Million Dollar Weekend: How To Launch A Successful Business In 48 Hours with Noah Kagan, CEO of AppSumo

Noah Kagan [00:00:00]

Yeah, I mean, I think the reality there is anyone can be an entrepreneur. Anyone can be a millionaire. The difference from the people who are versus not, it's actually quite simple. The ones who are, are starting and they're doing, and there's nothing special. There's a lot of ordinary rich people.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:10]

This is Noah Kagan.

Noah Kagan [00:00:12]

Hi, I'm Noah Kagan, CEO, and Chief Sumo of Appsumo.com. The number one site online for software deals for entrepreneurs was also number 30 at Facebook and number four at mint.com.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:23]

As you just heard, Noah was employee number 30 at Facebook and employee number 4 at Mint.com. He founded Appsumo.com, where I have found some amazing deals on software that I regularly use.

Noah Kagan [00:00:35]

AppSumo.com, number one site online for software deals for people that are solopreneurs or entrepreneurs and don't want to pay full price for tools they need to run their business. So we help find amazing creators all across the world. We help negotiate an amazing deal on their product and then we market the hell out of it. So, people who need tools get great prices and people need help promoting, we promote the crap out of them.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:52]

Noah just published a new book titled, the "Million Dollar Weekend".

Noah Kagan [00:00:55]

I've got a book out million dollar weekend. If people want to change their own lives in just 48 hours.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:59]

In the book, Noah has outlined a framework that any entrepreneur can use to bootstrap their business from ZERO to a MILLION dollars in the span of a weekend!

Noah Kagan [00:01:08]

I have all these weekends, I got 52 a year, I got 52 chances. And maybe not this year, but next year. And over time, these people that keep trying are the ones that end up not even just surviving, but end up thriving. And it's not some exclusive Harvard club that we're not allowed into. It's available for everyone.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:22]

I got my hands on an advance copy of the book, thanks to Noah. And I invited Noah to be my COPILOT on today's episode of First Class Founders and he graciously agreed!

Noah Kagan [00:01:32]

Thanks for having me, man. This is cool.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:33]:

And, over the next thirty minutes or so, Noah and I will discuss various aspects of the Million Dollar Weekend framework by dividing it into THREE parts - the idea, the validation, and the execution.

So, jetsetters, buckle up your seatbelts, put your phones on airplane-mode and get ready for take-off!

Noah Kagan [00:01:56]

Hi, I'm Noah Kagan, let's get down to business.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:07]

The next generation of successful founders in this digital age of entrepreneurship will leverage their audience to launch, build, and scale their brands. First Class Founders explores this golden intersection of audience-building & company-building with proven strategies to grow both your audience, which is your distribution, and your brand, which is your product.

Because those who can master both will create a category of one.

Hi, my name is Yong-Soo Chung and I'm a serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped 3 successful businesses from $0 to $20 million over 8 years.

On this podcast, you'll learn timeless lessons from world-class content creators, startup founders, and CEOs. You'll also hear tactical tips & strategies from ME, Yong-Soo Chung!

Are you ready? Then, let’s begin!

Before we begin, please do yourself a favor and grab your free Hyper-Visual summary for this episode featuring Noah Kagan of AppSumo discussing his Million Dollar Weekend framework. Thanks to the team over at HyperPods for this amazing 3-minute visual summary.

You can grab the hyper-visual summary for this week’s episode absolutely free at firstclassfounders.com/hypervisuals.

I have to admit, Noah Kagan is pretty hilarious.

Noah Kagan [00:03:30]

First-class founders, second-class internet you have. For the people that are listening is internet's like five met five kilobytes. Like his only, he doesn't go to YouTube. He just goes to watch his pictures.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:03:42]

And, as you can see, he does NOT like to mince his words.

Noah Kagan [00:03:45]

How come you have shitty internet in the bay? Didn't you guys invent the internet?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:03:48]

Dude, Actually, you might enjoy the story. I got a deal with AT& T where it's free Internet for life. Okay? And they really This they ripped me off, I think, with a speed though. Like, that's the catch. And so, like, I think I'm on this, like, really shitty, like, Wi Fi plan. But, even when you are at the receiving end, you know immediately that it's all just good-natured fun.

