NOAH KAGAN V2 TB

“Everyone should be an entrepreneur”

NOAH KAGAN: My father, he was an entrepreneur. He sold copiers, which nowadays people don’t know what those are.

JEFF BERMAN: And he was an Israeli immigrant, yeah.

KAGAN: He was an immigrant. Didn’t speak English and just hustled. 

BERMAN: Noah Kagan is a serial entrepreneur. By my count, he’s founded eight businesses, each worth a million dollars or more. He credits his dad for his risk-taking DNA.  

KAGAN: I used to follow him in his truck, and we’d go and deliver copiers. 

BERMAN: What excited you about that experience? What lit that fire for you?

KAGAN: I like that he was able to create as much money as he wanted. I like that he could take me to this arcade park. And he’s like, “here’s 20.” And I was like, “I can play arcade forever. I don’t want to lift copiers like you when I’m older, but some of this entrepreneurship thing you’re doing is appealing to me.” And I don’t think my brother had that appeal.

I have an older brother, two years, his name is Seth, he’s a doctor, and he just hates it.

BERMAN: Really?

KAGAN: Yeah, he doesn’t like being stuck to a desk or not being able to work flexibly, and that’s a common theme. 

BERMAN: Why is your brother still a doctor if he hates it?

KAGAN: I think he’s afraid.

BERMAN: What do you think he’s afraid of?

KAGAN: I think he’s afraid of the unknown of, like, doing his own thing.

BERMAN: But not everyone’s wired to be an entrepreneur, right? So when, when you talk to people who are trying to figure that out, I have to imagine for a lot of them, you go, “actually, you probably shouldn’t go start your own thing.” Is that true? Or are you like, “no, everyone should be an entrepreneur?”

KAGAN: I think everyone should be an entrepreneur.

BERMAN: Noah Kagan has a multi-faceted approach to helping others scale their business ideas. 

He founded AppSumo, which connects early-stage software makers with entrepreneurs who need affordable tools. 

Then there’s his online courses, his popular YouTube channel, and his new book of advice for people who want to start a company. That’s called Million Dollar Weekend. 

I’m Jeff Berman, your host.

Before Noah Kagan became an entrepreneur, he was a part of the early teams at Facebook and the personal finance app Mint. 

While he was excited by the growth potential at those start-ups, he bristled at having to follow his bosses’ priorities. 

Now, he’s the founder and CEO of AppSumo. The software marketplace has grown from the germ of an idea to $80 million in revenue. 

BERMAN: Noah. Hi.

KAGAN: Hello, Jeff Berman

BERMAN: Welcome to Masters of Scale.

KAGAN: I was like, man, I guess I’m scaling.

BERMAN: This is not a humble brag. Noah says he has always struggled with self-doubt, especially during the early part of his Silicon Valley career. 

Inside Noah Kagan’s Silicon Valley setbacks

KAGAN: I think I just felt insecure at some of these places. At Facebook, you have literally a wonder kid from Harvard; everyone there is from Stanford or Caltech. I barely got into Berkeley. 

BERMAN: Back in 2005, Noah was employee number 30 at Facebook. He’s talked often about what it was like to get fired nine months into the job, by Mark Zuckerberg himself. 

And then, he was on the ground floor at Mint. If you weren’t around for the Mint era, it might be hard to believe that a budgeting app was super-hot, but Mint was all the rage. Noah got fired there too.

KAGAN: I always felt like I got these, like, so-close moments. I started a games company called Kickflip while I was working at Mint. It ended up, you know, doing super well for a while. And then, you know…. You have Silicon Valley people saying, “You gotta be a billion-dollar company.” They’re shitting on me for making a company where I can live a good life and make millions of dollars. Like that’s a bad thing, and then Facebook banned us, and our largest competitor sued us. And so I was just like, “Can someone give me a fucking break?” And then it just felt like it’s not working out for me here. They didn’t believe in me.

The idea behind AppSumo

BERMAN: Noah left Silicon Valley and settled in Austin, Texas. He’s grown a YouTube channel to more than 1 million subscribers by offering tangible advice about how to build a company. 

His site, AppSumo, is also about helping people grow their businesses.

