The Startup Ideas Podcast - How To Find MILLION DOLLAR Business Ideas That WORK | Noah Kagan

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

I'm joined by Noah Kagan, CEO of AppSumo. We talk about how to build products people love, how he lost $1M for not listening to customers, how to find the best business ideas in 2024, and more.📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free: https://www.gregisenberg.com/70,000+ people are already subscribed.🪄 The CastMagic team reached out to me and wanted to give you a free month of Castmagic with the code Greg100. You can check out https://get.castmagic.io/l953mvcu8yiv to learn more about how to automate your content with AI using CastMagic.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND NOAH KAGAN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/noahkaganLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahkagan/Episode timestamps:00:00 Why you should test your business ideas first 00:43 The importance of differentiating your brand02:07 Best opportunities for entrepreneurs in 202406:41 Using content creators to grow your business08:28 The impact of AI in the workplace10:15 Platforms to streamline the hiring process12:40 Why you don’t need to innovate everything18:43 Tips for hiring A-players22:55 How Noah lost $1M27:08 How Greg built the largest real-time stock market29:43 How to build million-dollar businesses in 202433:50 Dealing with rejection in business37:55 How to decide if a project is worth pursuing45:58 How to find the best business ideas

I heard Chris Williamson talk about this where there's a success bias where just because you do something good, you think you know everything good. The beginnings are always the same, right? Find something people really want and you deliver it to them. You know, you go on Twitter and everyone's got this playbook they've shared and then you realize they're selling you a course. We thought, hey, if you 10x it because you see on Twitter that 10xing is the way. I very quickly ran in the wrong direction. We went from 600 to 13,000 products. And that was a great painful, expensive reminder around how do you test things before you go invest in them? So I could have easily tested from 600 products to 650.

and saw that the team was like, this is stupid. But now it's going back to the basics of how often you talk to your customers, how often you listen to your team, how often do you're talking to your partners? And then as we have these crazy ideas that we know are always right, how do we test them before we then double down and really invest in them? Dude, I was going to tell you that the cover of your book is so good. It's so good. Thank you.

It can also double as a flashlight. You can also throw in the back of your jacket as a bike protector if you're biking. The funny crazy thing about the book cover, it's not by chance. And my publisher did not want to do it. They actually sat me down with the top guy at Penguin. It was like, we don't want to do this. Are you sure? And I said, yeah.

And what was really interesting, if you go look on Amazon or a bookstore, there's no green business books, which is kind of funny, given that a lot of business about money. They think it's taboo or bad luck. But we tested it. And I also like the color myself. Yeah. And it's green is like go. Green is money.

So it has a lot of good going for it. Well, I was thinking about this with Absumo where when I started, what, 14 years ago, I was like, Star reviews are kind of boring. Let's do Taco reviews. And somehow we still do it. And I think with all of our businesses, how do you have a little fun with it? Or where you look at it, you're like, it's kind of a little, a little bit different. And, you know, I think over time that we all, we do tend to get normalized because it's like,

all right, that's why a lot of the shows look the same. And it's why all these backgrounds on YouTube videos now, everyone's got the same fake plant. And so just kind of being mindful how to differentiate a little bit. And the green definitely is a part of that. Well, I'm happy you're here. A million dollar weekend is the book. And so you're Mr. Million Dollar idea now. So it's only fitting that we spend about an hour talking about some of your million

ideas. I just literally did another million dollar business. Say more. You know, you sent me this question stuff, which was good. I like how you sent it to me like 10 minutes before the show. Like, hey, come up with really great ideas. I mean, dude, if it wasn't you, I would send it like two weeks in advance, but it's you. Thank you. You're a fountain. You're a fountain ideas. You know, the easiest and best problems are always the ones you have yourself. And that's why I always come back to. So you ask for some of the opportunities. One, look for tools to replace teams, right? Like there's a tool in APSumo called Cast Magic. I think in less than a year that at a million ARR, so they replace producers for podcasts where the software automatically creates all your show

notes stuff. They launched them done super well. But these other tools that I think are going to be super big are what are tools to replace outdated, kind of bloated software or more expensive software? So one of the easy ones I think is going to easily get its ass kicked is Google Analytics. I don't know how to use glowing analytics anymore. It's like, and then you have to change code, and then you have to pay a bunch of money to these agency people who's, you know, DMU on LinkedIn. So the other thing that pissed me off, and I saw on our bill on App Sumo, and this is another way to look at problems, look at your bills, was DocuSign. It's like non-locked-in software that's pretty basic at this point. It's almost a commodity, but they're still charging hundreds of dollars a month.

And so in 48 hours, I was able to sell $3,000 worth without using any social media. or any of my email list and in pre-sales to a docusine alternative for life, which will launch in 30 days on App Sumo. And then I believe I would bet, I'll bet a million dollars. It'll make a million dollars in a year. Wow. So what's your, like, where do you think, what is the state of SaaS right now? Like, where are the opportunities in SaaS?

Is it to basically look at the docu signs of the world and be like, I'm going to outcompete them in pricing? Or is it looking at replacing teams and thinking about how do I use AI to, create new SaaS using AI. It all starts with the customer. And that's where most people I see on Twitter getting wrong. And people, you know, especially if you're an engineer, right? You think, all right, what's a solution now I can use with this new cool tech?

And no one cares about your tech and no one cares about your solution. They care about their problems. And so that's what I always come back to, which is what are the problems that people are either spending money or time on, ideally yourself. And then what are, what's tech maybe that can assist with that? So, you know, you can go to Absuma. it's a really interesting insight into what's popular in software, what's becoming popular. So I'm just looking at the website today as well. We're seeing a lot of no code platforms still super

popular. People are looking for more solutions around that. Chat bots that just do it for you. You see them now. And it's going to be exciting where, do you ever use these bots and they're so annoying? It's just like, the bot is so annoying. It's like a, I don't want to make a joke here, but there's going to be bots of the future. And I definitely think, see where you're not sure who you're talking to. And that's just not obvious when people are going to think of. But again, with all these things, I would try to think about who do I have access to or who is it easy for me to then sell these types of products to? And for me, I like selling to, you know, solopreneurs and small business owners like myself. And is that because you're one of those people?

