Gumroad’s customer support team ships code with Claude
Gumroad, an e-commerce platform for digital creators, uses Claude to empower every team member to have a meaningful impact on its product. With Claude, Gumroad has seen improved customer support, faster feature shipping, and the creation of a "just fix it" culture across the company.
- 300% increase in new features shipped to production
- 4x faster feature deployment
- Significant reduction in context switching for engineers to answer customer support tickets
Enhancing agility in a remote-first culture
Gumroad, an e-commerce platform for creators to sell digital products directly to their audience, wanted to deepen and solidify its innovative edge. As a remote-first, cooperative company, Gumroad's success depended on empowering every team member to respond swiftly to customer needs and contribute to product development.
Sahil Lavingia, founder and CEO of Gumroad, shares, "Gumroad's remote-first culture and cooperative business approach make it special. We've pioneered a unique model where team members, including customer support staff, contribute to product development." This flat structure, while fostering innovation, created a need for tools that help non-technical staff contribute to technical tasks.
Lavingia approached AI cautiously. He explained, "I was concerned about its potential impact on creative industries." However, his perspective shifted upon discovering Claude's capabilities. "Seeing how Claude enhances productivity without replacing human creativity changed my perspective," Lavingia explained. "I realized AI could be a powerful tool for creators and our team."
Choosing Claude for speed, accuracy, and versatility
Gumroad chose Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its speed, accuracy, and versatility in coding tasks.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the only model fast and smart enough to assist in writing code more efficiently than a human engineer. It has virtually no hallucinations, which is important when writing code, and it's super fast.
— Sahil Lavingia, Founder and CEO of Gumroad
Vatsal Kaushik from Gumroad’s customer support team, added, “Claude is also quite accurate at locating the appropriate files and sections of the codebase that require editing. This saves a lot of time for customer supporters who lack the contextual knowledge of engineers when dealing with an evolved codebase.”
Initially, some Gumroad engineers were reluctant to switch Integrated Development Environments to one that would support Claude, but every engineer has since made the leap. On convincing the team to switch, Lavingia says, “There’s no way to know how delicious something is without tasting it. To achieve that, I had to do a little ‘Founder Mode’ — but it did not take more than a couple months for the entire team of 30+ people to be on board.”
Claude improves customer support and expedites feature development
Since adopting Claude, Gumroad's customer support team doesn't just address queries—they proactively improve the platform.
"Our customer support team uses Claude to triage and often fix issues, reducing the load on our engineering team," Lavingia explained. This enables support staff to take on tasks that previously required engineering intervention.
The following feature developments were led by the customer support team's new capabilities:
- Keyboard shortcuts for replying to tickets streamline response times
- Sorting functionality based on creator earnings will improve user experience
- Removal of assigned tickets from the "all" queue, enhancing workflow efficiency
- Implementation of support ticket analytics, which provides valuable insights
- Holistic updates to help documentation for comprehensive user guidance
- Improved purchase lookup for quicker issue resolution
Kaushik adds, "Claude has effectively promoted us customer supporters at Gumroad. Just months ago, we primarily answered creators' questions after they reached out. Now, not only do we resolve queries faster but also actively improve the platform by shipping features and squashing bugs."
Driving impressive business results and user benefits
The integration of Claude has improved Gumroad's operations and user experience. Lavingia reported, "Quantitatively, the team has increased our shipping pace by 300% — shipping 4 commits in the time it took to ship 1."
The impact extends beyond productivity gains. Gumroad has seen increased job satisfaction as team members expand their skills and contribute more directly to product development. For users, this translates to a more responsive platform that evolves to meet their needs, enhancing their ability to monetize their creative work.
Looking forward: AI-powered innovation for creators
Gumroad aims to create a more robust ecosystem for creators by leveraging Claude's evolving capabilities, where AI enhances human creativity rather than replacing it. This positions Gumroad at the forefront of the e-commerce revolution for digital creators, with Claude as a key driver of their success and innovation.
Lavingia outlined prospects for Gumroad. He explained, "We're exploring ways AI can help creators improve product descriptions and generate new product ideas. We're also exploring AI applications for legal document generation, natural language account management, and automated content moderation."
More generally, Lavingia envisions a future where AI empowers rather than replaces human creativity. "I don't think artists, writers, and engineers will be 'unemployed' by AI. Instead, they'll be promoted to directors, editors, and product managers. This is an exciting future for humans who enjoy being creative and thoughtful—like everyone we hire at Gumroad."