KAGAN: AppSumo is software deals for entrepreneurs. It started out as a Groupon for software and specifically for small business owners, or today you’d call ’em solopreneurs. So if someone out there is an agency freelancer, starting a start-up like a video editing tool. It’s like 50 bucks a month, which is like, if you’re just getting started, it’s a pretty expensive amount. You can come to AppSumo, and we have alternatives. So we go out and find tools that are more or less getting started. And then we negotiate a deal. Lately the deals are lifetime. So negotiate like 50 for life. So none of our products that we promote on our marketplace have subscriptions.

BERMAN: But you’re pre-negotiating the terms for the AppSumo customers to get access to the tools, right?

KAGAN: Yeah. Think of someone like you, Jeff, you went out and you’re in Santa Monica, and you’re like, “Oh man, I created Jeffsoft, it’s a new AI video tool.”

And you’re like, “how do I get customers?” And you go out and look at the market, and you’re like, “Well, I could buy ads. I can go to the synagogue and pray. I can go on Twitter and hope.” Or you come to AppSumo, and we have a marketplace of, you know, a million entrepreneurs that want to buy software, and you do a deal with us, and we’re able to help you get that promotion. 

BERMAN: Were you solving your own problem in doing this or was this more of a market opportunity that you saw?

KAGAN: It was my own problem. I think that’s the best ones to solve. I was excited. I was excited to find, like, I don’t know, just all these cool tools that are out there. And I kind of started more as a hobby. It was just tools that I was like, ‘Ooh, can I get my own deal on this?’ And then some of them need help promoting. So maybe I can promote, and I’ll actually even get paid for that. 

And so for me, it was a culmination of 10 years of work to get to that point of starting the business where I was like, I love promoting things, I love deals, I love software.

Maybe I can do all that. And that’s my career. It was never supposed to scale. It wasn’t supposed to be a  business with employees. It was just supposed to, for me, to get my freedom number so I could actually just live how I wanted to live.

Breaking down the concept of the freedom number

BERMAN: I love the concept of the freedom number. So let’s just… give us freedom number. And then I want to come back to AppSumo.

KAGAN: So a freedom number is how can you do the thing you actually want to do and what’s the minimum number of dollars you need monthly. So you can eventually decide to quit or not.

And for me, getting started with AppSumo, my freedom number was 3,000 bucks. And most people, when they realize the number to actually do the thing they really want to do is so low, they’re like, huh, maybe I can do it.

BERMAN: So how do people figure out their freedom number? Is it literally, ‘here’s what my rent is, here’s what I can take my rent down to, car payment, whatever, whatever.’ This is just covering the basics.

KAGAN: Yeah. Generally when people actually do the math, like, how much is your rent, how much is your living, how much is your savings, like, oh, maybe it’s not so high.

And, wow, I can actually get there and get the hell out of this day job because you can waste your life at a day job. And I never wanted to do that.

BERMAN: Okay, say more.

KAGAN: When you’ve been fired as many times as I have, you realize like your job is at risk of one person deciding. There’s a lot of people who have day jobs, but then you have a side hustle or something that’s creative. There’s upside to the income, and you have control of your destiny. If you can just give up 30 minutes a week. If you can just give up one Netflix show a week, if you can give up one thing a week, and you keep doing it weekly, eventually you can have that business.

And look, if you want to quit and do it, great. Or keep both. I’ve seen people do both, and it works out great. I think most people think they have to take a big risk. I got to quit, like Reid Hoffman’s famous line. Jump off a cliff. I’m like, and you build a parachute…

BERMAN: Build the airplane on the way down.

KAGAN: Which I was like, that sounds crazy to me. Like I’ve never quit my job until my freedom number was hit, and my side hustle was working. And then I quit. I never took the risk. 

AppSumo: The origin story

BERMAN: Interesting. So, okay. So, talk about how AppSumo got started. You said you weren’t building it to scale. What happened that you’re still doing this 15 years later?

KAGAN: I got excited about the problem. I think that’s the thing in business people are kind of missing out. They’re like chasing AI now or chasing being an influencer. And I think just find areas you’re just like, I don’t know if I’m going to ever get tired of this. And I got excited, but how do you help people promote things?

BERMAN: What did that ignite in you?

KAGAN: I think I wanted to help other people that felt like they’re not as popular. They didn’t go to Harvard. They’re not the elite. I wanted to help them succeed too. ‘Cause I felt like I wish someone would help me succeed.

BERMAN: It’s democratizing entrepreneurship.