Noah Kagan [00:04:09]

Okay, first off, I didn't mean to come in hot. I do appreciate your tweets and social media and that we've been able to connect. But I will still make fun of your very slow internet.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:04:19]

Noah is someone I have looked up to for a while now. AppSumo, the company he runs, has also been a sponsor of the show on our recent Black Friday episodes.

So, when I heard he was writing a book and had a Slack channel for beta-testing the book, I joined it immediately. And it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life so far because (a) the book is excellent as you will hear in the rest of this episode and (b) Noah's life is full of amazing experiences that have shaped him.

For example, Noah was employee number 30 at Facebook but he was let go nine months into the job, which meant that he didn’t get any of the Facebook stock options, which would be worth at least a few hundred million dollars by now.

Noah Kagan [00:04:58]

But I, one day at the office, they're like, let's go get coffee. And Facebook was everything to me. I, this is my entire life and I loved what we were doing there. And I was learning so much. Went to coffee and at coffee, Matt Kohler, who's a billionaire, and this guy named Rom who was early at Yahoo. He's now probably worth nine figures. They're like, yeah, we're firing you today. We think you're a liability.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:17]

Not only was getting fired from Facebook embarrassing for Noah...

Noah Kagan [00:05:20]

I had to turn in my phone. So I don't have a phone. And then I lived at a house with six other Facebook guys. So I had to basically pack up and leave. It's not, you know, it's awkward as shit. It's like living with your ex-girlfriend.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:30]

...but it also caused him to slip into a bit of depression.

Noah Kagan [00:05:33]

I went and bought a pack of cigarettes and I remember just feeling like, oh man, I'm so embarrassed. What do I do?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:38]

But this is where Noah's strength of character really shines through.

Noah Kagan [00:05:42]

everyone goes through challenges. And I always ask, what kind of character are you trying to write of your story? And that's the coolest part about life. We're our own authors of our novels. And we can decide how the character plays out.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:54]

So Noah picked himself up and decided to write his own novel, chart his own path, if you will...

Noah Kagan [00:05:59]

it was trying working in Korea. Like, do I wanna be a teacher for students? I was like, this is cool, but definitely not. It's interesting for a moment. Do I like consulting? So I consulted for Scanner.com, and like this company is called Speeddate.com. And then I tried a lot of things. Like I tried networking conferences and I actually ended up making $250,000 creating communitynext.com. I just created it from scratch a conference. So it was all these different areas to helping start mint.com, which sold for 200 million that led me to be like, okay, all these things, some I like, some I don't like, how do I really want it to be?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:06:30]

This question - "How do I really want it to be?" - this is a question all entrepreneurs deeply resonate with. We choose the world of entrepreneurship because we want to solve a problem. We choose this world with all its uncertainties and unsure futures because we are passionate about helping our communities thrive.

And it was this same question that sparked the idea which eventually proved to be the spark that brought forth AppSumo.com

BTW, if you know someone who is LIKE Noah or could benefit from Noah's story, could you quickly share this episode with them? If every listener of First Class Founders brought in one other listener, the listenership for this podcast would instantly double! And that will help me get more amazing guests in the future!

But, I'm not gonna force you or anything, just thought I'd ask.

Anyway, what were we talking about? Ah, yes, I was about to tell you how AppSumo.com came into being. Did you know that AppSumo was developed over a weekend?

Noah Kagan [00:07:30]

I hired a guy named Muhammad who I can still recommend to anyone for 12 bucks an hour. Maybe he's 13 now with inflation. The idea was, okay, maybe if we copy Mac Heist, which is bundles of software in limited time, I got a website, me and him put a PayPal button on the page. That's it. And then I went on Reddit and posted.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:48]

In fact, that's where the name of the book and the framework - "Million Dollar Weekend" is derived from. Noah created AppSumo literally over the weekend and it has now grown to 80 million dollars in annual revenue.