So you just find it easier to sell to one of those people? Yeah, because I know what's a good price for myself. You know, like there's Callenly for like 10 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month. And you don't use it that often. And the text like frankly overbloted. So we launched tidycal.com maybe two years ago, and that's doing $3,000 in profit a day at $29 for life. And the economics makes sense. And we do have a team that keeps supporting it. But if we stopped, I'm pretty sure it would stay around the $3,000, if not $2,500 a day in profit. And it's a great entry point into the app sumo ecosystem, which is why we build our original products. Other, I'm looking at the team pulled together other ideas. This is interesting. So zap your competitors,

So integration platforms as a service. So I think there's still a lot of room around like how do all these separate software products talk together? Again, for everyone out there, who do you already have access to or audience of that you can then easily try to sell these two? I think so many times people build it. And they're like, well, I'm going to go on Twitter now and be like Greg and Noah and then hope customers just magically come or I'm going to spam DM them and that just doesn't work.

Or if it does, it's going to take a very long time. Or what they say is, and I'm sure you get this often, is people will reach out to creators like us and they'll be like, hey, you know, my product's perfect. I just need a creator. I just need a creator. And usually that's not the magic bullet. Yeah. I like the idea of the like, even for yourself. So, you know, people are like, well, how do I think of a business idea or problem? So like you're, you're a creator and you're an investor. Like, what are the things that you're spending your time doing today? I mean, for me, you know, you mentioned cast magic. I just had lunch with Ramon from Cast Magic.

And I'm coming from lunch. Like I just like, I just like finished my sandwich, rushed here. And he's got a great business. And he told me, I was like, how did you get your first customers? He goes, absumo. And he was saying like, yeah, I'm looking, you know, at creators as a channel to grow. And while I think that, yes, if he had a creator, if you were behind it, let's say, it could grow a lot faster.

I think there's something to be said about being constrained and building your own media, building your own, you know, your own community and not being just like how you don't want to be dependent on BCs. You don't necessarily want to be dependent on creators. And but yeah, going back to your question, it's like what am I focusing on?

Like tools like cast magic I think are really, really interesting tools that could save me time, make me more productive. and unlock the potential. I mean, I've got 65 people on my team right now. So if I could make them more productive and make their lives easier and happier, that's worth it for me to explore. I think with this AI stuff, what's interesting, it's like, hey, how do you use the software

so I can fire you? There's like an unsaid thing about that in different businesses where we have an operations team where they get the copy. And it is more complicated to get, you know, how do we write good copy? how do we get a video for a partner? We're like, oh, let's use some AI. And it's like, well, that means I'm going to have to fire Susan. We don't have a Susan.

But if we did, it'd be like, I don't want to fire Susan. So, you know, it's like ATMs and a lot of evolution technology. Like 20 years ago, the internet just came around, which is crazy, right? And you think about how many trillions of dollars have been generated by the internet. And then you have to think, okay, with AI, what's that same new level of doors opening up? And I can either be on one side and be a victim of it or I can be a little bit more empowered and think about how to take advantage of it. And it's kind of like you look at salaries.

there's a reason some people make 10 times more than others because they're creating 10 times more value. I saw an article, I think it might have been in the Wall Street Journal that said that Gen Z feels that accountants are uncool and therefore are not applying to like CPA schools and accountancy schools. And now they're having to raise the average salary for accountants and sort of people in that field.

And all I was thinking about when I was reading that is like, The most uncool jobs are going to be the first ones to get replicated by AI. Or software of some sort. Yeah. That's also, I mean, I think that's, I think your point's great. Is that that that's also an opportunity. Yeah. Right.

Like, hey, people are having a hard time found accountants. Like either one, create an accounting school or some way to get them excited, maybe paying them twice as much, or find a way to create an opportunity to have software that can replace that. I mean, yeah, shit like this, like taxes suck. Most accountants suck. Hiring stuff. How is hiring not?

not solved. It's insane. It's just like, hiring is so hard. It is so hard. It's like I, it keeps me up at night. I've been using this site, HireMymom.com. And I hired this woman. She was an EA for like a professional sports team CEO. And I was like, wow, that's, she must be great. She quit after two weeks. And it's obviously me. I'm the problem here. But the point being is that like hiring in general, how, how do we not have just an easier way that I'm like, do, do, do, boop. I need this person to come help us out with stuff. There's just a lot of interesting opportunities out there to like, okay, what's the opportunity? A lot. It's just finding out who has money to some extent and what they're willing to pay for or if they're willing to pay for it. Like, you know, I had trouble

finding a video editor for my YouTube channel, right? Like I had to post a thing and I have to sit through things and I have to do these calls and still kind of interesting. Like I think there's now, you know, YouTube video job boards, but be able to have like Uber for video editors or some systems that can make this stuff a lot easier that I would easily pay money for. Yeah, I think AI is definitely going to help there automate some of that. Like if you, if we have all the data around all these people with their bios on LinkedIn and their bios on Twitter and you know how long they've been there and the average tenure at this company, like how could you use AI to reach out to people systematically and then connect the owner or the business or the manager with this person. So there's a lot that could be automated there. You also got me thinking I never heard of hire my mom.com, which by the way is just brilliant domain.

I didn't even need to go to the website to know what they did. Dude, mom's rock. Yeah, exactly. Mom's rock 100%. And I think there's a huge opportunity to take businesses that have product market fit and have an angle like, like, for example, you know, support Shepard already exists for remote workers. But hire my mom is like a niche of support Shepard. Or there's another web called go squaredaway.com.

Have you heard of that? I think we've used them in Apsema. Is that the ones that are veteran ins? Yes. Military spouses. Yeah, that's actually been really good. There's also, there's opportunity everywhere. We use howdy.com.

Have you seen them? No, what's that? So they give you, they hire South American developers and employees, but they do all the vetting and they just make it stupid easy for you to have full-time dedicated staff in areas. So we're on our Absumo Originals products, we're testing them out. What do you, here's the opposite question. What are you not doing an AI?