KAGAN: We call our customers the underdogs, like these people that have ability, and they just need a little bit of light on them. And so for me, I got really obsessed and interested. But like, how do you promote these software products? So I actually tried a lot of variations before it worked. I built a software review website because I thought, okay, I’ll write reviews, and I’ll hire people to write reviews. So that was software taco.com. After a month, no one came. Then I built a reward level, which was a cross-registration, I can’t even explain it. It was cross-registration software for small business software. No one used it.

And then I was like, there’s a site called MacHeist. And so I saw that this MacHeist thing did like Mac bundle software. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of interesting. Maybe I can do that for software deals on the web, not Mac.’ My interest was letting the geniuses create software, and my skill and my excitement is promotion.

Let me try it for web software, and I’ll just do one. Let me just see how that works. 

How Noah tested his big idea

BERMAN: To test his idea, Noah went on Reddit, checking out the entrepreneur chatter and identifying what software might be useful. 

He saw that people wanted a way to create and share memes and GIFs. Then he found a software program that did just that. It was called Imgur. 

I basically cold-emailed a software creator. He was a college kid, named Alan. He created Imgur. He’s selling it for 24. Maybe I can cold-email this guy.

I’ll sell it for some price. 

And I’ll pay him whatever I sell and see if he’s okay with it.

The downside for him is pretty small, like, okay, maybe I lose a little bit of money. And the upside is, wow, there’s someone who’s now a marketer for free.

What you want to do in business where people miss backwards is like, where are the customers? And I knew there’s customers on Reddit. 

BERMAN: That’s how Noah’s business model was born — a blend of an affiliate model with some exclusive partnerships. He helped promote Imgur on Reddit and beyond. And he split the money from his sales with the developer.

Scaling AppSumo

KAGAN: In the beginning of AppSumo, I was launching a few products a month. It was very limited.

BERMAN: Third-party products, not your own ones. 

KAGAN: Yeah, and so we’ve helped launch MailChimp, Zapier, and all these products that are now pretty mainstream. And today at AppSumo, we launch around 30 up-and-coming new products a month. 

BERMAN: Wow. So what started working? How did you get traction and go?

KAGAN: Yeah, with AppSumo, I got traction immediately. AppSumo our first year was somewhere 300,000 plus, second year is 3 million. So a pretty quick scale of a bootstrap business.

BERMAN: And how are you deciding which ones to launch?

KAGAN: So we have an algorithm that we’ve created proprietary that will basically go and scrape the internet for all up-and-coming software tools. And then we have our, we call them the beta lings. And then beta ling is an internal group that tests products.

And then we have a marketplace. So after it goes through this gauntlet, which is what we call it, we put it on AppSumo, and then our customers end up deciding which products are going to do well and not well.

KAGAN: Now, AppSumo today, you know, almost 100 million a year in revenue, which is insane. It’s insane. I can’t believe it.

BERMAN: Why is it insane?

KAGAN: You know, I never thought I would get to this level. It’s beyond my dreams.

Beyond my dreams from Silicon Valley, I think I got, uh, insecurity about like, wow, I’m good at launching. I can get to this million dollars of a product of desire, and then can I actually stay with it and scale these types of businesses out?

Cause I think there might be two types of scale. There’s a scale zero-to-one to validation, and then there’s scale-one-to-N. Can you take that to a larger size? And I would say some of the success of the biggest companies. As much as the founders are smart, to anyone out there, they’re not much smarter than you.

Okay, Zuckerberg, he is smarter than you. Gates, I’ve worked for him too. He’s smarter than you. But most of these other people are not that much better than you. But they did it. They stuck with it. And then the market they actually chose was really unique. And it just expanded so much.

So for AppSumo to take our business, I guess, I’m pretty smart, pretty good at marketing. But there used to be 10 software products. Now there’s 10,000 for the customers we appeal to, for just freelancers and solopreneurs. So part of just being in that wave, we succeeded. 

I think what’s changed in my perspective as I’ve gotten older is that a lot of success is just sticking with things. It’s just sticking with it. And guess what? You don’t have to do it yourself. Find someone else that likes sticking with it.

BERMAN: And then how do you decide, let’s say, look, I’m sticking with my day job. This is going to be my side hustle. It starts to get traction. How do you figure out when you actually start to hire someone, turn it into a real business, hand it off to someone else to run day-to-day, like where does that inflection point come in?

Trying to control your rate of growth

KAGAN: You know, I was thinking about this a lot and that every time we’ve tried to hyperscale and go beyond, I guess, the organic growth curve of our company, we’ve fucked it up. We hired a few other people, and then we got to 20 people. And I was like, what are we doing here?

