Starting A $250,000,000 Software Business In 48 Hours with $50

0:00appsumo today is going to do almost $80 million in Revenue we're bootstrapped right and it's just crazy and that's that's been 13 years so it's taken time to get to this point but the business started in 48 hours with $50 and so I'm not a huge coder I didn't go to like Caltech and I can program like I used a WordPress site and a PayPal button how much money do you make this year I'll make around $3 million cash really yeah okay is that a lot or a little that's good that's really good it's insane I mean I was making Zer doar for many years and then

0:32it's been a slow long grind it's only maybe in the past few years I started making seven figures every single year paying yourself out yeah so what do you do my my primary source of income is abo.com I'm the CEO founder number one site for software deals for solopreneurs software deals software deals it's a software company basically it's a Marketplace for software deals so someone someone out in the world like yourself who making software so you have the software called revamp how do you get customers you buy Facebook ads you pray go to YouTube you do all these different things but like what if you get customers and money and feedback

1:05today for free m there's nowhere else in the planet to do accept abo.com and so a lot of creators who make software for small businesses we only help small businesses um around the world we're like hey if we go to abso we do a deal on our software we can get paid we get exposure and get feedback right now and we help them with their marketing and their packaging so it's like Indie software or like courses right it's no courses it's it's only software majority of software so the the software the software could be anything from like design tools a lot of AI writing tools a

1:33lot of image tools a lot of website tools and that's that's definitely evolved over the years like heat map tools so whatever you need is like a freelancer an agency instead of spending spending like 20 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month $49 for life you can get like basically the latest and greatest tools from abs.com so I was going to ask you so how do you like convince people to let you because you give people discounts like if I want to buy software I'll go to Appo so I can get a discount on these cool softwares and also like discover softwares exactly so I was

1:59going to ask you how do you convince them but that makes more sense cuz it's like Indie software or like smaller teams or there like mainstream like slack is slack on there there's I mean over the 13 years of appsumo we've promoted Dropbox we've promoted MailChimp fresh books optimizely udem me which is a public company yeah I mean the amount of companies that we help put on the map is is pretty uh pretty remarkable so someone like yourself you have revm coming out what's your plan on getting customers in your marketing so I've been working on this YouTube channel for a while I've started a newsletter which I got from your channel

2:29shout out to you and just like media so yeah it it basically you can spend 6 12 18 24 months hoping YouTube works for you trying to build a newsletter trying to tweet all day maybe go and buy ads or if you build software that really is helping solopreneurs you come over to apps.com if we choose you and we think the product's good enough we'll work with you have a deal we split the revenue and then you'll get a six figureure to seven figureure check within a month or two so you have this leverage now because you probably have a lot of users on your website yeah like

2:58you have a lot there's about a million and a half people who come to ABS yeah it's awesome that is so sick yeah it's amazing but how did okay so when you had this idea you didn't have that leverage like you didn't you couldn't say hey we have 1.5 million users so how are you able to con to the first company to give you their software and let you sell it for less than them because that doesn't really make sense at first yeah so I'll give you the strategy that anyone can copy in their business and let me give a little back story of how I got to appsumo so number

3:2130 at Facebook number four at mint.com so I did product management I did marketing and then I built my own startup that did basically payments for like Farmville everyone knows like farmel these games so our company did the payments and everyone treated me like trash like I would go to you Brett and i' like hey can I can I be your customer and like can use my payments they're like come back in four months and then we'd come back and I'd finally convince you to do it and i' give you best rate in in the industry and then two weeks later' be like yeah I don't care about

3:46you I'm going to try this other competitor and I was like wow I'm doing something not valuable enough it's like someone being like hey let me be your Agency for Twitter I'm like that doesn't make a difference versus hey let me be your Facebook ads agency mhm and I can actually make you a lot more money right which really can generate cash and so I just knew my next company getting people customers is of basically Universal value so if I could do that there going to be a lot of people who will need that so I saw software getting bigger that's a key thing for any business like is the

4:13market dying flat or growing and I'm like software is going to be huge this like this is like 15 years ago this 13 years ago there wasn't a lot there's literally like Dropbox freshbooks MailChimp time doctor and just like Evernote that was that was almost it it's crazy you were so early to software it was super early and it was mostly you know I liked marketing I like software and I like deals that that was really the the core of what I was was interested in and so that's and that is after you know 13 years give or take of trying a lot of other things that I didn't like I didn't

4:42like having a job didn't like having a boss I didn't like doing payments for companies because I don't care about payments but like promoting a deal of a tool that I want dude sign me up I'll do it for free all day long and I think people should think about what they'll do for free and so with appsumo the the first partner uh and let me give you the strategy that anyone could copy is like work backwards from the customer and so the specific thing that was the original one um I wanted to do like productivity bundle and I saw that there's a site called Mac Heist okay and

5:11Humble Bundle and they were doing it for games and for Mac products and I was like why don't we do it for web products and I so I copied that kind of their this daily deal bundle of software now the strategy that was interesting is working back from the customers I was like well who has my customers and there was a Blog called life haacker was like the blog for tech tech products it's like who a YouTuber that talks about tech products it was like that was the blog so I went through every single page on their blog okay and I found the top five tools that they talked about the

5:37most and then I cold emailed them and I said hey if I can get these tools at a discount do you think you'd write about it because these are the tools you said are the most popular that's good and so it's I've already worked from data that I know it's going to be because they're already saying these are popular on their site I already know to write about it and they didn't promise me they'll do it so then I went out to these companies and I said hey I'm going to put a bundle for this blog would you be interested in doing it and and once I got one of them

6:01I was like who else do you think should be in your bundle so use referrals then MailChimp would be like oh you guys got to talk to freshbooks fres yeah and so then they leveraged it and then so when I finally got the bundle I went back to the life hacker who had the customers I said now will you write about it they said of course it came out and exploded it was a $50 bundle I think we sold like 2,000 of them so you're almost like a marketer for these companies at that in that framing yeah yeah and I think the question there one work back fors from

6:24the customers and two how do you leverage your partners to be your marketers like your best marketers or your customers M so once I got this partner I'd be like who else should I get and then I got that bundle together of these these products and then from them I gave every one of those companies in our bundle marketing material this is a core thing their whole campaign basically I and this is the thing people like yeah I do it I'm like you don't do it the right way they don't do it the right way so I literally wrote the emails for them I created the social