Is there anything you're just like, you know, I like doing this manually, the old school way. Yeah. This is going to sound crazy, but writing. I actually, the only time I write using chat dbt or AI is what I've been doing with. I have a lot of typos when I write and, you know, college dropout, whatever, grew up in a French speaking place. So, you know, my grammar is an awesome. So what I do is I basically write my tweet or write my blog post and then I put it into chat GPT and I say, do I have any spelling mistakes and list it all out there?

That's what I use it for, but I don't use it for writing at all. Yeah, I don't use it for writing at all. Do you have other cool use cases? You know, I'm going to be a transparent. I am not a big fan of chat cheap tea. I feel like everyone's eating it so hard. And sometimes I think when people go hard in one way, I'm like, how do I go the other way? Right? Like, I'm big at, you know, let's go pen and paper, baby.

Which, by the way, I just talked to someone who read Million Dollar Weekend, her name's McKenzie. I got to give her a shout out. Marymakery.com. You know, if everyone's going one direction, so she's a greeting card business, $50,000 a first year. Paper. It's interesting to think maybe what are some of the businesses are things like that that are harder to go away, even with all the tech that's coming. Like, you still, you know, even with AI, you probably have to eat food at some point. I mean, you're writing a book, right? You decided to write a book when you could have written, like you have 10 chapters or whatever, you could have written 10 blog posts.

Like you went the opposite way. Well, I think that's what I think about books where I wrote in, you know, in your pre-doc, which I thought was great in terms of opportunities or trends or niches. I don't know, some of the same to me, which is like everyone's going into podcasting and YouTube and Twittering. But to write a unique book does take a long time, right? It does take a long time and there's not as many of them out there. So just something that I did that, thank God, four years ago.

which led me to where I'm at today with this book. But I think in general, I don't think everyone, Andrew Chen says it's only years ago. He's like, you don't have to innovate a lot. You just have to do one thing. Because I think we have to imagine like, well, I've got to innovate the book. And then the marketing.

It's like most of that stuff has been solved. Just find one part of the 10 to innovate. And I've really embraced that over the years. Yeah. I think that's really smart. I think, I mean, I'm working on like six companies right now. So you might listen to this and be like, practice what you preach.

But focus and just like getting something. like focus on one thing, get it to product market fit. And until you get that to product market fit, just like don't think about anything else. So that's how I think about building multiple companies is like, I'm working at one at a time, basically. That reminds, do you know Portlandia? You ever watch Portlandia? Yeah, yeah. There's a great clip where they go to the cell phone store.

I watch it a lot. And he's like, so the phone's free. He's like, yeah, it's free after you pay $99. dollars. Exactly. So I think about that like focus. Like, yeah, of course I'm focused. Just like I do what and then I focus on the next.

Then I focus on the next. Exactly. Or it's like it's tough. It's tough in this lifetime. It's like Zoolander when he goes, I can't turn. What do you say? I can't turn right or I can't turn left. Like that's me.

Oh, man. What are these six businesses you're doing? We got boringmarketing.com, which is an AI tool that we built for ourselves to build SEO optimized pages and content. And that business is going to throw off $2 to $3 million of free cash flow this year, which is crazy. We just started it last year.

I haven't publicly announced it, but whatever, boringads.com. We have been sort of applying that same playbook, but through ads. We've got you probably need a robot.com, which is one of the biggest AI communities on the internet, which is cool.

We've got LCA, which is our innovation agency. So we work with like Dropbox and Shopify and Fortnite on future proofing their businesses. Got that. And we've got a bunch of other businesses. Dude, how, how, wow. Okay. Yeah. Well, what's your question?

So, oh, there's 65 people across all these different things. Yes, exactly. Wow. Nice. Yeah. Nice. And then the majority right now, the boarding marketing. com is like the bread and butter.

I wouldn't say it's it's it's it's it's probably about 20 25 percent and is it equally distributed by the way why is it bread and butter like wouldn't it be like you know tacos and meat or like steak and wine like we need to update some of these phrases totally bread and butter is you would think like when you sit down at a restaurant you get bread and butter it's the first thing right so but it's not the best thing it's not the best thing and it's not the main thing either right the main thing is a steak Like potatoes. Well, dude, it's so funny. You know, you guys are bootstrapped, right?

Isn't this all bootstrap? Like, your money and stuff? I was Googling yesterday, like, what the hell is a bootstrap? What is a bootstrap? It was like a longer explanation than I can even share here because I don't really know. But it's like, we all say bootstrapping, but it was something like not as obvious. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. It actually goes back to like the 1800s.

Oh, really? I'm guessing it was like gold or something? Bootstrapping is any tester metric that uses, oh, no, this isn't statistics. Yeah, bootstrapping is a self-starting process that is supposed to proceed without external input. Tall boots may have a tab handle at the top known as a bootstrap, allowing one to use one's finger or a boot hook to help pull the boots on. The saying to pull oneself up by one's bootstrap was already in use during the 19th century as an example of an impossible task. Ooh, that's interesting. I like that.

I actually like that. I'll stick with bootstrapper, but bread and butter, you're out. Nice, dude. Hold on. So you have 65 people across all these things. Yeah. Wow. A lot of things. How do you stay focused?

Well, how do you focus, not focus across this stuff? So we have GMs and CEOs for each of the businesses. And how did you, how do you hire these people? Well, that's what keeps me up at night. That's what keeps me up at night. A lot of the folks are, like, for example, the CEO of boring marketing is a friend, you know? And I know people say like, don't hire friends and stuff like that. Well, it's like, you trust your friends.

There's a reason why you're your friends with your friends. And so I say hire your friends. I say hiring your friends is a great idea. Just through my personal network has been most of the hiring. Yeah, I love that. I mean, it's been definitely an absumo one of our biggest. We've hired a lot of these advisors. So we go and look at who did the thing at this company that's ahead of us.

And then we pay that person a lot of money per hour. And then we hire a more junior person who cares probably a little bit more about absum. And then it's kind of a nice merge versus some of these like elite people that we think. One, they're not as good. And two, they're too expensive. That's interesting that you do the advisory thing. I went for lunch with someone recently who I really respect. And he was suggesting to me, he was like, you should pair your team with a bunch of advisors

and just pay them monthly. He's like, no-brainer. So I'm curious. We do it across. Yeah. That's exactly what we do. Yeah. So we have, I'll just break out the people.