Noah Kagan [00:08:00]

So, yeah, we're doing about 80 million top line a year. And my first sale was 12 bucks. And then, today we'll do- yesterday we did $243,000. I can't believe it. We're getting permanent products and then customers get all these awesome deals. And then we get a little bit of it and everyone's happy, but it did start with 12 bucks in one weekend

Yong-Soo Chung [00:08:17]

The story of how Noah landed on AppSumo is also a great example of how to execute the first step in the Million Dollar Weekend framework.

STEP 1: FINDING THE MILLION-DOLLAR IDEA

Noah Kagan [00:08:29]

So, taking a step, a few years back, I was doing payments for facebook games, and like iphone games, and all those games. And I don't play any games. I don't really like infrastructure with payments cause it was a commodity, there was a lot of competitors. And I didn't like my business partners. So, I wanted to figure out what's something that everyone really wants. At least certain people that I really wanna help, the customer.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:08:47]

On the one hand, Noah wanted to make things easier for the customer and, on the other hand...

Noah Kagan [00:08:52]

all my facebook companies that were doing the games, when I was trying to do the payments for them, were like we just want customers, I don't give a shit about your payments, give me more users. I was like, oh, that's interesting.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:09:02]

Jackpot!

The customers seemed willing to pay to play the games. But, for some reason, the companies making the games were NOT reaching these customers.

Noah Kagan [00:09:10]

So putting it through the million dollar weekend framework is, is there at least X amount of customers times Y amount that they'll spend of a million dollars that you could potentially get in profit for you to take home over some time period.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:09:22]

What Noah's essentially saying here is this: If you know for a fact that there are at least a thousand people willing to pay a thousand dollars over a period of time for your product or a service, that's a million dollar business idea.

But, that's just the beginning. The best ideas are useless if you don't have a proper business model to implement around it.

Noah Kagan [00:09:40]

And now you do a one-minute business model where you're like, what is, how do I actually make profit? And so my business model initially was software bundles and those, it was about $50 a bundle and I made $5 through a one-minute business model and that it's broken down in the book,

Yong-Soo Chung [00:09:55]

The one-minute business model that Noah is referring to here is quite simple. To hit $1 million of profit in one year, reverse engineer that number by asking yourself how much profit you need to make in one month. If you run the math, that’s about $83,333 in profit per month.

In Noah’s example, he sold a software bundle for $50, making $5 per sale in profit. This meant that he needed to sell 16,667 bundles per month to hit that magical million dollar mark.

At this point, Noah had a clear idea of the problem that he wanted to solve.

Noah Kagan [00:10:31]

...which was like, how do I help software companies get customers? That to me was the problem.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:35]

He just had to find the RIGHT way to solve it.

And to do that, he decided to test out a whole lot of different solutions. Like the fishbowl idea...

Noah Kagan [00:10:44]

So I wanted to put a fishbowl, it's called fishbowl, and I wanted to put it in restaurants. people put in their business cards or email address on a piece of paper, I digitize it, and then they can email their customers to get them back.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:54]

Great idea, but the solution wasn't viable because...

Noah Kagan [00:10:58]

very quickly I realized, as I talked with local businesses, they're very archaic, and doing anything modern for them was hard.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:09]

Then he tried his hand at content marketing for a bit...

Noah Kagan [00:11:12]

So I tried softwaretaco.com. I basically launched a WordPress blog and just started posting reviews of software products. There was only 10 at the time. And so I wasn't making any money and there was really not much traffic.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:24]

After softwaretaco.com, came rewardlevel.com

Noah Kagan [00:11:27]

...rewardlevel.com, which again was, I can't even explain what it was, but it was something to get people customers. And so that didn't work. And as well, I launched AppSumo. And the idea there was like, all right, well, I see that there's a site called MacHeist working for Mac software, which was basically Mac bundles of software on a limited time. Kind of like Groupon, but this was even before that really. And it was working for Mac software. I was like, oh, I should just copy that and do it for other software, for web software.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:50]

In fact, how Noah got the first bundle on AppSumo is exemplary of his hustle...

