I went from nothing to becoming part of a small, world-class team in tech — in just a year and a half.
It started with an idea. I tend to ideate a lot, and once thought of using AI to automate browser operations. Like — what if you could just instruct AI to perform tasks for you autonomously in the browser? Though I was not sure about product-market fit, and knew the distributiton — and especially motetisation — wouldn’t be an easy, and well, I just had too much else going on. So the idea has been sitting in my head for a while.
Until I came across Sahil Lavingia’s tweet about a new product he’d just launched. It was a variation of my own idea — only applied to the QA testing niche. The product went viral and gained several thousand stars on Github in a week. I realized two things: a big tech company had built my idea, which apparently validated it — and that I found a better way to bring it to life – and to the hands of people – and it’s through contributing to an existing product instead of creating one myself.
In the next several weeks I helped Gumroad’s team ship the following features:
- Caching — boosted performance by 600%
- Bash tool — introduced a way to test API functionality end-to-end
- Support for iOS and Android apps — extended the system to mobile platforms, laying the foundation for running automation flows inside native apps (big one, but not released).
As it later turned out, it was just the right time to build a product like that — tools like Claude Computer Use started to emerge, which considerably simplified the technical implementation.
Things were moving pretty quickly and I got really excited about the work I was doing. I felt I was doing something that is truly innovating — no products like that had existed before — we were pioneers.
At some point, I expressed my willingness to joing the company. And I got in.
Althought my time at the company was brief — just one official week of work, totaling about four weeks overall — I have learned a lot. I’d now like to take this opportunity to answer the two questions.
What got me into Gumroad — and what I need to remember going forward?
- As you remember, everything started with one, unclear idea. There’s this unexplained Low of Attraction — where your ideas attract people, ideas, and oportunities. This time, it happened when I came across a post on X.
- Contribute to open-source. I believe there’s huge potential in OSS — especially for those who haven’t yet had the chance to prove themselves. Sometimes your work is worth far more than the recognition it gets. OSS’s one of the best ways to get noticed and prove your worth.
- Don’t go where everyone goes. Would I have gotten into a company if I applied via their careers page? Certainly not. Not because I am less capable or competitive, but because of the bureaucracy. It’s hard to stand out in a crowd – and the truth is, good talent often goes unnoticed. Sasha Lukin, someone far more experienced than me, brought this up when talking about Big Tech:
Applying to Google via the careers page simply doesn’t work. It just doesn’t.
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