6:48media the for their individual business and I said you should probably email this out to your non-paying customers and this will be a way you can convert them and almost every single one of those five Partners did it and I mean it just exploded right right so life hacker did it I got the partners turning into my own marketers for me um and it was pretty instant I was like okay I found a business that works and there's been a lot of businesses that didn't work that fast or that well okay wow so I really like what you said about how you're doing the marketing for them that's been

7:13my unlock for agency work is to literally view it like you are doing this person's job for them like what can you do for them that they could take to their boss it looks like they did it and they get all the credit 100% so that's a huge unlock for me so you literally would go to these companies you would leverage each one You' tell them like hey I could get more customers you got one to agree then they LED you to the next person you added to a bundle now you have this huge deal and then you offer that to the public for a sale to

7:37no-brainer for those customers exactly so I like how you're viewing the customer as the company though and not the people buying the software because when I thinko I would think the people buying the software as the customer but you're viewing the customer as the partner partner so the question ask in each of your businesses who's your hero who's your hero our heroes are the people creating and then we're able to provide their tools and help them get customers and grow their businesses by giving those tools to other people and so even to this day when we message people on appsumo you really have to make it so exciting for them I get

8:08messages probably about 20 a day can I do your shorts form editing on YouTube it's just such a shitty message and if you just change the words you could have a dramatically different result so I message this day I'll tell you my two best emails and messages I ever say promoting you to 1 million people it's almost 100% respons outcome yeah it's like I'm telling you what I can do for you I can showing you give you another one that crushes 100% reply rate can I acquire your business question mark crushes because of course people are like well can I be acquired what you want to talk to me about and because we

8:39buy businesses not a ton but we do and the the bigger the underlying point though is how do you make it something they're excited to want to respond to about and most people are just like uh I need a job I need money can you just give me this not as compelling for others to do that yeah the two biggest things that hold people back is asking it's the power of asking I'm so scared to ask and well I'm scared to ask I I know I have dude I have YouTube videos millions of views where I ask someone to go on the private jet I don't know how

9:03you do that dude dude and well it gives me anxiety it gives me relationship problems because my girlfriend's like hey you're not present I'm like I know because I'm scared but the upside of asking is I went on a private jet the upside of asking is by asking to go take someone to breakfast I now have a a $80 million year business where I'm making $3 million a year and this week I'm going on a bike trip I'm biking from here Phoenix to Albuquerque and the team is happy they're doing they're getting paid well and they're running the company I'm out here doing this I think

9:31the other side of it is that if you've done something you're proud of I don't see it as a cell which is very common I don't see it as a cell I don't see it as Guild but if I believe like I'm a great Facebook ad marketer I'm a great Twitter person or I'm a great YouTube shorts person or I'm a great um you know even a restaurant doesn't matter what it is I actually feel like it's my job it's my duty to be like hey I think this is great for you I want to tell you about it I want to talk to about and so

9:55instead of being like I'm I'm embarrassing you or I'm uh making this a heavy ask or a heavy weight on them it's like I actually think this is good for you like this book million dollar weekend I'm I do believe it's a great book for people that want to be entrepreneurs so I'm excited to go talk about it and I think the more that you're you think about the benefits for others then it makes it exciting to think about like a lot of people on the YouTube same thing I'm like hey will you share about what you do for living to inspire others and I'm like yeah I

10:20will that's such a good point that if you like genuinely believe that what you're doing helps people you can go to almost any extent to sell them and you're like almost one of them like shake them I'm like dude like you're going to buy software anyways you might as well get 20% off I think a lot of beginners aren't confident in their product and so that's what they're scared of do you think yeah I mean it's scary in the beginning that's why it's a practice it's a muscle where you do the same thing over and over I'll tell you one of the number one things uh that you

10:46can get better from asking this this will literally separate you from everybody else you follow up it sounds so basic and people when they hear that be like yeah I know it's like when's the last time you wanted something and followed up on it how long did you fall up on it like I wanted as a domain I followed up every month for seven years I own sumo.com seven years seven years who owned it just a random guy the third largest newspaper in India huh yeah it cost me a million and a half dollars huh that was tough and then like I was willing to fly

11:15to India but the bigger thing is that find something you're excited about or you're proud of and just stick with it they talked about law of 100 which is like find these things and just keep going most people are like yeah I'm going to ask to get one rejection and then they you know my girlfriend says like they're made of sugar like don't be made of sugar baby like you know you can do it and you just have to keep building yourself up on these things and keep practicing it I a fan of your YouTube channel I've been for like years and so I'm trying not to like kiss your ass

11:41here but like I did read the book and I'm just going to not worry about teaching beginers how to start a business anymore I'm just going to send them your book because like I can tell that you spent so much time finding the most like streamlined simple way to break it down for people and get over these false beliefs and the only way you could know that is cuz I could tell you've helped helped thousands of people do this and you've seen firsthand like where people get blocked and I was reading that I'm like this is like my journey exactly but streamlined step by step overcoming all my false beliefs and

12:11if I just started with this I would have skipped all these like emotional justifications that I had for not taking action at certain times I think there one thank you good job thank you man I mean the thing that's interesting about anything we're working on whether you're doing an agency if you're doing nfts if you're starting e-commerce business if you're selling like a business or physical businesses how do you stack the deck in your favor how do you stack the deck where you're not going to fail how do you stack the deck where you you're basically cheating and and that's what I intended to do with this book where it's

12:39like how do I make it so good that if you want to start a business you could do million dollar weekend and so the way I approached it is like I hired James clear's writer that helped me with my book proposal then I hired the guy who's written two of the best business books in the past decade tall RW he wrote Never Eat Alone never split the difference and then we spent three years writing it and working with hundreds like literally hundreds every single chapter has had hundreds of beta readers and every weekend now I still have five people reading the book and taking action on it so that the material can be

13:06so tight that like I feel because you know in the beginning I'm like can I teach this I don't know and now I see it so of course the same thing for a lot of people out there where they're self-conscious about their businesses or self-conscious about their expertise go teach someone go help someone and then as you see that working you'll start being like I can have a course I can do a YouTube I can start a business doing these kind of things and that that is what G me confidence also pride in something that it's been I want it and it's also been extremely hard I felt it

13:31when I was reading it like I do have dude like this guy I do want to ask you like really serious questions about like that writing process for the book like what does it mean to like have tall like when you're saying you're writing a book with someone like what does that actually mean like you are like putting throwing ideas at a wall and then he's like advising you on like which order like is kind like copyrighting Frameworks or is it like yeah you want to hear the honest answer we have entered a new era of digital side Hustle e-commerce Affiliates newsletters even chat GPT now all you need to start