And it depends on where you're, now it's almost everyone in leadership gets a person. So Anna, who runs people. We have Christine, who is the chief people officer from Duolingo. Moody Glasgow was the CMO of Zapier and Glassdoor. He does marketing. There's a guy named Colin Gardner. He does revenue. So he did outdoorsy or RV share, one of those.

We have, there's Rajitish Mukherjee. He's more like in Operations. So he's kind of at a high level. Alona, who's the CEO. She has someone who worked at Automatic as an advisor. And now we're thinking even with other people in the company, how do we help them get more advisors? Because it seems like it's been a, for like a $500 bucks an hour or a thousand bucks an hour. And the way we found most of them is we looked

at the for who works at those companies. And I just asked for a referral. It's pretty straightforward. And almost all of them came through referrals where it's like, hey, you seem to know this person on LinkedIn. Can you introduce me to them? And if they say no or they say, I don't know them, you can also ask, well, who else do you know that could be this role? And that's created a lot of these people. And I would highly recommend it. Do you go to them like, hey, I'm willing to pay $500 an hour or are they, do you ask them? Yes. That's what you say. Okay.

Yeah. Well, we say we want to pay you. I think the best way to pay people is ask them how much they want to make. Yeah. So I have people I work with and like, I want to make a million dollars. I was like, great, let's get you to be a millionaire. Yeah. And there's people, it's nothing wrong or I just like giving people what they want.

So we do offer like, hey, we want to pay you for this. And with the different advisors, they do have different rates. And it's also different amount of hours. So like we have the CFO from Mailchimp, Jenny Bloom. And so she has an hourly and, you know, everyone's got their own hourly. But we found it invaluable. And it's kind of a cheat code because these people already know a lot of the things. Like Moody yesterday, he asked us in the marketing leaders meeting.

He said, what is what's absumo when you tell someone out of bar or you're at dinner and someone's like, what's absumo? Every single person had a different answer. And it's like he's asking the strategic bigger picture, bigger leverage questions that were just so tactical, I would say. So it's being with someone who's like done it numerous times to be able to. really coach us. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the answer a lot of people have, us non-bootstrappers have, is it's like, oh, I'll just raise money from well-known people. But I'd rather not investors.

I'd rather people who are do, you know, who are operators and, and who are in the game versus like writing checks for a living. Yeah, I talked to, I was in for a million dollar week and I was interviewing with a show yesterday and they're, they're a software business. And they, it is, great. They're doing their own content. That worked with me at mint.com. It's worked with us at Absumo. It's what I'm also teaching the book. And these guys are saying, yeah, we've got to do this because our investors want to do it. And I asked them, I was like, well, what are your customers want to do? And what do you want to do? And they're like, oh, not that. And so I think that was definitely where my apprehension of taking funding on. I was like, why don't you make your customers your

investors? I think definitely see maybe in terms of trends. I wonder how that's going to involve. Well, you have a good story around how you lost a million dollars not listening to customers. Can you share a little bit about that? Yeah, I heard Chris Williamson talk about this where there's a success bias where just because you do something good, you think you know everything good, right? And you forget also maybe how the beginnings are. And the beginnings are always the same, right? Find something people really want and you deliver it to them.

And then you do that again and again and again and again. And, you know, you go on Twitter and everyone's got this playbook they've shared and then you realize they're selling you a course. It's like, hey, here's how I bought a real estate business. Here's how I do my marketing. Oh, by the way, in the bio, there's a link for a life mastery course, 297. And, you know, in the, I guess I'd say as an operator in the trenches, you know, running an e-commerce site at Apsumo, I stopped listening to the customer really well

and listening to the team. And we have about 600 products on Apsumo software deals at any time. And a lot of them are like the latest ones, like, as you said, cast magic. And so we thought, hey, if you 10X it, because you see on Twitter that 10xing is the way, that we 10x our business. And so I very quickly ran in the wrong direction. We went from, and so we had to hire more people on sales,

on operations, on the marketing. And then we went from, and then the engineering team built all this stuff for that. So I'm only talking about cash million that I lost, not in terms of the salary. That's probably another million. And so we went from 600 to 13,000 products

within six months on the site. And our revenue stayed the same. But our profit went down, right? Because now we have different margins. So some products have better margins than others. So we went from normally like a 50% margin, give or take. Now we're down to like a 30% margin. And our customers were livid.

I saw on Twitter and they email me. And that was interesting. The team at Absumo was mad because they're like, we don't want to do this. And the partners were mad because they're not getting as much exposure. And then I decided to also spend a million dollars cash to promote that we have all these new products on Absumo. And that was a great, painful, expensive reminder around how do you test things before you go invest in them. And I think we all, everyone thinks their ideas are unique and their approaches

are unique. And the reality is probably not. Probably not. Like I would say opening eyes, like kind of unique. But even that, like, we've had chatbots 10, 15 years. Like now it's like a little better of a chat bot. And it can do a little bit more than Google search, but it's not like crazy. And so how do you test this stuff out? So I could have easily tested from 600 products to 650 and saw that the team was like, this is stupid. The customer said it was stupid. And the partner instead of stupid. And so in all of our businesses, we're going to fail. And frankly, the more you fail, the more it leads you to somewhere that actually works. And we've had a lot of that too. But now it's going back to the basics of how often you're talking to your customers,

how often you listen to your team? How often do you're talking to your partners? And then as we have these crazy ideas that we know are always right, how do we test them before we then double down and really invest in them? So we had this website that we put up. If you go to meetdispatch.com, you can check it out. It was a... On meet? Meet. Is that like a dating site? No. It's like a dating site if you want to meet designers for your team. It's basically on-demand designers.

