Gumroad helps creators share and inspire with Airtable

In the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco is an innovative startup that helps creators make money doing what they love.

Since February 2012, Gumroad has succeeded in connecting thousands of creators with their audiences.

Writers, designers, developers, musicians, artists, and filmmakers have turned their passions into their livelihoods with Gumroad by selling their content directly to consumers.

As well as empowering independent creators, small publishers, and up-and-comers, Gumroad’s base includes artists such as Eminem and Bon Jovi, bestselling authors including Tim Ferriss, and production companies such as Magnolia Pictures.

Finding the right tool

With such a thriving business, Gumroad needed a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) system to efficiently manage their clients, partners, and deals. Unfortunately for Gumroad, all of the existing CRM products they tried were highly inflexible and largely inapplicable for the company’s business development team, whose activities had more to do with relationship building and partnerships than traditional sales.

Turning to Airtable, Gumroad crafted their own CRM to track the most relevant aspects of their process.

“Over the years, I’ve tried all sorts of tools to track our deals, including Salesforce, RelateIQ, and even Google Sheets,” says Ryan Delk, Head of Business Development at Gumroad. “With Airtable, we created a workflow that perfectly matches how we work.”

With Airtable, we created a workflow that perfectly matches how we work.

From musicians to production studios

Airtable allows Gumroad’s business development team to manage not only individual creator deals, but also larger partnerships with record labels and production companies. Contact details are linked directly to the corresponding deals or partnerships, and the team can monitor the date of last contact with a client or assign follow-up tasks. Gumroad team members can also easily exchange internal notes about particular clients within the base.

With the help of Airtable, Gumroad is able to reach more creators so that these creators, in turn, can reach their own audiences. You can see Gumroad’s redacted business development approach in Airtable here.

Airtable: Organize anything you can imagine.

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