BERMAN: Because you were hiring ahead of the demand? 

KAGAN: Ahead of the demand. And I think everyone has to take a step back, like zoom out of the fishbowl or the matrix, and think about what kind of life are you trying to create? So for me, I want to promote great products. I want to work with good people, and I want to live my life. Like I left Silicon Valley cause we were like, oh, it’s a lifestyle business.

It’s like I’m making a few million dollars a year lifestyle. It’s pretty damn great. It’s a very good lifestyle. But yeah, we rushed into hiring, rushed on ‘we have to scale it.’ And we’ve done that. I’ve done that now twice where I’ve had some huge catastrophes in the business that I’ve had to pull back. And when I was running AppSumo earlier in the years, these catastrophes, I was like, I just got to go faster, and we got to get faster because this is what you hear. And we hired a CEO because I was afraid of actually ruining the business. So I brought in this other guy named Ayman. And I said, “just make enough money so we can sustain, and we don’t have to risk anything because I’m too afraid I’m going to ruin all this.” Like my father had the same experience where he did well, and then he ruined it, and Ayman actually approached it from like, kind of, I don’t know, Midwestern values, very slow, very steady. And it was this year after year, like compounded growth where it wasn’t, he wasn’t trying to 10x. He wasn’t even trying to 2x. He’s like, let’s just try to 15 percent growth, but because he wasn’t pressuring himself to grow so much. He had a lot more creativity, a lot more flexibility. Ended up doing like 50 percent growth, and 70 percent growth and 90 percent growth. And so that’s how I’ve shifted my leadership and our business growth, where I think this year in 2024, we’re trying to grow 7%. 

BERMAN: Okay.

KAGAN: And I just got, you know, every day I get a pulse and like, we’re already at 25 percent growth this year because we’re not stressing on how we 10x our business so fast and try to prove to anybody else.

BERMAN: Right. When you brought on a CEO, you’re giving up a level of control. If you’re gonna bring on a real CEO, you’ve gotta give them some autonomy to make decisions. How was that for you?

KAGAN: A lot of people aspire to make a lot of money and step out of the business. For me, I think I felt a little lost when we put him in, because I was like, well, what do I do all day?

BERMAN: Were you able to let go? Were you able to say like, okay, if this is your vision, then I’m good with it?

Countering the self doubts

KAGAN: That’s something I’m working on. ‘Cause he quit, but yeah, when he was doing it, I was doing my best to step back and say like, ‘What’s the numbers we’re agreeing on? What’s the vision we’re trying to go to? And then let him make the calls on it.’ And then I think there’s definitely sometimes in my head, like, ‘Oh, you’re not a good CEO. And that voice does come up?’

BERMAN: How do you counter it?

KAGAN: Do things within my own control that I’m proud of and doing that, you know, on a regular basis is helpful.

I was biking yesterday, and I was like, I can’t get to the end of this ride. It was a 75-mile ride in Texas heat. I was like, well, no one else is gonna fucking pedal for you. You need to believe in yourself. And it was just kind of like, okay. And then I started pedaling, and I kept pedaling.

This is like midway through, and I was like, I can do this. 

BERMAN: Yeah.

KAGAN: Mark Manson said you’re the wealthiest guy that talks about himself the worst. Or the most insecure. And I think I just, I share it more. I’m probably more open.

BERMAN: More honest about it.

KAGAN: Yeah, so every time you challenge yourself or criticize yourself in one way, have one positive thing just to say right afterwards. And I find that actually like a really nice hack to kind of keep reinforcing my own self-worth. 

BERMAN: You mentioned your dad lost his business. 

KAGAN: Yeah.

BERMAN: What happened?

KAGAN: He, you know, came to America, he sold carpets. Then he sold these copiers, and he made a lot of bad decisions, right? He was drinking. He didn’t do any budgeting, didn’t do any financial management.

Remember at times we’d go to Costco, and he’s like, you can have whatever you want here. Or I can go to the arcade, and we could play all the games we wanted. And at some point, you know, I do remember him on his deathbed just kind of drinking Sierra Nevadas.

I don’t know. I always remember just feeling sad, you know, and he can barely afford that place. He was renting one room in a house, and it was just from a lot of his own bad choices. And I was like, well, I guess subconsciously I’m sure that’s how I felt many years running AppSumo, I’m going to do the same.

