How To Find MILLION DOLLAR Business Ideas That WORK | Noah Kagan

0:00I 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 hear 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 cuz you see on Twitter that 10 Xing 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

0:25you 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 are you talking to your customers how often you listen to your team how often are you 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

0:51double as a flashlight you can also throw in the back of your you know uh jacket as a bike protector if you're biking the funnest crazy thing about this the book cover it's not by chance and our my publisher did not want to do it they actually sat me down with the top guy at penguin and was like we don't want to do this are you sure and I said yeah and uh 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 is about money uh they think

1:21it's taboo or bad luck and but we tested it and I also like the color myself yeah and it's green is like go green is money so has a lot of has a lot of good going for it well I I was thinking about this with appsumo 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 right 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 H it's kind of little little bit different and uh you

1:50know 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 and the green definitely is a part of that well I'm happy you're here uh million dooll weekend is the book and so you're Mr million doll idea now so it's it's only fitting that we spend about an hour talking about some of your million dooll ideas I just literally did another million-dollar

2:28business say more um 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 you're a fountain you're fountain ideas you know I the easiest and best problems are always the ones you have yourself and that's what 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 on app called cast Magic I think in less

3:00than a year they had a million AR so they replace producers for podcast where the software automatically creates all your show notes stuff uh they launched have 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 Google 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 you know DM you on LinkedIn so the

3:29other thing that pissed me off and I and I saw in our bill on appsumo and this another way to look at problems look at your bills was DocuSign I 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 uh or any of my email list and in pre-sales to a DocuSign alternative for life which will launch in 30 days on appsumo and then I believe I would I would bet I'll bet a million dollars it'll make a million

4:02dollars in a year wow so what's your like where do you think what is the state of SAS right now like where where are the opportunities in SAS is it to basically look at the docu signs of the world and be like I'm going to out compete them in in pricing or is it looking at replacing teams and thinking about how do I use AI to create new new SAS using AI it all starts with a customer and that's where most people I see on Twitter getting wrong like and people you know especially if you're in engineer right you you think all right what's a solution now I can use with

4:33this 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 that's what I always cut 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 absum and it's a really interesting insight into what's popular in software what's becoming popular so I'm just looking at the 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 uh chat

5:03Bots that just do it for you you you see them now and 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 it's I don't I don't want to make a joke here but there's going to be bots of the future and I definitely think we'll see where you're not sure who you're talking to and that's just an obvious one 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

5:29products to and for me I like selling to you know solar preneurs and small business owners like myself um 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 a good price for myself you know like there's cly for like 10 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month and you don't use it that often and the text like frankly over bloated so we launched tidy cal.com maybe two years ago and that's doing $3,000 in profit a day at $29 for life and the economics make sense and we do have a team that keeps supporting but

5:59if 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 abso ecosystem which is why we build our Originals products other I'm looking at the team pulled together other ideas uh this is interesting so zappier competitors so integration platforms as a service so I think there's there's still a lot of room around like how do all these separate software products talk together uh again for everyone out there who do you already have access to or audience of that you can then easily try to sell these twoos I think so many times people

6:30build it and they're like 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 gonna take a very long time or what they say is and I'm sure you get this often is people will reach out to create like 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 pro like even for yourself so you know people are

7:05like 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 Ramone from cast magic and I'm coming from lunch like I just like I just like finished my sandwich rushed here and uh he's got a great business and he told I was like how'd you get your first customers he goes appsumo and he was saying like yeah I'm looking you know at creators as a channel to to grow and while I think that yes if he had a

7:40Creator 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 uh dependent on BCS you don't necessarily want to be dependent on creators yeah 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

8:20them more productive and make their lives easier and happier that's that's worth it for me to uh explore I think with this AI stuff it's it 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 with our 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 ah let's use some Ai and it's like well that means I'm gonna have to fire Susan we don't

8:49have 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 trillion of dollars have been generated by the internet and then you have to think okay with AI what what's that same new level that 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 uh it's kind of

9:12like 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 uh 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 and and sort of people in that field and all I was thinking about when I was reading that is like the the most uncool jobs are going to be the first ones to get replicated by AI or software of some

