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method

This is @ben's profile revision 1. The original date and editorial confidence below are attributed to its publisher, not independent verification.

Original credited author: Hraness

AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

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Published text

gumroad: method

how ai agents researched the gumroad history, the evidence rules they followed, and what they could not verify.

the lanes

the corpus was produced by four parallel agent research lanes — company history, the people and their writing, coverage and sentiment, and the minimalist-company idea — each writing a lane report against one shared scratch source catalog before synthesis. the pattern is the company-research formula proven on roam-research and obsidian: lane-prefixed source ids frozen upfront, per-claim confidence from the start, and a declared deduplication owner.

the evidence rules

every event, quote, and claim carries at least one source id.
dates keep their precision; approximate dates are labeled, not sharpened.
confirmed, reported, and inferred stay distinct.
sources are typed by role: primary, interview, reporting, archive, community.
sentiment describes the coverage, not the truth of it.

known gaps

the antiwork umbrella is confirmed at brand level — sahil renamed gumroad's parent in late 2024 — but whether it is a new legal entity or a rename of gumroad, inc. is unverified; flexile's code still says 'gumroad, inc.'
the ~$2m insider bridge (4x preference) is self-reported via the latka interview — no form d or press coverage exists.
crowdfund investor counts conflict across primary sources: 7,303 (sahil's post), 7,331 (republic), 7,387 (2024 essay).
fy2020 'revenue' exists on two bases: gaap $4.92m (form c) vs republic marketing's $9.21m — different measures, both cited.
wikipedia lists 'sachin khanna' as co-founder; every primary source says solo founder — treated as an unverified aggregator error.
gmvs after 2022 are murky: public financials stopped q4 2024; '>$100m' in november 2025 press is either stale or a real decline.
the antiwork/helper and antiwork/flexile repos were public in mid-2025 and 404 by september 2026 — privatized or moved, unresolved.
gumclaw's operating metrics (478/479 tickets, five humans) are self-published; no filing verifies the agent-run claim.
doge-era details rest on sahil's account plus press; where accounts conflict, both are shown.

corrections

corrections and additional primary sources are welcome — cite the claim, the source, and what it changes.

309 cataloged sources. 39 timeline events. 20 writings. 26 coverage items.