Oh, dispatch. Yeah, exactly. Up to 60% off. And we put up a website really quickly, okay? And it, my opinion wasn't really converting that much. But that was just based on my own gut and feel. Like I was like, I just saw some slack messages. I was like, you know when you build something and it's,

scales really quickly, you're just like, you know, it's a seven, it just instantly scaled to a seven figure business. And we never updated the webpage. And then I came in there, bull in a china shop, going to the team being like, we need to redo our website. Like, and I wrote this copy, which, uh, I'm reading it. Yeah. And now we're testing to see if it converts more. But my team went to me and they were kind of like, dude, you got to like take it one step at a time. Like what we, We should have done. You know, it's so different. And there's, there's, and it was a lesson, it was a lesson for me to like, it's cool

to bet boldly, but you want to, you want to have a plan. You can't just like press the nuclear button when you have something working. Well, yeah, I mean, I literally wrote a book on it, not the book, but actually going to one of the books. I'm curious, though. So, one, you're so much cooler than I realized we've never really like gone deep or deep-ish. I love that you're doing all this stuff. I think this is super cool.

most of the people that I'd say the most success to me have also tried the most things, right? And then they find the thing that works and they stick with it for a long period of time. How do you decide when to start something new? And like, maybe can you share more of the things that you've done that no one knows about or that you never, that didn't get much traction? Yeah. Well, I think there's one thing I did with my team that not many people know I did, which was when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I built a network of the largest financial communities on the internet. So we built a business called Wall Street Survivor. And Wall Street Survivor was the largest real-time stock market on the internet. And it was right after 2008,

when people's net worth went down 50% because of the crash. And we were kind of like, wouldn't it be cool to like have play money and turn buying the stock market into a game? And then we did that for ourselves and then we powered, you know, all the big brokerages like Scott Trade and TD and every newspaper who ran a challenge, a stock market challenge. And then we said, hey, wouldn't schools want to use something like this? And then all of a sudden, 80 plus percent of the top U.S. business schools would pay us to power their finance curriculum. So that's something I did that not many people know about. Is this still yours, this Wall Street Survivor.com? Did you sell it? We sold it to a private equity group. Can you share how much?

Well, actually, the company, we took it public in Canada. Then we privatized it because it was getting promoted by stock market like manipulators, penny stock traders, because it was essentially a penny stock. We spent $2 million to make it go public. Then we spent $2 million to privatize it. And so that was crazy. I've never talked about that publicly. And then we also, and then we.

sold it to a private group. And do you know how it's doing it all? And roughly how much you sell it for? I would say, I mean, it's probably doing, you know, it's probably an eight figure, but, you know, it's an eight figure profitable business. The team is probably 50 or 60 people now. I'm not going to disclose how much I sold it for, but, you know, it was, it wasn't a home run, but it was certainly a single. Depends where. I mean, it sounds like a double or triple to me. I mean, I think what's crazy, and I've seen it with this book and with my YouTube channel is just how many different ways you can get rich. Right.

Even on the web, right? Like, it can be non-web totally. You know, it could be books. It could be local businesses. But even within the web, there's just so many categories. Yeah. Even in content creation, right? I think you've probably seen Kevin Espierreter, the epic gardening guy.

Yeah. He's been a long time buddy. And I really do think it's finding something that people want. But also really, I think what doesn't get talked about is sticking with it. Yeah. Like, I'm sure you've tried things that like boring market or did that hit right away? Or is it like you had to try a long time for it to hit? So when we, like our version of an MVP is an audience or community.

So when we started boring marketing, we created a Twitter account called Boring Marketer at Boring Marketer. And we would, you know, our whole thesis was, you know, if Cody Sanchez is the queen of boring businesses, who's going to be the king of boring marketing? You know, that was the thesis. And so we started just tweeting about, it caused zero to create a Twitter account. So we just basically started tweeting about this concept of boring marketing. What are boring ways to grow your business?

And then we started tweeting about SEO. And then we started tweeting about AI SEO, how to do it. And then people really, all of a sudden, we had 5, 10, 15,000 followers. And then we were iterating on this tool to go and implement while we were validating. So we always start with the audience or the community. Have you ever built like from like day one with the customer or like, sold to a customer at all or done validation without? Because I think what I always have hesitant on is like building up an audience and then they don't actually want to ever buy anything or spend

money on something. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that is a fear of mine, which is like, is this audience the same people who are going to be customers? So I have this I have this funnel that I talk about, which is like, it's called the ACP funnel, audience community product. So I usually start with an audience, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, build up. Like, it also allows you to be clear about what it is, like how to position it, what it is I'm building. And then I usually convert a small amount of those people into a free community. And those people that I convert are generally people who I think are going to be customers.

So those people I'll either put in like a WhatsApp group, an I message group, a free school or something, circle, whatever. And those people I'm iterating with in real time. And what has been your approach about what you sell to them? My approach. I think it's my approach is honesty and transparency, which is like, I'm one of you and I'm interested in, let's say, boring marketing. And I'm going to share my learnings and add value.

And hopefully you're interested in this too. And it turns out if they're interested in it, they're also assuming that they, in this example, like these people have purchasing power, assuming they have purchasing power. and they're your ideal customer profile, then this funnel works pretty well. I guess I've liked to approach similarly, but ideally I'm the first customer, or at least problems that I'm interested in.

And then I like making sure there's validation with other people before I want to build up an audience of something I'm not sure of. But I like the idea of getting validation early, whether it's on a marketplace, whether it's through your pre-selling or whether it's through landing pages, and then building that product out for those people and the audience at the same time. Different approaches to get to probably similar destinations.

I think the other thing that you highlighted, which I got to call out, and this is something I noticed, especially with the book, how do you get your customers more engaged with the business? Right? There's normally like a separation, I think has happened. And it's the same thing with,

if you think of celebrities, remember celebrities where we literally could see them on TV and People magazine? And now every celebrity has a podcast, right? And then they have like social media where you can DM them and leave a comment and maybe they'll reply back and you post that reply back as a comment for yourself

as social media. And so it's a great reminder for me. And I've done it with Absumo, I've done it with a million dollar weekend, done it with, you know, things have done over the past decade. It's like have people a part of the process. And I love that you're saying, yeah, just be honest. Like we tried for the book, I did a referral program. Like, hey, if you had a launch team for the book. And I was like, all right, bring one person. So there's a 1,300 person launch team. And I said, if you can bring one person, I'm going to do a dedicated office hours. I'll answer anything you have in business or whatever you want to talk about, just for you and your friend. Six people did it. Right. So it was awesome, though. I was like, great. That's something people

didn't want. And you could, and then I share that back. Like, hey, seems like y'all didn't want it. Tell me more. Yeah, I guess it's like, I don't have any really friends. Like, I'm kind of in an area by myself. So I didn't have someone I could even think of referring. That's why I'm a part of a group. Oh, okay. Or every week I share updates of what's been going on from our marketing. And I shared, here's all the shows I'm coming on this week. Obviously, Greg Eisenberg. I'm coming to hang out with him. And then I shared as well, you guys, I don't know if you know this,

but here's all the shows I'm rejected from. Here's all the diary of a CEO, how I built this rejected me. They didn't respond. This woman, Kathy Heller, is rejected me three times, which I'm like, okay, twice I get three times. Now you're just being mean. But they love it.