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15:27know people call him imposter syndrome and which is is funny given that like I worked for Zuckerberg I was number four at mint.com so for almost $300 million like I've started seven companies now that have done a million dollars I have a course monthly 1K over 10,000 people have taken it like almost five star reviews I'm pretty good like I run Almost 100% company any like Pretty Paper like stud yeah like pretty good pretty pretty good as they say and then I still felt self-conscious and like do I know these things and so I I think part of me and this is the hero's journey that we're all going through was

15:58like well if I just get someone who's the best in the world who's literally the best writer in the world to collaborate with me and it he'll just he'll do it for me and I think we we want to separate ourselves that from where we are to where who we think we can be that we want to create this Gap that we don't think we can cross and the reality is all of us can there's no guru out there that that really has some secret between where you are and where you want to be it's the belief there's some knowledge and there's some skills but it's really the belief in ourselves

16:22and the practice and so I I hired tall I paid him a tremendous amount of money I gave him basically half of what I received as a royalty and which is tremend it was like my agent and the publisher I hired the I got the number one publisher in the world penguin they all were like this this is crazy I can't share T's numbers that's his private stuff but they're like you're crazy I was like I want to be with the best of the world and I really wanted to not be responsible and in what sense like if you as into like like like this guy

16:50knows he knows what to do I don't know what to do oh okay this YouTuber knows something it's just like a lot of the content people consume they must know something I don't know and that's not true 100% maybe a doctor okay they know probably how to like do surgery you don't know but like these these gurus create separation from people so that they can sell you something putting themselves on stage yes they put them as and the reality is it's not true and the distance between where you are and where you can be is much closer than people think and so with tall um I went with he

17:17basically consumed all of my material and then we went into the wood he so I sent him every blog post I've ever written and a lot of the book is based on this article that went viral on Tim Ferris site about how I've started a lot of businesses how people can copy my formula which is the exact thing that's in the it's it's more detailed and up to date in the book it's much more streamlined as you've seen so we basically went into the woods in Asheville North Carolina and we worked on the material for 10 days and and Tall what I found from him and what I I look

17:44for and people I hire and people I I love working with I'm looking for people who disagree with me a lot my I remember at Facebook and even now at appsumo and especially someone like tall I want someone who's challenging me I think when you find people who are challenging your ideas it's uncomfortable and you want to be defensive but the best way to improve is by someone challenging you and he was extremely Chen he's like this is [ __ ] what you're telling me right here is [ __ ] that's not going to work let's try it okay and so it was basically a little

18:13over a week just in the woods like hammering out the outline and the chapter and all these things in the material um and it was grueling and we finally got to the book and it was like uh going to turn in the publisher and I I I basically tried to distance myself because I felt like I don't really know what I'm doing here M which is not that's not what you're that doesn't sell a book by the way yeah I know and um I felt self-conscious and I felt all these things and so at that point though I said no you you can do this all of us can do

18:40this whatever it is that we're all afraid of and let's let's go face this book let's go look at it so I took look at the book I finally started reading it and I was like this isn't going to help people is not great and so it's good it's not excellent It's not like the best I can't be proud of this and all of us want to be proud of things so uh at that point I I got beta readers people who I want to read the book and be my customers which I think I'm a theme Here Yeah I think people miss out on I'm like

19:05who's your customer how are you helping them why are they excited to give you money and so I reached out to people on Twitter and on my email list through noah.com and said hey I'm looking for a launch Team to come like rip this book apart and I basically spent three almost three weeks by myself and with some assistance for my friend Neville madora and I just not rewrote the entire book but I I went through every single word with these readers to to perfect the book and at the end of three weeks my girl phone's like I haven't seen you in a while little it's a little messed up I

19:35was like baby I love you I need and at this time though it was the it was truly for me the hero's journey where I felt like I was afraid I didn't think I knew this stuff I didn't think I could help this stuff I didn't know if I could write a book and then when I finally faced it it's not as scary as it seems and what I was able to deliver now I'm excited to share about million dollar weekend because I'm very proud of one I've seen it work and like what we've put together is really like a step-by-step plan about if you want to

20:01get a business going and you want to be a millionaire which everyone should be you can do it in 48 hours first the book thing is interesting like how you wrote with a writer and you're basically giving him ideas but he's like writing it and then you review it and then you like rephrase things but he's like physically like going through it kind of like articulating it in a better more beginner friendly way so that makes sense but I'm going away from the book AB suumo so when you started let me add one thing here cuz this is this is so clutch for you and for everyone out

20:25there why I believe absum is at 80 million and why we've done so is this cheat code hire advisers yes don't get a mentor get an adviser an adviser and the way we do ab Sim it's the same thing I did with this book so I paid T RW an insane amount of money because he is the best in the world and he will help me cheat to create one of the best business books in the world if people are looking to get a business started and so the same thing we do at abs every single person in our leadership team we have an elite person advising them and that it's

20:53about $500 to $1,000 an hour we paid to our advisers we have the CMO from glass store zapier Moody Glasco he's phenomenal he's our marketing adviser we have Raj Mukerji he is the GM of indeed.com he is the CEO operational adviser we hire reboot which is a CEO coach Aman alabdullah CEO coach as well business coach we have a cro cro um we had one from mindbody online that conversion rate uh Chief Revenue officer Revenue okay so we hired a cro from outdoorsy and rvshare it's like a RV site so he was the head of revenue revenue person there so he's advising Chief people officer from dualingo so

21:28point being and to to is that to cheat get the 10,000 hours from someone who's already done it and you could pay 500 bucks for 10,000 hours it's it's pretty good deal and so stack the deck stack the deck so with the book with AB suumo specifically that's been one of our huge advantages because you can hire more affordable people and then they're excited to be trained up and then get 10,000 hours from these Elite advisers uh to really understand because they've already been to the promise and they've done these things that we want to do and this applies in everywhere like for $1,000 dollar you could probably take

21:57bread out to lunch okay 2000 yeah maybe for for sure definitely I'm not going to be arrogant here my point though is that if you want to get advantages in these areas like 500 might seem crazy but for what the person will do oh yeah help you out and plus most of the time for 500 bucks thousand they'll want to talk to you more they'll successful more more so than like hey uh can I pick your brain C no one wants their brains pick and then leading to ABS suumo you you curious about okay so how 0 to 80 million 13 years we got a lot of we got a lot of f