9:49sort yeah software some sort I mean I think that's I think your Point's great is that that's also an opportunity yeah right like hey people are having a hard time finding 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 I mean yeah like this like taxes suck Most accountants suck hiring still how is hiring not solved it's insane it it's just like d hiring is so hard it is so hard it's like I it keeps me up at night I've been

10:20using the site hire mymom.com and I hired this woman she was an EA for like a 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 General how how do we not have just an easier way that I'm like doop 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 and what they're willing to pay for

10:49or if they're willing to pay for it like you know I I had trouble finding a video editor for my YouTube channel right like I had to post a thing and then I have to sift through things and I have to do all these calls and still kind of interesting like I think there's now you know YouTube video job boards but to be able to have like a 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 if you if we have

11:17all 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 and the average tenure at this company like how could you use AI to reach out to people uh systematically and then connect the owner of the business of the 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 mymom.com which by the way is just brilliant domain I didn't even need to go to the website to know what they did um D mom's Rock exactly mom's Rock 100%

11:50And I think there's a huge opportunity to take businesses that have product Market fit and have an angle like like for example uh you know support Shephard already exists um for remote workers but hire my mom is like a niche of of support Shepard or there's another we called go squared away.com have you heard of that I think we've used we use them apps is that the ones that are veteran yes military military yeah that's actually been really good there's also there's there's opportunity everywhere we use uh howdy. comom have you seen them no what's that so they give you they hire South American developers and employees

12:32but they do all the vetting and they just make it stupid easy for you to have full-time dedicated staff and an area so we're on our absum Originals products we're testing them out what what are you here's the opposite question what are you not doing in AI is there anything you're just like you know I like doing this manually the the old school way yeah this is going to sound crazy but writing I actually the only time I write using chat DPT or AI is what I've been doing with with I I have a lot of typos when I write and you know College Dropout whatever grew up in a French

13:05speaking place so you know my my grammar isn't awesome so what I do is I I basically write my tweet or write my blog post and then I put it into chat gbt 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 cool yeah I don't use it for writing at all do you have other cool use cases I you know I'm gonna be trans I am I'm not a big fan of chat GPT I I feel like everyone's eating it so hard and sometimes I think when

13:35people go hard in one way I'm like how do I go the other way right like I'm big you know let's go pen and paper baby like which by the way I just talked to someone who read million dollar weekend her name is McKenzie I got to give her a shout out marry maker.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

14:02point 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 couldn't WR you could have written 10 blog posts like you went the opposite way well I think that's what I think about books where you 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 all some of the same to me which is like there's everyone's going into podcasting and youtubing and twittering but to write a unique book does take a long time right it it does

14:31take a long time and there's not as many of them out there so just something that uh I did that thank God for 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 said so many 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 I've got to innovate the 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

14:56I think that's really smart I think uh I mean I'm working on like six companies right now so you might listen to this and be like practice way you preach but um 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

15:30it a lot and he's like so the phone's free he's like yeah it's free after you paid $99 exactly so I think about that like Focus like yeah of course I'm Focus just like I do one and then I focus on the next then I focus on the next exactly or it's like it's tough it's tough this life to it's like Zoolander when he goes I can't turn what he say I can't turn right or I can't turn left like that's me oh man H what are these six businesses you're doing we got boring marketing.com which is an AI tool that we built for ourselves to build uh SEO

16:06optimize pages and content and that a that business is going to throw off two to three million dolls of free cash flow this year which is crazy we just started last year um I haven't publicly announced it but whatever uh boring ads.com we have been sort of applying that same Playbook but through ads uh we've got you probably need a robot.com which is one of the biggest AI communities on the internet uh 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

16:47businesses um dude hold how yeah 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 boring marketing.com is like the the bread and butter uh I wouldn't say it's it's it's it's probably about 20 25% um 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

17:23and 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 and 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 let me look it up but it's like we all say bootstrapping but it was something like not as obvious and I was like oh that's