Noah Kagan [00:11:55

I cold emailed the founder and said, give me a discount. Can I have a discount on your software? Cold, I didn't know him. And I'll promote it on Reddit and I'll pay you $7 for it when I sell. Because for him he's like, sure, you're going to pay me $7. I wasn't getting anything on these. And you'll do all the work for promotion. And I didn't know if it's going to work, but instantly it worked. And people would hit, on Reddit I posted, I also asked the founders of Reddit for free ads. Just asked.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:12:15]

If there was a book on entrepreneurship, I think one of the early chapters in the section on "How to get things done" would feature a page filled with just these two words.

JUST. ASK.

Noah Kagan [00:12:26]

And I have a lot of ways for people to do that in stories as well. How do you ask? Ask for a customer, ask for an employee, ask for a discount. And I have challenges and ways that people can do that. And I've seen the transformations through Million Dollar Weekend.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:12:37]

In fact, Noah's book "Million Dollar Weekend" contains a ton of stories, example challenges, and ways to 'ask' for things that will help grow your business but more on that a bit later.

Right now, we need to look at how to convert the million dollar IDEA into a million dollar BUSINESS. And that is what the second and third steps in the Million Dollar Weekend framework are all about.

The second step in this framework is validating your idea and the third step is executing it. Growing it. Scaling it.

Noah's Million Dollar Weekend framework clearly outlines specific tasks to complete for each of these steps.

And we'll take a look at each one of them in detail in a short while.

But, before we proceed, I'd like to take a quick break here to tell you about my million dollar business, which also happens to be the sponsor for this episode today. In fact, it's the most adorable sponsor we have had till date. My French Bulldog, Humphrey!

And guess what? He’s quite a following on social medi over 150,000 followers, if you're counting, across Instagram and TikTok @spottedbyhumphrey.

Every time we post Humphrey in a new harness or with a new dog toy, people keep asking us.

Hey! Where can I buy that? So what did my wife and I do? We decided to launch a dog boutique named after him called Spotted By Humphrey.

Spotted by Humphrey is a destination for all your furbabies needs. Treats, Leashes, dog toys, and even an award winning dog poop bag holder called Poopsie Daisy, which my wife designed all on her own.

Oh. So Check out Humphrey's shop at spottedbyhumphrey.com and use code FIRSTCLASS15 for 15% off your next order. That's spottedbyhumphrey.com. I'll leave a link in the show notes.

Oh, by the way, just in case you are wondering, Humphrey isn't a weekend project - he's my lifelong baby!

Anyway, let's now get back to discussing the remaining steps of Noah Kagan's Million Dollar Weekend framework.

Let's take a detailed look at these two steps one-by-one...

STEP 2: VALIDATING YOUR IDEA.

Noah Kagan [00:15:02]

Yeah, so just because someone else does it doesn't mean it's validated.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:15:06]

Noah is absolutely right here.

Ideas are incredibly difficult to validate. An idea that seems to be 'untouched' might actually have been considered and passed on by someone else. Conversely, an idea that worked for someone else might, in fact, be a terrible idea for YOUR business.

Noah Kagan [00:15:22]

...this is very common for people starting businesses. So like, well, someone else did it. It'll work for me. And then they'll say, well, I need to build it and do more research and hire more people and get more funding and spend six months. And then at the end of the six months, they're like, oh shit, I got to get customers and I was like, we could have done that in 48 hours to change your life and find out no one wants it or find out they do. And then in six months, you could actually be making $10,000.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:15:43]

Thankfully, the Million Dollar Weekend framework actually has multiple approaches that you can use to validate your business idea.

Noah Kagan [00:15:50]

There's one the pre-sale. So that's what I did.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:15:52]

As in, with AppSumo, that is.

Noah Kagan [00:15:54]

Which was, I didn't have to pre sell it I was just like I was able to get it But you can pre sell like call people within your zone of influence to see if anyone is available.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:16:02]

Noah also cited an example of a business that he strongly felt should have validated their idea before getting VC funding.