They love it. Even, you know, my whole Facebook store, I got fired. I'm still talking about that 20 years ago because the takeaway for anyone out there, whether you're a content creator or a business creator and all these aspects, just include the community and the audience in the process. Yes. And I know with Habstim,

I still text the first customers. Not every day. So I think that's creepy. But, you know, as part of the thing. And even with this book, like the customers, I'm talking to them.

Hey, here's what I'm writing on. What did you guys think about it and working with them in the process? Yeah. I think they want to hear your wins and equally they want to hear about your losses. I remember, by the way, you know,

it's even more hurts even more. about not getting onto a podcast is getting invited on a podcast, recording the podcast, and them not releasing it. So that happened to me with Harry Stebings, 20, 20 minute VC. He invited me to the podcast. I go on the podcast. I'm so excited. By the way, this is in 2018, okay?

I needed this podcast because I was funding my business, like myself. we had run out of money, 2018. I don't know if you remember, there was like a bit of a flash crash in text docs. I was running a social app. And social at the time, everyone was like, well, Facebook's going to copy you. Facebook's going to copy you. No one wants to do social apps. I get invited.

I open my inbox. I see Harry Stevings invites me onto his show. I'm like, this is the number one VC show in the world. Thank God. I've made it. I go on the show. I'm like, I do it. 30 minutes.

I think I nail it. I'm like celebrating with friends afterwards. I'm like so excited for the episode. Doesn't ever air. And then I, you know, after a month I sent him a message. I was like, what happened? And he's like, oh, we're not releasing the episode. And I think that the outches people, like that earns trust with your community,

with your audience, with your 100%, right? One of the things, I mean, what's been interesting with this book and seeing people read it, is that the more that you can get okay that there's going to be rejection as part of this process and frankly it's a learning opportunity. It's like, okay, this person didn't want it, why not? This person wanted it, great.

And the more that you can get a little bit uncomfortable with that, get comfortable being a little bit uncomfortable, you just keep going and think about how many other people have said yes. But what most people do is they get rejected by Harry or one person and they're like, well, I guess this is not it. Right. And if you can figure out, not even figure out, if there's fun ways to do it, like the coffee challenge

is something I've always talked about where you go ask for discount, get rejected, and you move forward. And you're like, this is not. not so bad. And I think sharing that has been good. The other thing I would say that you highlighted, besides starting a lot of things, right? Like, you've started so many things, right? So you actually have a skill now that you get going. You're not waiting to be ready for it. And though, you stick with it a long time. Like, how long did it take for Bore and Marketer to make a million? Like a year, two years, three years? Just under a year. Yeah. Wow. That's fast. That one's fast.

We had product market fit right away. But, you know, how many examples I could share of things that we invested a million dollars plus and we were going after it and going after it. And so much time, you know, it's tough to, it's tough to kill a project, right? It's really tough. So especially when you feel like you're so close. Dude, I've done that. I feel like that's such a thing where you don't have product market fit.

you just add more features until it fits. It's tough though. It could work that way, right? We use these exceptions as the norm. Like, oh, well, Slack did it twice, right? Yeah. But that's just literally two of the examples where I always think of it as like putting stickers on a Honda.

Like, it's still slow. Like, just make a faster car if you want a fast car. Yeah. And I've noticed with all of my successes, they have started fast. Like, that's what I, you know, weekend, if not sooner. And then the ones where I'm like, okay, I need more research. I need to build more. I need to talk to more people.

just this is a unique one. Like we try to build a clavio competitor called Meat Fam. It spent like, I don't know, six, 12 months building it. I couldn't beg a friend to change over. I was like, please, but this is an automatic clavio. You don't have to do anything. They're like, yeah, I just kind of have it set up. And I have this guy that runs McClavio.

And, you know, with Absumo, I was like, all right, I got a deal on Imger, threw it on Reddit and people bought it right away, 12 bucks at a time. It's like, that's it. You know, it sounds the same thing with the board. marketer and some of these other approaches, that there are other ways of doing it where you can find out faster of what people are actually excited about. Yeah, I agree. I think people stick to the examples of like, you know, they're on their last dollar and they figure it out. My friend, Nikita Beer was like this. He, I don't know if you know that story, but he basically, he hit me up

like summer, I don't know, 2017 or something. And he was, he had been iterating on social last for like seven years and like it wasn't working out so he was like yeah i want to close my company you know i'm going to close my company do you know anything about getting out of an office lease and i was like oh whatever happened to that like high school anonymous teen pulling pulling at and he was like oh i didn't launch it i'm going to launch it in a few weeks i think maybe he wasn't even it was on his last straw he didn't even know if he was going to launch it and that became like his claim to fame, right? TBH, gas, which is essentially the same app. And the, you know, so if he, if he would have quit that summer, he wouldn't be Nikita beer. But I look at that and I'm like, I don't want to be,

I don't want to put myself through that stress personally. He would still be Nikita either way. I just think that that's glorifying the wrong behavior. Yeah. Right. There's this whole 10x thing and burn the boats thing. And I think you can do it that way, but you can also do it an easier way. I've started all my businesses while I had a day job. And more what I've realized is that there's a lot of smart people in day jobs that don't want to be there. But they think they have to be like Nikita and like, okay, kids, we're going to have Cheerios every day or whatever it is that you eat.