17:50interesting I learned it actually goes back to like the 1800s oh really I'm guessing it has to do like gold or something uh bootstrap strapping is any test or metric that uses oh no this is in statistics um yeah bootstrapping is a self-starting process that is supposed to proceed without external input to 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 put the boots on the saying to pull oneself up by one's bootstrap was already in user in the 19th century as an example of an impossible task oh that's interesting I like that I

18:25actually like that I'll stick with bootstrapper but bread and butter you're out nice dude H so you have 65 people across all these things yeah wow lot of things how do you stay focus well how do you focus not focus across this stuff so we have GMS and CEOs for each of the businesses so and how did you how did you hire these people well that's what keeps me up at night that's what keeps me up at night um 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

18:58and stuff like that well it's like you trust your friends like there there's a reason why you're your friends with with your friends um and so I say hire friends I say hiring your friends is a great idea just through our my personal network has been most of the hiring yeah I love that I mean it's been definitely at appsumo one of our biggest we've hired a lot of these uh advisers so we go and look at who did the thing at this company that's ahead of us and then we we pay that person a lot of money per hour and then we hire a more Junior

19:28person who cares probably a little bit more about appsumo and then they it's kind of a nice and nice merge versus some of these like Elite people that we think one they're not as good and two they're they're too expensive that's interesting that you do the advisory thing I 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 advisers and just pay them monthly he's like Nob brainer so I'm curious we do it across that's exactly what we do yeah so we have I'll just break out the people and

19:57it depends we now it's almost everyone in leadership gets a person so uh Anna who runs people we have Christine who's the chief people officer from dualingo Moody Glasgow was the CMO of zapier and glass door he does marketing there's a guy named Colin Gardner he does revenue so he did outdoorsy or RV share one of those um we have there's Raj t smooker g he's more like an operations uh so he he's kind of at a high level Alona who's the COO she has someone who worked at automatic as an adviser and now we're thinking even with other people in the company how do we help them get more

20:32advisers 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 was we looked at the for who worked 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 in 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

20:56do you highly recommend it do you go to them like hey I'm willing to pay $500 an hour or they do you ask them that's what you say okay yeah well we 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 a 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 or I just like giving people what they want so we do offer like hey we want to pay you for

21:19this and with the different advisers they they do have different rates and it's also a different amount of hours so like we have the CFO from MailChimp uh Jenny Bloom and so she has an hourly and you know's got their own hourly but we found it invaluable it's kind of a cheat code because these people already know a lot of the things uh like Moody yesterday he asked us in the in the marketing leaders meeting he said what is what's AB suumo when you tell someone out a bar or you're at dinner and someone's like what's appsumo every single person had a different answer and it's like he's asking the

21:50Strategic 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 inter for a million dollar week and I was interviewing with the a show yesterday and they're they're a software business

22:27and and they it is great they're doing their own content you know that worked with me at mint.com it's worked with us at appsumo it's what also teaching the book and these guys are 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 do your customers want to do and what do you want to do they're like oh not that and so I I think that was definitely where my apprehension uh of taking funding on I was like why don't you make your customers your investors I think definitely see maybe in terms of

22:52Trends I wonder how that's going to evolve well you have a good story around how you lost a million dollar not listening to customers can you can you share a little bit about that yeah there's I heard Chris Williamson talk about this where there's a success 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 uh you know you hear you go on

23:20Twitter 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 bought a real estate business here's how I did my marketing oh by the way in the bio there's a link for a life Mastery course 297 and um you know in the I guess to say as an operator in the trenches you know running a an e-commerce site at appsumo I stopped listening to the customer really well and listening to the team and we we had we have about 600 products on appsumo software deals at any time and a lot of them are like the

23:50latest ones like as you said cast magic and so we thought hey if you 10x it because you see on Twitter that 10 Xing is the way uh that we tenx 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

24:20site and our Revenue stayed the same but our profit went down right because now uh 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 appsumo 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

24:50appsumo 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 it's like kind of unique but even that like we've had chat Bots 10 15 years like now it's like a little better of a chat bot and it could 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