Noah Kagan [00:16:09]

It's an idea where the problem is documenting your parents' life. So you have videos and audio of them. And it's a site called, HeyArtifact that has 5 million in funding. And I was like, I could kick your ass in a weekend. I could call up my grandparents and just film them. Then I could ask my other friends and say, Hey, do you want to pay me a hundred dollars and I will film your grandparents. I just did it. And I could find out very quickly if they want it. And then I would call my entire, if it worked great, I validate it. If I didn't get three customers in 48 hours, it's not validated.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:16:35]

The THREE customers in 48 hours is not an arbitrary metric by the way. It is an important idea in Noah's Million Dollar Weekend framework. According to Noah, the simplest validation for a business is whether or not it can get three customers in 48 hours.

And the easiest way to validate a business without having to spend any money - be it your money or the VC's money - is to run a pre-sale.

Noah Kagan [00:16:56]

But most people are like, well, I should probably build a website. I should probably get a domain. I probably need to build technology. Then you need like a CRM system to organize the grandparents. I'm like, no, you don't need shit. I can literally call people and ask them, hey, do you want me to interview your parents for 100 bucks?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:10]

Yeah, pre-sales are counter-intuitive, for sure. I personally LOVE pre-sales. Having run several pre-sales over the years for UrbanEDC, I can personally attest to the fact that they are incredibly powerful tools for gauging customer interest.

Noah Kagan [00:17:23]

And if I can't get anybody, great. OK, let's figure it. Let's work on another idea.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:27]

Another approach to validating your business idea is the marketplace model.

That is, build a marketplace for customers and see if there are any takers on both the supply and demand sides of the equation. Like the way AirBnB did it.

Noah Kagan [00:17:40]

If you're trying to build an Airbnb site, like a marketplace, they built it in a weekend. It was launched in a weekend and how do they grow it? They put it on Craigslist and that's how they were able to actually get a lot of traction.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:47]

A third approach to validating your business idea is using landing pages and paid ads to attract your potential customers.

Noah Kagan [00:17:54]

...which is, can you put a landing page? People click and maybe they buy or maybe they don't. There's definitely a lot of success stories. It works.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:00]

However, Noah personally isn't very fond of this approach.

Noah Kagan [00:18:03]

I discourage that one because it takes longer. You have to figure out ads and then you have to spend money, which all those things I don't like, especially if you're starting out.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:09]

Moreover, it kinda goes against the spirit of approach number 1 - the presales. If building the product before the presale isn't advisable, then the same logic applies to marketing and advertising! If anything, marketing and advertising the product should happen only AFTER the product is fully built!

And all of these principles and approaches were applied by Noah when he was building AppSumo.

Noah Kagan [00:18:32]

So for me, it was just finding a product that I wanted. Seeing, knowing where the customers were and seeing if it was a problem they actually truly wanted solved in a very quick amount of time without a lot of money. And they did. And I was like, okay, this is great. This one finally works.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:44]

Okay, if you are following along Noah's journey, let's take stock of where you currently stand.

Like Noah, you have a million-dollar business idea. Maybe you did some back of the napkin math and figured out how to make it into a million-dollar business.

And then, like a smart entrepreneur you used a validation approach and got the first 3 customers in 48 hours by using one of three approaches.

What’s next?

How do you actually execute the business idea? What growth levers should you pull? What scaling strategies does Noah advise?

Noah Kagan [00:19:16]

So many people talk about ideas. I had a friend who told me that idea two years ago and he's done nothing. And the best way to do something is now and get momentum.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:19:24]

Which, you will recognize, is exactly what Noah did with AppSumo.

Noah Kagan [00:19:28]

Like I just started AppSumo. There was no magical advantage. It was for $12 my first sale in a weekend, able to get going. And that's available for all these ideas.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:19:36]

Or in the words of a very popular sports brand, just do it.

Noah Kagan [00:19:42]

Yeah, most people never make a million because they're stuck at $1. And the risky part is them having a day job that they hate, not getting going. And so if you have some validation, the biggest thing is now delivering on that validation, number one, deliver, and then continuing to do the exact same thing you were doing to have that success.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:03]

This second part, the 'continuing to deliver on validation' part is incredibly important in my opinion. Because, as an entrepreneur, the first successful delivery makes you think you can deliver more. And, that makes you believe you can immediately take more on your plate.

