not sufficient condition for rapid growth.

It sounds like Gumroad built a product that delighted their users, but there just wasn't a level of market demand to hit the growth numbers that they were hoping for. (Though I consider their end state a big success; being a unicorn isn't the only way to add value to your users' lives.)

In a different market, with enough pent up demand for the product, the story could have gone another way; "We kept on getting new users, but ultimately couldn't keep users because our product wasn't awesome enough."