Introducing Silk Rail

2 weeks ago, at the last day of Rails World, Sahil, the founder of Gumroad made a tweet, stating that Rails is a legacy framework, and announced that their are rewriting Gumroad in TypeScript for a few reasons. One was to get rid of the technical debt. It is a very weird take, because you will end up with the same technical debt after a while with whatever language or framework you use. Another reason he stated was that LLMs can generate TypeScript code better than Ruby code, so he will be able to move faster. I don’t agree with that statement either, I think Ruby and Rails offers all the tools to move fast.

During the afterparty, I jokingly told the guys that someone should build a Gumroad alternative by Monday, to prove Sahil wrong. Since I have so much stuff on my plate, I wasn’t going to do it myself. Then a week later, I’ve seen a few tweets from people complaining about how hard it is to reach a human at Gumroad support. And that got me thinking again.

I respect Sahil a lot, he managed to get Gumroad out of the hands of VCs, he built a good company and enabled creators to make money online easily. But recently, I think he is going to the wrong direction. Betting too much on LLMs and not paying enough attention to the needs of the creators. Even if Gumroad would be TypeScript and he would plan to rewrite it in Rails, I would think that would be a bad business decision. And friendly competition should drives us forward, so I started to seriously think about building a similar product.

As every married man would’ve done, I asked my wife what she thinks about the idea of taking on another sideproject, even though I have a few unfinished ones. I told her that I think I could build an MVP in a short time, and she said to go for it.

And that’s how Silk Rail was born. I spent Saturday last week, a few hours during the evenings last week and this Sunday on it, and I have an MVP!

It isn’t pretty, it isn’t feature-full, but one can already sign up, connect a Stripe account, create a product, create discount codes and start to sell.

There is plenty more to do, and I have a few feature ideas I was missing from Gumroad, so it will keep me busy for a while, but I will juggle it with the rest of my side projects and paid work.

I would also like to use this project to demonstrate that Rails is a really good option for indie hackers. It is a truly one person framework and you can build rather quickly with it.

So if you are an online creator and want to sell digital products, consider Silk Rail. Currently, it is free of charge, and I will start charging 5% of the sales going through the platform. If you have a feature idea, please reach out to me.