Just like being reckless, being a liability, making some bad decisions, making bad hires, just self-sabotage. 

BERMAN: So how have you dealt with that?

KAGAN: I mean, therapy is definitely a helpful one.

BERMAN: Yeah.

KAGAN: I would say in the first decade of AppSumo, when we were on year 15, it was surrounding myself with people who have families, people who are stable, people who show up every day, and they show up on time. And so finding people around me to support me that are, you know, what I maybe consider myself weaker in.

BERMAN: I’m sorry that you lost your dad and, and I’m sorry that he struggled in his business after inspiring you the way he did. How do you imagine he would have responded to your career at this stage?

KAGAN: I don’t know. I had one of my businesses doing pretty well when he was still alive, and I think he just had so many of his own demons going on. I went to him, and I was like, “Hey, we actually made a million dollars in this business.”

BERMAN: Quite a moment.

KAGAN: Which is insane. I thought you’d get like a confetti celebration. And it just doesn’t happen. And I remember I told him it, and he just was like, “Okay, that’s fine.” And, you know, I think a lot of success comes from, and some desire for, that recognition from our parents or from someone, and so, yeah, over time, what I’ve tried to acknowledge is I got a lot of good from him. I got like this, mostly, no fear of asking for things and going for it. And then I’ve got some ways that he lived that I can actually learn to avoid or improve for myself.

BERMAN: Still ahead, Noah Kagan shares lessons he learned from his early jobs at Facebook and Mint, his own scale story at AppSumo, and why he wrote his book: Million Dollar Weekend. 

BERMAN: Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this full interview and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube page. 

The scale lessons behind AppSumo

So, Noah, one thing we haven’t talked about is real scale lessons from AppSumo. So, what are the scale lessons you’d share?

KAGAN: Yeah, so I want to share a few of the inflection points that have taken us from, like, 300 to 3 million to 30 million to 100 million. Number one was when we did a giveaway. I know, in marketing it’s hard to know what’s gonna work. And I was like, ‘Oh, what if we gave away some cool software?’ And then my friend was like, ‘what if you gave it away for life?’ And so we gave away Dropbox for life. Launched it in the morning, and by noon, a quarter million people signed up for it.

BERMAN: That’s a pretty efficient acquisition share.

KAGAN: Was the best, the best thing. I mean, that’s probably a 50 million marketing strategy. That was an inflection point. Two, we built software to run that giveaway. That actually turned out to be another inflection point where we started launching our own software tools. It’s called the AppSumo Originals. So we basically take expensive subscription software and make a one-time payment version.

BERMAN: And you use AppSumo to market it, right? So you’ve got the flywheel really built there. 

KAGAN: Yeah. I would say the other kind of thing for a lot of these businesses is how are you doubling down in areas? And this is, I think, people all hear this, and they just don’t do it. What I mean by that is, like, we found email marketing was huge. That’s been our bread and butter. We even built an email marketing business. So for anyone out there, like if email is good or social is good, or sales are good or whatever, the areas that are working, how do you actually invest a lot more? I think people are way under-investing in their success. Meaning they have areas that are working that they have not capitalized fully.

BERMAN: They’re not fueling the fire that’s already lit.

KAGAN: Not even close, right? Like if you notice your podcast is doing great, let’s take Masters of Scale. Maybe instead of once a season, why not once a week? Once a week is doing well. Why not once a day? And I think that is, you know, you have to find the balance of sustainability. But that’s definitely been something. I think we’ve had a lot of inflection points around that level of scaling.

Lessons from Noah’s time at Facebook

BERMAN: We talked a little bit about Mint and Facebook and being early at these companies. I’m curious what lessons you took from the way those companies were run that you’re applying in your current life.

KAGAN: Yeah. Facebook, working for Zuckerberg, I would say probably the number one thing was having a number one thing.

BERMAN: What do you mean by that?

KAGAN: He was obsessed with taking over the whole world, and he was obsessed with growing, you know, it became a billion people. And that’s something that I think I’ve done a good job taking away from him, which was very clear on what we’re trying to accomplish.

Meaning we’re trying to get to a billion people. So when you’re coming to me with ideas about monetization, which is what I was doing, because I guess I would say I’m a bootstrapper. He doesn’t care. He’s like, “I don’t care about money. I want to get to a billion people.” And that level of focus and clarity on what he was trying to accomplish, with a clear outcome was something that I’ve copied in all of my endeavors — that was invaluable.

