I usually tell new hires this often; understand how this company makes money. Is engineering seen as a necessary cost or income multiplier on the balance sheet.
In most companies, it falls in the land of IT, a cost center.
Glad someone is talking about the option other than selling to VCs or ramen diet start ups. The tech community might have collectively forgotten the other option.
Generally Gumroad itself is an amazing idea. It's challenging to push out products, and any platform that helps empower people to just try is a win.
I'm not sure about how the open-source element of this is supposed to work, but if it ends up with more people building things, creating and contributing, while making a dollar, that's a good thing.
Our team also runs into this issue. Dealing in real time means real time changes. Even if we have to wait on an return from the database to the api to the client.
So we simulate the changes as the user makes the action, 'optimistic UI updating' and then wait for confirmation on the server to persist the data. During that waiting period, we tell the user that their changes are being saved, but they are free to do what ever they wish.
It lets the user know things are happening, but might not persist because we are still in the mode of saving, yet allows the user to carry on with their tasks while we deal with the information they send us.
If they close the page, during this time, they are well aware that the changes are happening. The request has been made, it just didn't return yet.