And you have to have this crazy risk where it's like, no, start a bunch of things. Like, did you have a day job? Like, how did you get going or did you start making businesses right away? I've just been building businesses right away. I mean, I started off like I was, my dad had a store and I was a cashier at the store. and well actually I started off breaking boxes literally and that was tough work to be to be doing that and then I graduated eventually to be like assistant cashier and then cashier and I learned that I really didn't want to be in retail and on the side of that I was like building websites and

and love this internet thing and I was just like wow it's so much more fun to be building digital stuff than breaking boxes or you know bagging. product. I would say for a lot of people out there, it sounds like we've had similar, you know, earlier careers. But yeah, you can have a day job and maybe like it or don't, but at least have that option where you start your own business. And for me, I kept getting fired. And I was like, well, shit, man, I got to take control of my own destiny instead of letting one person choose my livelihood. And so one of my third job is like, well, I'm going to start building these side hustles and find a system that can eventually work so then I can quit that side hustle

when I make enough money. But I would say the underlying thing I was calling it out again, sometimes it just takes a long time. It takes compounded time to really get the results of these businesses once they start working. For Absumo, it was like, we did similar to you. It worked right away. It was like first year, 300,000, second year, $3 million.

But then it was flat, you know, for a few years, like $4 million, $4 million, $5,000, then it started picking up again. Market got better. We stuck with it. We doubled down, aiming the old CEO, dabbled down on things that worked. And then, you know, last year, $80 million. It's crazy. But which is, you know, it's a bootstrap business.

It's unbelievable. And, you know, we've made a lot of millionaires. And a lot of people have products like Casabagic have gone on to do amazing things. And that's what we're here for. But part of that is we got started and we stuck with it. I think people stick with it like Nikita, which is like, you're sticking with something not working. Or maybe he saw some data that was. But why not just find something that does work and then stick with just that for a long period of time?

That's what I've seen, especially on the YouTube channel, too. These billionaires, they all took 20 years. I was looking at all of the ones I've interviewed and the ones that, I've worked for. It's about 20 years you ever take on average for them to make a bill. And it's like people aren't a billionaire in like a month from crypto. They give up. Are they? I bought a lot of shitty NFTs. I kept getting scammed. And it was like a hobby. But it was like, I think so many people were like, I'm not rich off NFTs this month. I gave up. But there are a few people who are like, hey, I really am excited about NFTs. I'm going to stick with it.

Like I invested in Moon Pay. This guy Ivan out of Miami. And they're sticking with it. And I could see them ideally, you know, in a few years, it produces a great results. But some of these things just doesn't do all of the results at once. And so why don't you compound you over year with slow, you know, slow consistent growth? That's definitely been my approach with App Sumo coming back in the past few years. And I feel like we can sustain longer.

Like a boring marketer, it's like one million and then two million and three million. It's like keep, because I do believe in that phrase like easy come, easy go. Yeah. And if it's like, if you build it really slow and they come really slow,

then they're going to stay really slow. But again, you have to make sure it's something that people want, not like Nikito or, you know, I guess risk it all. at the end, God does his work. Yeah. Yeah.

I think, I also think like it's easier now to build and test. And so I think like I would recommend for most people that they put themselves through the stress of, hey, let me go dedicate five, 10 years of my life to go and take this moonshot swing. Unless like you're passionate about a particular space. That anyone a billion dollar plus outcome. Like for us, like we're, we're happy. Happy not having a billion-dollar plus outcomes. Totally happy. We're not looking at the million. I was, I was stoked with a million. I mean, I talk about the freedom number in the book, which was I quit my job when I made 3,000. And I think everyone should think about their freedom number when they can finally do what they want. You know, it's interesting because we think about these people like Edison or James Dyson, where they're like, I built a thousand light bulbs. And the thousand light work. Holy shit. You know, so I think one, you know, he's in the dark a lot. So he probably wanted a light to, so he could do work.

Right. So solve your own problem. And I think what doesn't get talked about with that is you do have indications that people want things so it's easier to stick with it. You know, I've noticed with content, it's like law of 100. So make 100 content because otherwise you're going to quit too soon. And the same thing with with when I was at Facebook. We saw the retention and growth data, even though others didn't know it. We're like, holy shit, this is fucking exploding. But no one else knew that. And I'm guessing the same is true with with Edison and Dyson where it's like, wow, there's something already working a little bit. bit that's giving them confidence. It's the same of the business. Like find some people are excited about and then, all right, at least you have some indication that you can stick with that for some period time, something's working there or will work where I do think people are like, it might work and let me hope for it. And I just never, I never wanted to approach business in that way. So to find business ideas, like the only way you find business ideas is basically you go through life. And as life happens, you kind of like observe things and you write it down. I am not as thinking, I'm not thinking about business ideas as often.

Obviously with a book, I'm thinking about it more just to share with others and give them away. I just think there's like unlimited ways to make money. And I've chased opportunities. So when Facebook games opened up that platform, I had a day job at Mint doing their marketing. But I was like, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to get the hell out of here. And so I don't play games. I don't like games, but I can make some apps.

So I copied the most popular app in one category that had the least competition, which was a soccer app. and I made a hockey app. And I chased it. And it went viral of a million users in a week. And then I launched a bunch. And then Naval wanted to fund me and other people, which he ended up doing. And, but it was a business that I did not care about.

I'm not interested in games. I didn't play games. I'm like Farmville. I hated all those people. And so, and then I did another business where I did payments for those games. And that made a lot of money. But I, again, hated all these people. Or maybe they hated me.

I don't know. But I think it's like, find something you're excited to work on for 10 years. Like, I like making content. I've been doing it for 20 years. I'll do it for another 20 because I love it. Even not a lot of people watch or a few, because I like watching. And I think the same thing with these business ideas. I want software deals like on Cast Magic or on Clean Shot, which is on App Sumo right now, or on Alfred app, which I got a long time ago, or remember the milk or whatever new tool is out there. Like, I get excited by that. And I think more people can think

about, all right, what's a business that I'd be excited and then make sure that others want that too. So like for today, I'll tell you, like two ideas that I really, really need, frankly, I need food delivery in Austin that's healthy. They have it in Barcelona. It's called the healthiest BCN. And for $10 a day, they'll bring to your house like very, very healthy food that you can customize. 10 bucks a day, super good price. Okay.