22:27here but so it okay so you had imager then you had your first bundle what was like really growing the company was it getting more bundles and going into different markets yeah was it the marketing those existing bundles continuously if so you can't just scale only on Reddit yeah so then who's doing that and then the salesperson that you're hiring what is his specific you hire one salesperson he's tackling Reddit you hire one salesperson is it cold email next yeah break people always say on business podcasts it's system and processes I'm like dude tell me [ __ ] system whenever someone says sop like standard operating proc I'm like tell me

23:04like what is anop it's like a mysterious Google doc checklist one two 3 4 explain it dude yeah and you know ABS one of our values is is good judgment over good process because I think what happens that's really important yeah yeah because people are like what's my checklist I'm like it's fine to have a checklist for you're a doctor doing some [ __ ] but if you're following a process and you're being dumb that's not helpful and it's also not innovating so with AB suumo yeah let's talk inflection points CU I think that's interesting like what's the the trajectories first year was 300,000 second year was 3 million

23:33and then it was 4 million 5 million and then we plateaued for 4 years okay so what was 300 to 3 million yeah so 0 to 300,000 we basically did bundles and so the way we did our bundles and I'll tell you two other values of absum that everyone can copy first one is test and invest okay so what that means is that anything and we still do it to this day if you want to go do anything you have to test it first how can you test it in the fastest cheapest shortest possible time to see if it works and then I can give it I'll give more examples about

23:58that later if you're curious so test it and if it tests well then you can invest and if it invests what we call it is double down so what is the things working in your business like how you get your customers or how you grow your business that you can double triple 10x down so how it worked for us in the beginning of appsumo was doing these bundles based on where we could find customers so first one was Reddit with imer second one was life hacker with a productivity bundle then I went to Hacker News and I did a YC bundle so you found the demographic first and then

24:27made a deal for those people yes very okay cool then I found uh I Twitter people designers on Twitter and I made a designer bundle so every month I was doing a bundle based on if I could get the audience and then what tools that audience would want and because I could say hey I'm probably going to work with these people do you want to do a deal on it because I can promote it out here and you'll be with these other cool Brands so that got us to around 300,000 I was working not that hard to be clear and it was just me for most of the year I I had

24:54Partners in the past that sucked so I was really determined to do the coding the customer support the design the marketing the sales all by myself and basically the site in the beginning you would PayPal me money as a customer I'd literally take the code and Gmail email it to you for the software that's so cool right like there wasn't some you know like the first door Dash basically like is that what they did yeah they just yeah I mean now our system is like you know we have two full-time servers uh system admins like we have a development team of 20 25 people like QA

25:21like it's very we'll get there yeah in time but I think that's the point is that most people want to be millionaires and they're not getting a dollar mhm and you got to just get started that's why I'm telling you the two biggest things starting asking so get going today and I just like all right let me throw this out there see if people ready buy it instantly they bought so I was doing these bundles and at the end of the year one of my advisers and best friend is Andrew Chen um he's General partner injuries and horrorwitz like uh baller Do's a superstar and so Andrew was like

25:47you're doing these bundles and you're working about a month to make a bundle and you sell them for 50 and your margin's like 10 bucks like why don't you split them up and just do a deal every other week or a deal a week now and get better mark Mar and so that changed trajectory so now instead of doing a deal a month it was a deal a week and the margins were even better CU we didn't have to split it with all these partners and you could use those same pools of people for exactly individual okay increasing the LTB basically it was not we we weren't

26:14sophisticate at that point to get think what LTV is Lifetime we Wen even at that point we were just like Andrew basically was like hey here's you're selling this for 50 you're keeping 10 and you're doing it once a month if you could basically sell for 50 and do it four times a month and keep 20 or keep 50% like here's what your numbers can look like so I do think a lot I call it the one minute business model and we break it down in the a million dollar weekend but basically just like understand the economics of your business and he was like here's where you are if you try

26:38this like it actually seems like that could be better so that's started the second that started the real first inflection point of the business and then the second inflection point was because the economics of that got better we could start running ads because we knew then we started thinking about lifetime value so were were you losing money on the front end never so you were profitable when you say losing money how most of the ads work and how we are today we do Predictive Analytics around our ads and I'll I'll can share exactly how we we think about that stuff but what we do is like we're spending let's

27:06just say $50 to get a customer to buy a $50 product so we break even day Zero or week one the question is how much money do you make back and how long does it take like if you make your money back it takes three years that's not good that's a venture capitalized business M you're a bootstrap business you want to make your money back like immediately and make it profitable immediately and pretty pretty quickly especially at that time we were profitable almost instantly uh with Facebook ads so from 300K to 3 million you just implemented paid traffic indiv individualized deals and then paid traffic there's also yeah how

27:36are you H like how much do you make on a one software sale like because you can't if they're giving you a discount yeah they're it's kind of like an affiliate deal in a way yeah it's an exclusive partnership private yeah yeah okay and so they're giving you just a flat fee for every sale you get and they also let you sell it for cheaper yeah I mean I could show you do you want to see what deals look like today yes okay so as I talk about it um let me log into our VPN and I'll I'll showare you you can see the back end of how this this operates

28:03generally how it's working then and even now is we go to a partner like you you've created a revamp your product normally sells 20 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month um so that's $600 a year we'll do a lifetime deal with you at $50 and we have a two person business intelligence team that's figuring out the ideal price so we're doing a lot of like price understanding because the more better we sold for we get better customers we were buying it the partner makes more money and we make more money you're almost doing that company's job for them like the ideal price they're not they're

28:32smaller and they're not as sophisticated yet eventually one day some a lot of our partners and you have all the data we have a lot of data on what prices work um that's so smart only 13 years no but in the beginning it wasn't sophisticate at all it was like what's a price in the beginning it was like hey let's do a one-year deal and how much is your price normally 20 bucks all right will you do 30 sure what were your Facebook ads back then like what was the offer what was the creative like what cuz it's Facebook ads are pretty rudimentary yeah it was

29:00pretty basic I I think most the ads I I think a lot of time I just try to make it funny yeah I think I just try to make it funny and then what what you do is like why does someone need to take action right now almost one of the the successes of appsumo is that there's a timer and there's a limitation on this deal and in all of our marketing most of the time there's no urgency like why does someone need to join your email list today why does someone like think about YouTube videos there's literally like a gazillion why do I need to stop