Noah Kagan [00:20:17]

Let me give you an example. There's a guy, Jake, Jake read Million Dollar Weekend and he always wanted to do a golf business. He loves golf. And he was able to actually get five paying customers for golf trips. And now he came back to me and he's like, well, I already talked, someone talked to me about an app. Now I'm going to go build an app. I was like, dude, you haven't even delivered on the five we got going. But everyone does it because it's like, oh, well, this other thing is shiny.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:41]

What is that old proverb? A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, right?

Noah Kagan [00:20:45]

The number one thing, number one thing I've seen from failure in entrepreneurship when people have some business success, is they stop doing the thing that works.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:52]

Yeah, I agree. The moment you stop doing what is working for your product or service, you lose the momentum you have built. And momentum is the most important ingredient for what comes next...

STEP 3: GROWING & SCALING YOUR IDEA.

Noah Kagan [00:21:06]

for scale, there's a lot of things around how it scales. Like AppSumo started with just me and $12 and now the marketing team is 25 people and the engineering team is 20 people. And that just takes time. And so it's being patient.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:21:15]

Several other guests have mentioned the importance of being patient while scaling your business. It seems like a banal and cliched thing to say but I really want you to stop and think about it for a minute.

Because, until this point we have spoken about doing things quickly.

Until this point in this episode, we have discussed how to find and validate a business idea in the span of a weekend - that is, 48 hours. We have spoken about doing things right away. We have advocated presales over product and bootstrapping quickly over looking for VC money.

But now, for scaling, the advice is exactly the opposite.

Slow down. Have patience.

This change in mentality and momentum is not impossible but it sure is a difficult one. It needs conscious involvement from you as the owner and operator of your business. It needs the understanding that scaling follows the compounding curve which means it starts slow initially but rises exponentially.

This change of mindset is incredibly important. So, I wanted to make sure that you understood it fully before we hear what Noah has to say about scaling.

Noah Kagan [00:22:18]

How do you scale? You find a problem people really want, and you'd be patient to continually keep delivering for those people. So, with appsumo.com, how we scaled is that people really wanted software deals.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:22:29]

Except that's not the full story.

Noah Kagan [00:22:31]

There's a thing called a one-minute business model in the book, and I have video tutorials at milliondollarweekend.com that people can see. But we were doing bundles, and then through a one-minute business model from Andrew Chen, he's like, dude, stop doing bundles and just do individual products. And that made our margin go from $5 to 25, and then we could do from one deal a month to one deal a week. And that's how we went from 300,000 to 3 million our second year, which was insane.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:22:52]

That is a 10x growth in the second year of business, which is massive!

So, the first scaling tip Noah has to offer is to:

    "Re-evaluate your business through the lens of the one-minute business model, when it is time to scale."

Noah Kagan [00:23:06]

Other things that helped us scale, one I learned from Zuckerberg, have a clear goal. Most people have no clear goal and they have no clear timeline at all. Have some.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:16]

Scaling tip number two:

"Have a clear goal.”

Noah Kagan [00:23:20]

and it's the same playbook I've used at mint.com, which sold for 200 million, with Gambit, which got to 20 million in one year, with AppSumo, which has done really well, with my YouTube channel. It's the same playbook I'm using over and over.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:30]

This scaling tip dovetails very well with the advice Noah gave a few minutes ago, when he said "find a problem people really want and keep delivering for those people."

Noah Kagan [00:23:36]

You find a problem people really want And you'd be patient to continually keep delivering for those people.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:41]

Scaling tip number three:

"Don't do anything new."

Yeah, this one's a bit out of left field, isn't it?

Noah Kagan [00:23:47]

have a very limited amount of experiments that you think will be your future growth. Because what works at AppSumo, which is paid ads and affiliate, does not work on a lot of the other things for me, like for OKDork and noahkagan.com, my personal blog does not work. So it's, it's being clear of where, what problem are you solving? Who is your customer, the three W's and then where are they? And then having a list of experiments you think you can do to find those people, doing them over literally 30 days after you have business success, finding the one that works and then continuing that one.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:15]

Revised scaling tip number three:

"Don't do anything new and have limited experiments for future growth."

Yeah, that makes more sense, doesn't it?