25:18and saw that the team was like this is stupid the customer said it was stupid and the partner said was stupid and so the 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 are you talking to your customers how often you listen to your team how often are you talking to your partners uh and then as we have these crazy ideas that we know are always right how do we test them before

25:41we then double down and really invest in them so we had this website that we put up if you go to meat dispatch.com you can you can check it out it was Meet meet is that like a dating site no it's like a dating site if you want to meet designers for your team get 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 look I just saw some slack messages I was like you you know when you you build

26:20something and it's scales really quickly you're just like like you know it's a seven it just instantly scale to a seven figure business and we never updated the web web page and then I came in there bowling the china shop go 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 should have done you know it's so different and

26:54there'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 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 deepish I love that you're doing all this stuff I this is super cool most of the people that have had I'd say the most success to me have also tried the

27:23most 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 that no one knows about or that you never that didn't get much traction yeah well I think uh there's one thing I did uh with with my team that not many people know I did which was when I was in my late teens and early 20s I built the a network of the largest financial communities on the internet so we built a a business called

27:53Wall 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 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 in 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

28:33plus% of the top us Business Schools would pay us to power their Finance curriculum so that's something I did that not many people know about H is this still yours this Wall Streets survivor.com or 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 uh uh stock market like manipulators penny stock Traders because it was essentially a penny stock we had to private we spent $2 million to make it go public then we spent $2 million to privatize it and so that was crazy I

29:11know I've never talked about that publicly and uh and then we also and then we sold it to a private group and do you know how it's doing it all and and roughly how much you sell it for uh I would say I mean it's probably doing you know it's eight it's probably an figure you know it's an a fig 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 wow it wasn't uh it wasn't a home run but it was certainly a single I depends where I sounds like a double or triple

29:41to 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 you me 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 cont creation right I think you you've probably seen Kevin asiru the Epic gardening guy he's been a long time buddy and I really do think it's it's finding something that people want but also really I think what doesn't get talked about is sticking with it yeah

30:09like it I'm sure you've tried things that like boring marketer 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 uh boring marketing we created a 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 costus zero to create a Twitter

30:45account 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 this to 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 people what what I always hesitant

31:20on 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 uh 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 Tik Tok build up like it also allows you to be clearer about what it is like how to position it what it is I'm building and then I usually convert a small amount of

31:54those people into uh 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 iMessage group a 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 um my Approach I think it's I it's it's my Approach is honesty and transparency which is like like I'm one of you and I'm interested in let's say boring marketing and I'm going to sh my learnings and add value and hopefully you're interested in this

32:31too and 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 that this this funnel works pretty well I guess I I've lik 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

33:04landing pages and then building the that product out for that 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've noticed especially with the book how do you get your customers more engaged with the 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 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

33:34leave a comment and maybe they'll reply back and you post that reply back as a comment for yourself as social media and so what's it's a great reminder for me and I've done it with appsumo done million dollar weekend done it with you know things I've 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 uh for the book I did a referral program like hey if you I had a launch Team for the book I was like all right bring one person so there's a 1300 person launch Team I said if you could bring one

34:01person I'm going to do a pro a dedicated uh 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 just 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 uh every week

34:29I 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 and come and 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 uh how I built this rejected me they didn't respond this woman Kathy heler has rejected me three times which I'm like okay twice I get three times I just being mean uh but they love it they love it even you know my whole Facebook I got

34:57fired I'm still talking about that 20 years ago cuz the the takeaway for anyone out there whether you're a content creator or a business Creator in all these aspects just include the the community and the audience in the process yes and I know I still text the first customers not every day so I think that's creepy but you know as 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 do you guys think about it and working with them in the process yeah I think they they want to hear your wins and equally

35:24they want to hear about your losses I Remember by the way you know what'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 uh Harry steings 20 was 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 Tex dos I

36:05was running a social app and social at the time everyone was like well Facebook's gonna copy you Facebook's gonna copy you no one wants to do social apps I get invited I open my inbox I see Harry steings invites me onto his show I'm like this is the number one VC show in the world thank God I've 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 I you know after a month I sent him a message I was like