29:24right now and click what I'm doing like and we think about that with our YouTube videos like okay you see it on recommended on the side like why would I stop at the thumbnail and the title and be like okay I've got to see what that is and so with our ads even to this day you can see that there's um there's timers on it deal is ending fomo is what we if you're missing out so we try to think about how we can increase the amount of fomo so people do take action immediately uh and that was a lot of the ads and or funny the other ads that have

29:47exceptionally well then and now is comparison like here's what you're paying for other software that's super expensive here's this that's good because you can understand it easier like cly 10 bucks a month tidy C 20 $29 for Life mhm it crushes it does super well so it was you can log in but it was super simple so first bundles you first find a Target demographic that needs a product that uses a product then negotiate a good sale and get them sales then you could individualize the products so you get more sales yes and then you run Facebook ads to these just comparing the price savings or making it

30:19funny to get their attention and then adding some urgency yes that got you to $3 million yes then what was the next Reflection Point then we stalled for the next four years damn you didn't think about I guess there no we tried a lot you tried Google ads you tried uh we tried Google ads didn't really work we tried content marketing didn't really work um YouTube we were not really doing a lot of stuff on YouTube um some of the things we tried actually worked later which was interesting we tried running Dollar Deals so like super cheap deals to get people into the site lose money

30:52on the front Ender and what happened is those people came in and never came back they retracted they bought the $1 thing and then never came back we tried doing courses um like your own made courses our own made courses which did really well because the thought process is to bring people in get them on the platform and then hopefully they discover other deals and like get in the habit of buying from you ex well generally when you're doing advertising is you get more sophisticated you're spending $50 you may not make 50 right then but if you can sell them more things you can make the lifetime value right greater than

31:18the customer acquisition cost CAC and so um we tried so much and I think one of the secrets of our success is that we stuck with it right and to be straight up like 5 years is so long it is very and like I I I gave up I gave up so I like during that time period to give you context like I left to India we fired the whole team so like there was like an inflection point on that but basically like we're trying everything like Dollar Deals okay why' you hire the whole team you can't just skip this yeah I know I hired a $110,000

31:51a day business coach who was like this polyamorous like psycho basically yeah like we still joke about him um yeah let me break some of this stuff down so we're trying all these things and eventually it's frustrating you know like trying Facebook ads we're trying to have more products we're trying you know what happens in business is as something starts working you you your ego gets bigger you're like dude of course I'm the best yes like I'm the greatest here and you think everything you're going to do is going to work because this has worked and and that that's not true and so what you also start doing is

32:22you start jeopardizing the core of what what initially got you there right every business has a core like Google's core is search that's the core absum core is a great deal at a great price that's our core and every time we've deviated very far from it we've we've screwed our business and so we were promoting courses we were promoting shitty PDFs um and I was frustrated man I was like this sucks like we had 20 person team we had a sales team development team marketing team a support team and I was like I don't like this business and so I left to India to go walk around for

32:54a month to just try to get inspired and try to figure out like why I'm so so unhappy with all these like I'm happy with the business it's not working I'm happy with my life I'm unhappy with the like the team um and again it it I so I went to India to try to find some answers and uh the the answer is that it's answer is that it's always inside that's what it was like after a month of walking around India I I think we all need to put ourselves through some type of hardship and suffering to realize that we can handle a lot more

33:22than we think and when I finished the month in India finished it with um food poisoning Goa brutal yeah and I was in a bed and I just remember I had this beard and I was feeling sorry for myself and I was like you can you can make the change of how you want to live this life and how you want to have this business so I went back to America fired everyone except four people why was that the answer to fire but re like just in your mind refresh re like new culture new approach or big dogs require more food better people leaner higher quality

33:54know it's kind of rude to this yeah no actually a lot of the people that come in some of them aren't friends with me some of I'm still friends with like one of the guys you met here earlier he actually stayed he was one of the four and um the idea is that with a smaller team we didn't have to make as much money and you can actually do what you really want to do and what I only wanted to do and what I still do to this day what I'm going to do for the next 23 years is promote great products at great prices and so we just went back to that

34:20we cut out all the courses we cut out all the PDFs uh we cut out any software that wasn't a good deal or wasn't really good software and that kind of got us starting back to like okay we're making some money and we're we're feeling good about the business just you don't really know me exactly the stage I am at right now that all just happened to me so really yeah so that's why I'm so interested in it part like you just just fired 26 people in 20 well last year remember I was saying last year wasn't the best but this year's been great because we kind

34:48of figured this out so that was brutal but I get it so how what was the actual like once you guys reassessed you got like a players only around you less stress of payroll less stress like I feel like you feel obligated to make this amount of money every time keep these people's jobs but it's just not working how much of our Lives is what we want versus what we think we're doing for others to look at us and look positively at us that's I would brag about having 30 something employees I'm like I got 40 employees I'm the man like a [ __ ] idiot like yeah it's just

35:17something you have to go through it's like ego and you get humbled fast yeah yeah I mean and it was it was honestly actually refreshing I remember feeling lighter and I think that's always a nice feeling if you notice when you've made a hard decision if you feel relieved just noticing what that feeling is and I felt relieved that okay the four people that are with me they all really want to be here they're all still here today I mean and all three all four of us still work at the company this is like almost 10 years later now and we were just like back to just doing what we originally

35:46wanted to do which was like get these deals and promote them at good prices um and as that started then we that got us to like our next inflection which was what so we the business coach by the way was super funny that was that was super crazy it was like I think sometimes we look at YouTubers or coaches or courses as like if I pay this for some money they're gonna teach me something I don't know and he basically told me he's like you just gave me money that could have been in your pocket and I was like I don't know I think it was an

36:14interesting reminder that like we have a lot more abilities and Power in ourselves than we realize and sometimes it takes losing I paid him for two days $23,000 uh because I felt insecure and I think it's this practice of what can you do to feel good about yourself that's what in our own control what when I do that maybe it's a small thing doesn't have to be some massive thing that I can feel proud of for myself like biking or putting out some content that I I I enjoyed not because I need more views and so the next inflection point within our company we went back to basics and

36:42every time I talk to people in their businesses I'm how's business going it's fine like how do I grow like what's the how did you initially grow they're like well I I just did this I perhaps deals price how's that going are you doing more are you doing that yourself and almost every time like no I'm not doing what got me here I'm like just go back to that so your thought process was I can make my own PDS my own coures and get 100% of the margin cuz you already have the traffic in way so it wasn't like why would I I can still promote