Lessons from Noah’s time at Mint

BERMAN: What’d you take from Mint? 

KAGAN: The founder of Mint is Aaron Patzer. I give a lot of credit to Aaron for finding a very important problem. And a lot of people will have excuses. And they don’t take their power back. Like, I don’t have a network. I don’t know how to code. I don’t know this. Aaron moved to Silicon Valley by himself. No network. No, like, formal anything. He locked himself in an apartment and built the Mint prototype by himself for six months. This guy doesn’t know Silicon Valley, VCs, nothing. And to me, it’s another great example that we can do it. All of us can do it. 

Just like, no, I like this idea. I like this problem. I’m going to build it. And I’d say secondly, if you can find something that people are so excited about, it’s very easy to market. And I think that’s where a lot of people get backwards. Like, how do I market this thing? I’m like, no one wants it. Like you can’t market it, and then you know maybe one bonus thing I’d thrown with mint. It was just being clear who it’s for. Who has this problem? And so for Mint, we had two really clear audiences. One was people kind of personal finance obsessed. You know, they’re reading the finance blogs. They’re checking out like, ‘Oh, what’s the latest APR and APY of these different things?’ And the second one was young professionals. So you just graduated college, you’re making 65,000 working in tech. And so having a clarity of who those customers were made the marketing of where they are a lot easier.

Why Noah wrote Million Dollar Weekend

BERMAN: Noah’s book “Million Dollar Weekend” was published this year. It is designed to help people start their first businesses, and do so quickly. I gave a copy to my entrepreneurial 14-year-old for his 8th grade graduation.

KAGAN: I think I wanted to prove that I’m smart or prove that I’m successful or prove that Facebook when they fired me. And then when Mint fired me, like I can do it.

And I think this book was probably some of that, like, hey, I want some level of attention and validation. And I wanted something that was going to also be hard. You know, I do a lot of YouTube videos or I do podcasts or do software like that. That’s pretty, you know, there’s kind of a known known, but I wanted a project that was going to be hard and take many, many years.

BERMAN: And the book was that?

KAGAN: Yeah, book is fucking hard.

BERMAN: Why was the book hard for you? 

KAGAN: A lot of insecurity. Can I actually help people? I’ve worked literally for the best in the world. I’ve done it numerous times. Can I actually help others? And it’s a big problem. Like there’s not one way people can start a business. 

BERMAN: Mhmm.

KAGAN: Can I even crack that? And so it was a long journey of belief.

BERMAN: When did you start on the book?

KAGAN: March 2020 during COVID.

BERMAN: Okay. So it’s been a four-year journey to get to this point. 

KAGAN: Like, I did want to write a book. I did want to put everything I’ve learned about how I’ve started businesses without money, without time, and package it into one thing. I’m almost proud, more than anything, besides people reading it and getting results and all the experiences of that, that I finished it. And I think for all of us, like, find something hard. Prove to yourself you can do this stuff because you can. And that’s what the book is for. The book is to give each person their own confidence. So when they’re doubted at work, when they’re doubted by getting fired, when they’re like, fuck, can I do this? It’s like, yeah, you can. And it may not work right away, but you keep sticking with it, you keep trying, you keep trying, and it eventually does work.

The power of just doing it

BERMAN: Well, I also love that what I hear you saying is there are multiple levels of success with the book. And the first one is just doing it. Just doing it is an achievement. I got through this. I did the hard thing, right? And now there’s this thing sitting here. And part of what you’re doing in the book is saying to people, go ask your first investor, figure out who that is, your best friend, your partner, or whatever. Ask them for a dollar to invest in you, right? To incentivize you to actually get going on whatever the thing is. So when you think about people reading the book, going and asking for that first dollar, getting it. What do you want to hear back from them a month later, six months later, a year later? What is that next level of success for you with this?

KAGAN: I want to see people believe in themselves because there’s never enough book sales that make me feel satisfied. That’s what I talk about in therapy a lot. But what’s most satisfying is seeing someone say, ‘Hey, I got someone to give me a dollar.’

I didn’t know I could actually do this. Or this woman messaged me today. I think her name is Emanuela. She’s like, ‘I asked someone to finally be my customer.’ It’s like, ‘that’s great.’

BERMAN: That’s amazing.

KAGAN: That’s awesome. And this is the book. Yeah. I wish when I was coming out of college that there was a blueprint to follow to feel good about myself and have a business journey that can work.