36:39what what happened and he's like oh we we're not releasing the episode um and I think that the ouches 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

37:11just 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 uh 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 you move before and you're like this is not so bad yeah and I think sharing that has been good the other thing I would say that that you highlighted um besides starting a lot of things right like you've started

37:37so 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 boring marketer to make a million like a year two years three years uh 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 like I could share of things that we we we invested a million dollars plus and we're going after it and going after it and so much time you know it's tough to it's tough to it's tough to kill a

38:10project right uh it's really tough so uh especially when you feel like you're so close I 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 there's the 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 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

38:42successes they have started fast like that's 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 clavo competitor called meat fam spent like I don't know six to 12 months building it I couldn't beg a friend to change over I was like please but this is an automatic clavo 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 that runs mavio and uh you know

39:13with appsumo was like all right I got a deal on imra 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 boarding marketer and some of these other approaches that there 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

39:42me up like summer I don't know 2017 or something and he was he had been iterating on social ass for like seven years and like it it wasn't working out so he was like yeah I want to close my comp you know I'm going to close my company do you know anything about getting out an of an office lease and I was like oh whatever happened to that like high school Anonymous teen ping polling app and he was like oh I haven't launch it I'm goingon to launch it in a few weeks I think maybe he wasn't even it was his on his last straw he didn't

40:12even 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 qu you know so if he if he would have quit that summer he wouldn't be a beer but I look at that and I'm like I don't want to be that I don't want to put myself through that stress personally he would still be Nikita either way I 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

40:44it an easier way yes for like I've I've started all my businesses while I had a day job and I 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 we 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 uh I've just been building businesses right

41:10away 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 uh literally and that was tough work to be to be doing that and then graduated eventually to be like assistant cashier and then cashier and I I learned that I 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 I would say for a lot of

41:50people out there it sounds like we've had similar uh you know earlier careers but yeah you you can have a day job and maybe you like it or don't but at least have that option where you start your own business and for me I I kept getting fired and I was like well man I got to take control of my own destiny instead of letting one person choose my livelihood and so one of my on my third job was like well I'm gonna start building these side hustles and find a system that can eventually work so then I can quit that side hustle when I make

42:14enough money and uh but I would say the underlying thing I was calling 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 you know for appsumo 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 million four then uh it started picking up again the market got better we stuck with it uh we doubled down aiming the old CEO doubled down on things that worked and then you

42:43know last year $80 million it's crazy but which is it's beyond you know it's bootstrap business it's unbelievable and you know we've made a lot of millionaires and a lot of people have products like cast magic 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 and 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

43:07what 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 I've worked for it's about 20 years give ever take on average for them to make a bill and it's like people aren't a billionaire and like a month from crypto they give up or they I bought a lot of shitty nfts I kept getting scammed but 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 like give up but there are a few people who are like

43:31hey I really am excited about nfts I'm going to stick with it like I invested in moonpay this guy Ivan out of Miami yeah 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 it just doesn't uh do all of the results at once and so why don't you compound year-over-year with slow you know slow consistent growth that's definitely been my Approach with appsumo coming back in the past few years and uh I feel like we can sustain longer like a boring marketer it's like one million and then two million and

43:58three 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 uh like nikito or you know I guess risk it all and at the end God does his work yeah yeah I think uh 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 5

44:3010 years of my life to go and take this moonshot swing unless like you're passionate about a particular space um that and you want a billion dollar plus outcome like for us like we're we're happy not having Billion Dollar Plus outcomes totally happy we're not looking 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

44:59they're like I built a thousand light bulbs and the thousandth light bulb worked holy 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 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 I've noticed with content it's like law of 100 so make a 100 content because otherwise you're G to quit too soon and the same thing with with when I was at Facebook we saw the retention and growth

45:30data even though others didn't know it we're like holy this is exploding but no one else knew that and I'm guessing the same is true uh with with Edison and Dyson where it's like wow there V there's something already working a little bit that's giving them confidence same with business like find something people are excited about and then all right at least you have some indication that you can stick with that for some period of time something's working there or will work where I 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