37:06these people but you put too much emphasis on your own stuff no it wasn't that it was more that we were just promoting a lot of things that didn't really aligned to what we were proud of and didn't really we didn't this is not what we were here to promote and what people trusted us for like were you just making them too quickly because you thought like we wanted to grow we have all this team we're supposed to be big we're supposed to have a lot of employees we're supposed to all we're supposed to do we're supposed to do all these things in reality none of us

37:28really cared and so it was just going back to the basics of like just software just for solopreneurs that were good deals uh we did later lose our we did make we did the same mistake again a few years ago I'll get to the next inflection point after that was that we decided we needed create our own software so as a Marketplace we're promoting other people's tools but we have to go sell it we have to go hopefully negotiate it and promote it we thought how do we have more uh predictability in our Revenue I think that's pretty common thing especially if you're an agency how does it like almost

37:57every agency eventually leads to some typee of software creation because you want to have control over your outcomes and so uh adap soon we created our course monthly 1K that was probably the hardest year I've ever worked because our go and every year I copy from Zuckerberg we just have one goal that's due at the end of the year so the goal that year was 3333 is to sell 3,333 courses at 300 bucks nice and it was probably the hardest I've ever worked to try to sell a course on how to start a were you tight on money after no no scaling down no because now we're

38:30we're not having to make as much money you end up making more M that was the relief yeah you're not having to make as much money so you do what you really want longer term decisions exactly exactly so then we ended up making a lot more money and now we're was like oh wow we're back to making good money again we don't have to worry about having to do payroll because when you have to make payroll you're making decisions to cover payroll not because it's best for the business I'm in so you made that course we made yeah monthly 1K and why was that the hardest you ever worked because no

38:57one was was buying it no one bought it and we wanted to create something and we were kind of looking around like what to create and it was like well everyone always asks us how do we start appsumo I was like well why don't we just sell that this is before there was no you to me hses like we built our own custom course software really yeah from scratch like custom reminders and custom the whole thing was custom who were the four people you kept was it like a like a two developers two developers two developers Anton who's kind of B Dev operations and then myself who I'd say I'm I'm a sales

39:25marketer CEO M um and when we started the course no one bought it right and we had this pretty sizable audience at that time maybe 300,000 people and it was like on YouTube no no there wasn't no YouTube it just our email list okay everyone should if you have a business you need an email list watch all his videos seriously it's like I just made a video on this yeah it all from you years ago I mean our business does around 50% so at this point 30 to $40 million this year just on email which is in our control cuz like 30 wait you said 30 40

39:57million yes oh my God yeah it's crazy send an email and you make money is this cuz you're sending more offers now like oh we're actually sending less than we're sending half as many as last year that is so crazy and it's not hypers segmentation which a lot of Junior people get too excited about like oh we're going to segment down to all that's like Our Generations thing yeah and I think there is a lot more advanced things you can do which which we do do but uh taking a step back here um we just wanted more consistency and so as we had this course we emailed the

40:25audience we said hey go buy our course and none of them bought it M and we're like the hell and so that's an awesome opportunity every time you get rejection it's it's a test of if you really want something every rejection is a test if you really care and if you really want this outcome and so the easy and then people are like well how do how do you fix it what do you do then I just called those customers I said well how come you're not buying it they're like well I kind of want it in person okay let's do it in person so then we brought people

40:50in person and then they did it and it was $100 and then after that we created the material and then two later I called all these people was six of them I said hey how did it go I I literally taught you everything I know about a business and that's what I'm going to put into this this course we're selling they're like we didn't do anything after two weeks I'm like how come you didn't do anything I've given you literally everything I know that I've learned from Zuckerberg I've learned from all these things I've learned from my own businesses like we just sign accountability okay we'll build

41:16accountability and so then we had an accountability group we hired a support person dedicated to it we changed the course name from how to make your first dollar because we tested um instead of how to make your first dollar it's how to make a, month business m that converted twice as well so ultimately messaging really yeah the that alone was literally double the conversion rate wow which is amazing and so I would say the the the theme was that people didn't buy it right away so it's understanding either a okay is this something you actually just don't want and there's something else we should make or is

41:43there a reason you're not buying it and it was that the material the accountability and also what what's in million doll weekend A lot of them it wasn't the business strategy it was that the fear that we talked about the two great fears that stop them and so all these different pieces held in the back and so finally we got that ready and we kept updating and we started promoting it and then it started selling but the other thing I would I I got a comment no matter what business you're on is that I'm always shocked how much it still took to sell it sometimes not it wasn't

42:08always hard I don't think it should be hard you saying to build up to that point or you mean even to this day almost at that time I kept you have to sell in different ways for people I think that was an interesting lesson like maybe it's through live chat maybe it's through WhatsApp Messenger maybe it's going to be through different ads and it was just like people need to see your product multiple times I was shocked cuz I thought you send an email everyone who saw the email should just buy it and it's like no you got to follow up you got to do new ways of

42:32promoting it I did Sumo jerky where I started a business in 24 hours and so through multiple multiple ways eventually uh like November December we hit the target we we grinded our ass to get there it's like the 7114 have you read that from Daniel Priestley it's like you have to they have to consume seven hours of content on 11 11 different pieces of content and four different platforms to be like a customer I thought that was that like has helped me a lot to grasp that heard the seven rule which is just if you're speaking or talking you just mention your product seven times ah yeah same

43:03there's just like these multiple it's like retargeting ads you know just getting people different places and they're going to think you're like a celebrity well I think that's just a good lesson for anyone out there is to be persistent like if you believe you have something and I believed our course could help people like every month we had a new reason that we were telling them about it like there's maybe a new promotion maybe I'm doing a case study like sum jerky was a number one way we ever sold the course that's a cool story it's clever like it's a it's you're forced with a problem you have a

43:26constraint and you figured out how to beat that constraint where if you don't have that constraint you kind of just make bad decisions it's like if you're starting an agency business I get hit up all the time I was telling you like hey I got dude I'm a great YouTuber I'm like let me see your channel oh no but I do it for other channels so the easiest way to do it is prove it right like if you're a great editor send me a video that's really good that you've done of mine I'll never understand why someone if they're doing a short form if they're trying to pitch me they just send me