When you say healthy food, are you talking about prepared food or just like? Yeah, it's fully cooked. And it's not worn when they bring it, but it's pretty warm every single day. Well, do you remember, 10 bucks? Do you remember Sprague? I don't know if it came. You were an SF when that happened? They didn't have it in Austin.

I know Goggin, but no, they didn't bring it to all. Austin. I don't know if they brought it to Austin. So Sprigg was that idea. For me, like, I've been looking for a solution for that. Yeah. Right. That doesn't is, or right now in Austin, I need a, like a house manager, which sounds kind of crazy, but I have a painting on the ground. My grass is dead. There's my umbrella broke off. And it's not that I'm too good for it. Or I can't do these things. I'm just a little occupy with my girlfriend, Absumo, this book, YouTube. And I don't want to do that. But to try to find someone and interview someone and have them come over once at a while is a pain in the ass. And then I have to trust them and hope it works out. So again,

that's a great opportunity. And there's probably other people that are busy with their houses too. Now, what I've been thinking about though with these businesses is that they're all, I think, really good opportunities. What do I actually want to do though? And for me, again, what I said in the beginning, I'm mostly focused. I am only focused on businesses that are working that I'm already in. So we talked about DocuSign. I think I mentioned that I don't want to use DocuSign or HelloSine or any sign and I don't want to pay a subscription. So I validated that people wanted it and now I can deliver it to those people. And that is something that now our team will then take over. David and Garrett and Abaldo, Marni will take it over and then really scale that out.

But those are more, I think in the past, I would try a lot more things or just do stuff that I'm like, okay, cool, I'll do it and then throw it away. But now it's only, it's more intentional, especially as I'm getting older, I'm more, I think you probably too. I'm way more sensitive on time and I want to not do meetings before noon and I want to be present for my girlfriend and and our future family. And being an entrepreneur, I think you recognize it as well. It is a lot of work. And now I'm actually working more hours now than I ever have. But I'm also more excited now than I've ever been. And that's available for everyone. You know, have cool shit you're looking forward to. Cool stuff you want to be doing like these things. And when you're an entrepreneur as

well, I can have more time to also be off, which I feel very grateful about. But for everyone out there, you also have to start. Like you want to be a contractor, post a thing today. You want to make products like Greg. Go make an audience. Follow Greg's formula. You want to start a business my way. do my way, but at least you get started today. Yeah. And I think it's also important for people to follow what other people are doing, understand their models, and it might be a mix of like a Greg and a Noah, right?

Oh, that's a nice mix. That's a beautiful mix. I love that mix. It's a good looking kid right there. Put us on some AI baby generator. No, because I think what happens, Greg, and I think that's a great point is they see Greg's model and they copy and it doesn't work. And it's like, well, you're not understanding how Greg got to these decisions.

decisions. Like absolutely used to be bundled software deals. And then we went to individual daily deals. And it's not just because that's what Groupon did. It's because we literally had to go understand that we looked at the economics of bundles. Andrew Chen put it together. Here's a bundle economics. Here's individual deal economics. Here's how advertising could now be implemented in each of those and what that return will look like. And it was just obvious. But, you know, I think sometimes we have to ask people like, how did you get to those decisions? And maybe it works for you. Maybe it doesn't, but you go try it and you're like, okay, this isn't work. Let me try something else. No, I appreciate you coming on. You're just, I'm, I'm ready to run through a wall right now.

Like, this is, this is what I'm talking about. I mean, go find stuff you're excited to tell people about. I think that's a big, like a big problem. Yeah. People are like, I don't know, I don't want to promote things. Like, well, then your product sucks or you're not excited about it. You don't have customers excited about it. But for me, you know, this book or app sumo or this new docket sign alternative. We don't even have a website or a name yet. So if you got an idea, let me know. But people are, people want it. I want it. And I'm like, yeah, now now I get to go make a business and spend life doing that. I don't know. I think we're all figuring out in this planet. So have some fun while we're doing it. That's definitely what I would like to get that out there. Amen, brother. Million

dollar weekend. Is it available for purchase? No. No, I don't know when this is coming out. The book drops January 30. It's so it's, it's, it is a business, right? It's, I ran this like a tech company where how do I test different things? How do I make sure there's validation? How do I run the marketing? So I think if people are liking how they see the promotion and the materials of the book, I think people will get good results for themselves. I'm reading it. So I'm looking forward to it. And this will come out January 25th. So sweet. Perfect timing. And then I sent you a VIP box, by the way. So I sent you a million dollar weekend VIP box. Oh, wow. Thank you. I appreciate that. yet, but I will look for it.

We just sent it two days ago. I know. I don't know. Yeah. It's not as fast as email. I'm a digital guy, bro. I know, but also media mail in America is a lot cheaper, right? Like, there's this like FedEx overnight.

It was like $50. But media mail is like $3 for the books and other, some other goodies for you. Said like a true bootstrapper. Dude, it's, I'm flying to Spain where we spend half the year. And the flight, it's like $700 for economy, but $5,000 for first class. Just book it on points. Book it on points. Yeah.

We're going to do the points. We're going to do the points, which that's a whole other thing. If you're a bootstrapper, create an LLC, get points. That's not you can expense things. But I think the bigger thing is just enjoying the money we do make, right? If you're going to make some and enjoy it. So yes, I will most likely use points. But if not, pay for the upgrade.

Yeah. And by the way, last time we spoke, you didn't have, you were looking for a girlfriend. So now you have a girlfriend. I have a woman, man. Yeah. It's a woman friend. And she's phenomenal. We met in Barcelona.

So we're going to go back there. And we actually have a baby on the way. So we're going to go back to the baby. A lot of, every time I talk to you something new, dude, I've got, you know, what's next? I love it. You know, that's funny. Someone asked me that too.

They're like, what's next? And I'm like, honestly, just more of absumo. You know, being a good father, being present. And what's working? Just keep doing more of that. You're full of surprises. You know, follow Noah Kagan for surprises. million-dollar weekend.

Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, man.