Oh, by the way, Noah also shared the specific growth levers that worked really well for AppSumo.

Noah Kagan [00:24:49]

Half of our revenue, half of $80 million is from email.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:32]

...and he shared these growth levers with me in great detail during our hour-long conversation.

Noah Kagan [00:24:37]

There's a lot of sophistication in it, but it really just started with basic one minute business model...

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:42]

We also spoke at length about using his personal brand to grow AppSumo.

Noah Kagan [00:24:45]

in terms of business, I would say it's helpful to AppSumo... we surveyed... It's around 33% give or take of AppSumo audience knows who I am.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:54]

All of this and more can be heard in a specially crafted bonus segment made available exclusively to premium members of First Class Founders. Premium members enjoy a ton of perks, such as access to a private feed, AD-FREE episodes, released a WEEK early. So, yeah, join the First-Class Founders membership today - go to firstclassfounders.com/join. Look for a link in the show notes!

Towards the end of our conversation, Noah got a little emotional when I asked him what advice he would give if he could meet his younger self...

Noah Kagan [00:25:27]

Yeah, I have regrets. I have a lot of regrets. I have a decent amount of regrets... Yeah, I would change three things. One, I would work a lot more on positive self-talk. And I'm not talking like manifesting, like, oh, I'm rich, I'm rich, look in the mirror. Just literally day to day being nice to myself. Ongoing, not being such a harsh critic. We're literally the worst friends of ourselves. And so I would go back to 20s and be like, hey, you got fired, it sucks, you're gonna feel some pain, you're not a bad person. But I think I just took it so harsh that I sucked for a long time and I was so critical for so long, judging, guilty, sad, frustrated, angry, which is not to say I don't want to feel the feelings, but not be so hard on who I actually am and my worth inside. So just being a lot kinder earlier on in my life, that would be number one.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:26:20]

Wonderful words.

And if you resonate with Noah's message about being kinder to your younger self, well, why not start now? It's never too late to be kind to yourself, if you ask me!

Noah Kagan [00:26:29]

Number two, more patient. You know, the success of Million Dollar Weekend for people that read it is being impatient to some extent. It's saying, go, don't let excuses stop you from today, from right now, not how. And things do work in our life. So I would say to my younger self, just be patient. It will work out. Where I feel like I got to my destination that I ended up really wanting. This is beyond my dreams. But I think I made it a lot harder along the way than I had to. When is it going to work out for me versus having a little more optimism with that patience? Like, hey, be patient, man. It's going to work out. Keep going. You're good.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:27:01]

Again, wise words from Noah here.

Even though the whole success of the Million Dollar Weekend hinges on the ability to do things quickly and immediately, success in the long-term requires you to have lots of patience. It might seem paradoxical but, if you stop to really think about it, it's not.

You can set your sights on a distant goal and also be proactive about reaching it, right?

Noah Kagan [00:27:23]

And say lastly, what I would tell myself is better partner selection, so better mate selection. We all I don't think it's really taught how important your partner is and who your partner is and I'm with this woman now who has taught me a lot about kindness to myself and to others and Is just really happy and is really adventurous and I'm like, wow, I wish I was more selective about who I dated and got to this 15 years ago because definitely life before and then life after being with a partner like this. It's not it's not a partner I got it's a partner I wanted

Yong-Soo Chung [00:27:53]

What a beautiful thought to close out the episode!

You can connect with Noah on the book's website.

Noah Kagan [00:27:59]

milliondollarweekend.com is where everything is. There's templates, videos, checklists, walkthroughs, everything's at milliondollarweekend.com

Yong-Soo Chung [00:28:06]

If you were taking copious notes while listening to this episode but don't quite know where to start looking for your business idea, I recommend listening to:

Episode 62 titled, "How to Find Your Next Million Dollar Business Idea." In this episode, I have shared my simple decision-making process that helped me launch all my successful businesses.

That wraps up today’s episode We’ll catch you next time on First Class Founders.

Noah Kagan [00:28:40]

Juliet, shout out. I generally will eat two to three times a week tacos. And I literally have no problem eating seven days a week. It's not a branding thing. I just love eating things wrapped in a tortilla or in anything.