43:51words I'm like dude take my vide show me what you're going to do for me exactly like exactly that is lit out of all the skills you have the one that you can just show me and you're still trying to like convince me with words it doesn't make any sense to me so yeah that was that was kind of the beginning of getting our own products going I was like oh there's something here where we can create a product we didn't think a course could scale like there's only so many people that are going to take a business course and I can't make the course that much better this is exactly

44:16how to do it there's not like some ultimate thing I can keep iterating on like add a fresh lead magnet but that's about it yeah and you can maybe promote it more but there's a cap on the how much you can improve it right and that L us to Software creating our own your own software products yeah so how far how much did that Revenue go from or did that just make up for the loss of losing the people no it actually the business got better so we cut down all the products we were promoting there's only four of us and so there's less products being promoted but it's still like now

44:41it's like super profitable and then you can add on that we have this course that made a million dollars that year in Revenue so you hit 333 we hit the 333 um I think that year we got the business back up to like five or six million okay so it's doing it's like finally and you're really profitable at that point yeah I mean I've always followed the Amazon approach so our company's all it it mirrors a lot of Amazon like I was gonna ask this yeah I mean Andrew Chen said this he's like Noah stop being creative I was like what do you mean I he's like don't innovate I'm like we all

45:09want to innovate we all want to be like special and creating new things he's like nine out of 10 things have already been figured out copy them innovate on one and that really always stuck with me it's like you don't need to do nine they've already been solved and so some of these things like the Amazon approach how we run our business is that every year we have no profit not because we're like these fake you know finance writer gurus on YouTube it's because we take all the money and invest it so next year's bigger MH so we do a thing called the noi net net

45:35operating income playground which is like this year we'll have somewhere between five and $6 million of income how do we spend it so that next year is even better and we've done that every single year for the past 13 years and every year generally gets a little better that's why you didn't make a few million dollars until your 13th year is what you're saying yeah I mean I didn't start paying myself seven figures till probably about five years ago yeah I mean I the first year made zero second year 42,000 third year 75,000 fourth year 120,000 and then it was like around that and then finally I started was like dude

46:06I have nothing to show for I'm living in a you know 800 foot like house that's falling down like I'd like to be able to have somebody to show that this goes away that I'm I'm covered what year in was the 333 core sales uh 2014 this 2014 2015 that's year five yeah you're five Okay cool so from there now you're making the decision decision to build build your own software okay so this is where I was going to ask you I am a lot like you like I want to do all these different new exciting shiny things I want to be creative and like I'm going

46:33to do this better my way and I actually listen to a and speak at an event one time in person oh wow that's yeah that so I kind of I need someone like him too but you I was going to ask you so like you built sinf Fox you built tiny cow you built these different softwares that are proprietary to appsumo in a way yep so is did that help like increase Revenue drastically or was that more of a distraction because I feel like it could go both ways depending on the internet Guru you're listening to it was a distraction if we just kept doing appsumo we would have been could be a100

47:09million do business or Beyond right now and the the problem is every entrepreneur thinks no I'm Different my case is different and this new thing is going to be the thing the best thing is the thing that works and ABA worked and I got in my I would say in my 30s and 20s I was much more excited to do new things um right now I'm more excited to do things that work and make them work as best as possible like try to get as many customers as possible try to help as many partners as possible and then when it's finally finished okay now let's move on to other things and the other

47:41things how do they really support the core not support new things support the core even more which is how we're thinking about our appsumo vision of the future and so at that time I just got like okay well we should create new software here and we should try to have a course here and it's like if we just try to keep improving the marketplace and improving that could have been $1 million business sooner which not necessarily our goal but it would have been more focused and probably easier along the way than trying to get distracted with all these other things what what was the first one you tried is

48:07that was so that was what you just said you said that was Co then it was s yeah so then the next thing we built was called sumo.com okay so originally called Sumo me and the idea was that at the time we email was how we made all this money we're making a ton of money from youo we're like why don't we help other people collect emails right so we can have our own software and was almost like MailChimp competitor or it was the email collection not the email lead magnets lead there wasn't landing pages yeah yeah landing pages mostly in the beginning was popups just like those emo

48:35pop-ups the original ones that made well but you made those we were the ones that made it popular yeah sorry for everyone I apologize like it's annoying they work so well though I was fighting with my writer for like a month to not put it on our website and then he put it on like 70% of our subscribers yeah I mean sometimes people you know web design I learned it at Zuckerberg with Zuckerberg and Facebook from the elite designers like there's a lot of thought about how you put website and where people click um but you have to tell people like so many times at a restaurant I always

49:06think about it I'm like I come to this restaurant it's so hard to get me in this door I have to drive or walk to your place get Indo how come you don't ask for my information so you could tell me to come back right it's the same thing with a a business like if you're an agency if you're a jewelry store if you're a restaurant if you're an online YouTuber whatever it is like you want to be able to communicate with your people to tell them about things going on and so we thought we could enable that for other people um again coming back on it

49:30think about things you've already done that you've gotten paid for yeah think about things that you've done that people always like hey I really like your cookies or people were like hey you guys are making a lot of money what are you doing and so that is kind of that what we spun out into its own business how that and that is it still running we just sold it for seven figures which is a pretty no it's actually pretty tragic a no it was it's horrible dude it was a it sounds like a lot but we probably spent maybe $5 million building it just on devs and like on development on

49:57server all these things and we actually had Peak had it it was 6 million $6.5 million recurring Revenue wait what yeah how much 6 and a half million what yeah it was crazy I mean we grinded for a long time like annually yes okay not like projected or like it was you know I can show you the a 50100 million exit if it's yes and we had people hitting us up to do it and of course we're like no this is going to be so big we're like the best ever and um me and my partner had disagreements about the vision of it and then we kind

50:30of ruined it I would say I ruined it like I was like I actually stopped working the business i' basically just stopped working for three years and he ran the business and he did his best and then we hired aan to basically keep appsumo um on life support and I just went off and just hung out for three interesting because I feel like I would I want to do that too so why did you do that like did I just hung out for three years yeah it was honestly horrible it's probably one of the worst three years of in my life what why what like it incited it well taking a step

51:01back you know so we we have appsumo we started building the sumo.com product we get Tim Ferris using it pat Flynn's using it you like crushing it dude it was it was in every site had our stuff and you go on anywhere people like they knew we had a like a blue badge and then people would know it's Sumo me.com and everyone knew it and like Shane Parish Cal Newport like these guys was like people I admired and it was so cool one of the things that I think especially wherever you're on your career if you can just be in the industry that popping it's just such an advantage like