BERMAN: Well, I think part of what’s cool about it is my dad is in his 80s, and he still has more ideas for businesses than almost anyone I know short of you.

And my kids are teenagers, and they’re full of ideas as well. And I think the book works, whether you’re in your 80s or in your teens or somewhere in between, it’s really about just saying, fuck it. I’m going to go do it. Let’s fucking go.

That’s how Mark Cuban was asked if you lost everything, and you were down to 500 bucks and an iPhone, what would you do, and his answer — and summarizing here — was ‘I would go get a sales job because I’m great at sales, and I’d become the expert, and three months in, I’d be the best salesperson at this company. And I’d walk into the CEO’s office and say, either you pay me this number, or I’m going to go start a company and compete with you.’ So that is, like, just become a domain expert and go. Do you agree with that? Or do you see it differently?

KAGAN: Yeah you can be a salesperson, you could be a marketer, you could be a chef. I think people are starting to recognize that you can get paid full price anywhere for talent, and you can create these businesses, whether whatever gender, height you are worldwide. You know, I love seeing people get rich. I’ve interviewed people on my YouTube channel. One guy does basements. I don’t even know what a basement is. We don’t have ’em in California or Texas. You know, another guy got rich off ships. Just like a lot of different ways of creating wealth. And I think if people put in the effort, which doesn’t even have to be that much, you can create a cool life for yourself.

BERMAN: Alright, I want to ask you the same question that Mark Cuban was asked.

KAGAN: Ahh. Interesting.

BERMAN: You lose it all. You’re down to 500 bucks and an iPhone. What are you doing?

KAGAN: One, I don’t think I’d lose it all. I keep it in cash. Like I’m not a risky person. I think the two things that I would do: number one, I would go to all the people that I’ve been helping and interacting with for the past 20 years of being a human in the professional world. I think you can look through everyone you’ve ever helped, and you’d be surprised how much people want to help you. I think people discount that. Now, the second thing, I think it’s much harder to build a house if you don’t have a good foundation. So let’s say you only have 500 bucks, and you’ve got kids, and you’ve got a mortgage. That’s scary. So my first thought is take care of your shit. So I would go drive Uber. 

BERMAN: Get your Freedom Number.

KAGAN: I would get my guaranteed income taken care of. Because what I’ve noticed is that if you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to sell 10,000, and I’ve got to be the best salesperson in three months,’ that is very hard if you’re worried about how you’re going to get food tonight. That is very tough. And so, how can you get guaranteed income, which there’s literally guaranteed that you can drive Uber, you can do Uber Eats, you can do DoorDash, you can do any of these things guaranteed. And you could see these people, there’s people that are hustling for that. 

BERMAN: Yeah. 

KAGAN: Then start thinking about other ways that you can create money. But I think people are trying to do like, I would go sell. It’s very hard to sell when you’re worried about your rent.

BERMAN: So you’re about to become a dad for the first time? 

KAGAN: Yes. And I’ve been blessed to be with my wife, and she’s like, I don’t care how many followers you have. I don’t care how much money you have. I just care who you are as a person. And your daughter doesn’t know about any of this stuff. She won’t know for a very long time. She just wants you to be present.

BERMAN: And she really won’t care. 

KAGAN: And I was like, damn, really? Like I’ve worked so hard to prove all these people wrong. And she’s like, no, you just have to prove yourself and us right. And so that’s really what I’ve been grappling with or struggling with in a productive way, which is, how do I start doing the things that like, if no one’s watching, if no one’s paying, I’m at least doing the thing I’m really happy with — like, how am I starting to prove for myself?

I’ve been reducing the amount of work I’m doing at AppSumo, trying to have a more CEO approach, and then be more available as a father. So that’s a lot of where my mentality and my mental space has been these days.

BERMAN: Yeah. I love that taking inventory and then taking action. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you Noah.

KAGAN: Dude. Great hanging out.

BERMAN: The early side of Noah Kagan’s career was full of setbacks. And it fueled a hunger to prove himself. 

It’s a useful example of how our business plans aren’t just about business. They’re often tangled up, deeply, in our own sense of self. 

Evolving personal goals often require professional pivots. In Noah’s case, his definitions of success are changing. 

As he enters a new phase of life as a parent, he’s rethinking who exactly he needs to impress. 

He’s allowing himself a sense of pride in his own journey. And leaning into a sense of value, driven by inspiring others. Like a reader he’s never met who just got their first customer.

I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.