45:57that 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 a 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 I had a day job at mint doing their Market marketing but I was like I want to be an entrepreneur I want to get

46:28the 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 in one category that had the least competition which was a uh soccer app and I made a hockey app and I chased it and it it went viral 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 um but it was a business that I did not care about I'm not interested in games I didn't play games I like Farmville I

46:54hated all those people um 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 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 if 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

47:19or on clean shot which is on appsumo right now or an Alfred app which I got a long time ago or remember the milk or whatever new tools out there like I get excited by that and I think more people can think about all right what's a business that I be excited 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 bucks a day they'll bring to your house like very very healthy food that you can

47:46customize 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 it's not warm when they bring it but it's pretty warm every single day well do you remember 10 bucks do you remember sprag I don't know if it came you were in SF when that happen when they didn't have it in Austin I know gogin but no they didn't bring it to Austin I don't know if they brought it to Austin soig was like there's all these for me like I've been looking for a solution for that yeah right that doesn't or right

48:14now 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 AB suumo 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 in 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

48:42other people that are busy with their houses too uh 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 I'm mostly focused I am only focused on businesses that are working that I'm already in so we talked about docy sign I think I mentioned that I don't want to use docu sign or hello sign 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

49:11that is something that now our team will then take over David and Garrett and obaldo uh Marne will take it over and then really scale that out but that those are more I think in in the past I would try a lot more things or just do stuff that I like okay cool I'll do it and then throw it away uh 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 more 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

49:35and uh being an entrepreneur I think you recognize it 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 that's available for everyone you know have cool you're looking forward to cool stuff you want to be doing like these things and meet 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 content creator post a thing today you want to make products

50:00like Greg go make an audience follow Greg's formula you want to start a business my way great do it my way but at least get started today yeah and I think it's also important for people to to follow what other people are doing understand their models and it might be a mix of like a Greg and a Noah right depending mix that's a beautiful mix I love that mix the uh It's a good-looking kid right there put us on some 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

50:32well you're not understanding how Greg got to these decisions like ABS 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 like 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 individual deal economics here's how advertising could now be implemented in each of those and what that uh 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

51:01it works you maybe it doesn't but you you go try it and you're like okay this doesn't work let me try something else no I appreciate you coming on you're you're just I'm I'm I'm ready to run through a wall right now like this is this is what I'm talking about fun I mean go find stuff you're excited to tell people about I think that's a big like a big problem like 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 or you don't have customers excit about it but for me you know this book or appsumo or

51:28this new Doc sign alternative we don't even have a website or a name yet so if you got an idea let me know but we people are people want it I want it and I'm like yeah now now I gota go make a business and spend life doing that I don't know I think we we're all figuring out in this planet so have some fun while we're doing it that's definitely what I I would like to get that out there Amen brother million dooll weekend is it available for purchase yet no no I don't know when this is coming out the book drops January 30th so it's it is a

51:54business 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 they see the promotion and the materials of the book I think people will get good results for themselves I'm reading it so uh I'm looking forward to it and this will come out January 25th so sweet perfect timing and I sent you a VIP Box by the way so I sent you a a million dollar weekend VIP box oh wow thank you I I I appreciate that I didn't

52:26get it yet but I will look for it what we just sent it two days ago I know I don't know I'm not 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 like 50 bucks but Media Mail is like $3 for the books and other some other goodies for you said said said like a true bootstrapper dude it's so 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 it's like just

52:57book it on points book it on points yeah we're going to do the points we're going do the points which that's a whole another 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 G 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 uh last time we spoke you didn't you didn't have you were looking for a girlfriend so now you have a girlfriend I have a woman man

53:24yeah it's a woman friend and uh she's phenomenal we met in Barcelona so we're going to go back there and uh we actually have a baby on the way so we're going to go baby lot of every time I talk to you something new dude I've got you know what's next I love it you that's funny someone asked me that too they're like uh what's next and I'm like honestly just more of appsumo you know being a good father being present and what what's working just keep doing more than that you're full of surprises you know follow Noah Kagan for surprises million dollar weekend thanks for coming on thanks for

53:59having me

54:09man