51:29you don't even have to be successful CU you're in the right direction be in the wave right like be in nfts be in crypto be in like right now content creation is like super hot everyone AI is super hot like just go work in it or go create content even if you don't know [ __ ] about it just make videos about the different AI tools make videos about whatever Sam Alton's talking about and like just being in the waves it's literally my YouTube Janel I watch the same Al podcast and I just translated to normal people yeah I mean we were we were very early on the fast stuff for

51:58like for this this wave of it and um you know email collection got a lot bigger and it just like popped off and so we hired aan and trained him for two years to run appsumo and just like make $120,000 a month to to basically cover the cost of the whole team and it was still a small team at the time was about six and the story is crazy one have you ever watched this movie um it's Woody Allen smalltime Crooks I don't know if I don't know if it's worth watching the movie but the whole the movie is basically these guys are trying to rob a bank okay and and to

52:26rob a bank they buy a cookie store and they tell the wife to run the cookie store while they spend the whole movie robbing the bank and at the end of you know middle end of the movie like they can't rob the bank they don't know how to rob the bank it's not working but the Weiss cookie store is now kill super successful and so while we told aiman to just keep absa's lights on and we were doing sumo.com and we grew to all these numbers um am who I've learned a lot from and who was successful in running appsumo uh was able to grow appsumo

52:55while sumoi did well and eventually kind of died appsumo then just kind of took off and I can I can share more about that but in that process aan was over running appsumo Chad and me were running sumo.com the software business and we had a disagreement about the future of it and I didn't like all having fit the employees I call them teammates now but I didn't like having employees I didn't like you know having meetings all the time it's like not why I started a company it's not why that's why I left Intel that is why I left got fired by Facebook I don't want to be a big ass

53:21company um and so I basically was like Chad you run the company then if you think you know what to do you go off which was not my best behavior and I left for three years to do like kind of podcasting and I created senf Fox with some guys and I did a little YouTube I just did dabbling and it was probably one of the most unsatisfying three years of my life professionally and personally so you had a disagreement on the direction of it and then simultaneously all of these things that you like didn't enjoy were like stacking up and you just ran away basically yeah

53:51that's not yeah I mean it's embarrassing as you say it that way sorry no no no but it's real it's real I I think instead of facing feel that too like yeah instead of facing my problem and really working it out with Chad who's one of the best humans I know mhm and he's been with me he was my customer in my previous business and he became my business partner and he's just been s he worked for free at absum to stard for almost a year and um which says a lot about who he was and how much he believed in what we doing and mean um it

54:17was a it was a tough moment and I I I in now in retrospect I wish I would have just really worked on trying to solve it with him and he wanted to go Upstream to like Shopify and mid-market and I was just more like I just like the small people I just want to work solar preneurs I don't want to try to have a sales process where I have to convince uh these companies and have an you know a proposal process I just want to help like individual people with their businesses and have a cheaper more affordable product we have the same brain dude this is why I'm so like being

54:46candid with you because like I feel this exact same thing and you're really helping me not do that good I mean that's the yeah cuz like it's I hate meetings I all I want to do is to make videos all I want to do is I don't want to work with big companies cuz I feel like I have a boss now and I have to be on meetings and be all formal and stuff like I just want to work with people and help people start their businesses and so I feel like I'm working towards that uh Sumo like a success where you're like have like the software killing it and

55:15then I can just go start other side businesses I can totally see how my ego will take over I can just totally see it I think the question with these moments I'm curious how you think about it is how can you remember what you really want to be doing like physically put something like on the wall this says like what it is yeah I mean stuff like that you mean I think the two things that I found is being very clear on what I want to be doing like writing it down like here is what I want to work on I like promoting deals I like making YouTube videos and I

55:42like working on my book and and being a good boyfriend do you like making those YouTube videos not most of them yeah no I mean some of them I do some of them I'm really like tell so scary no I mean some of them are awes dude I get to meet John Paul De the founder of Patron oh yeah that one's sick dude I got to be on a private jet that's how I feel right now yeah I mean I get to be on a private jet with this guy Jim I mean do you do you talk to them off camera like hey I'm one of you by the way like during I'm I

56:06don't I don't know if I need to actually do that sometimes yeah they're just like down there are times where I no I you know none of these people I really knew before and I do share like hey I have a business I have a pretty pretty quar billion dollar business yeah yeah we've done a quarter billion dollars in sales in the past three years which is crazy which is crazy and I love your story that like it wasn't in the middle there's like really hockey like and you're still with it so yeah it's really helping me what I was going to recommend for you as well is being clear of what

56:32you like to do and then have people around you who are very supportive of that and they can handle the parts that you don't want to do and they're happy about it MH and so it was nice that that balance where like I have a therapist I have business coach and you know aan who was the formero really like providing the counterbalance and I'm like oh no let's go get distracted and do this new stuff he's like you know that's not what you like that's not you know that's not what you're so finding these people that are challenging and supportive that can be on the side of you did you find that

56:58you like starting things like the idea of like this could be huge let's go like get a ragtag team and like validate it and try it like is that what when you left for those three years because you didn't just do nothing like we started other little softwares yeah no I did a Sumo charity ride so we did this charity bike ride laptops for kids did you know podcast YouTube SF fox.com I think in my 20s and 30s which it's fine for others to do I had to learn it my way was that I kept chasing my own contentment I kept chasing ing happiness kept chasing like if I finally

57:29get money if I finally get this to be successful then people like think I'm good I'll finally feel happy and the happiness was always there and this is probably the most this this Che into my soul dude it was it was insane because I was chasing all the [ __ ] time like I got to prove Facebook wrong because they fired me and I'm still mad that they did it that would be so like that would just be my fire yeah keep going I'm sorry I've interrupted no no it's it was just I was chasing for so [ __ ] long and it was just hard to find peace Within

57:55Myself and the weirdest thing it was actually like we're doing this bike right now so this is about four years ago aim in the CEO of appsumo calls me while I'm on the bike ride across America he calls me like a week into it I'm in La he's like hey I'm quitting I was like dude I'm on my bike ride can you wait and you have to realize like I'm not really working I'm making millions like he's running the company it's it was pretty good life like I mean I think most people think it's a good life what was really missing was the hard work that I miss missed it

58:26I missed doing something that mattered to me had a purpose yeah and so aan was quitting I called two of my advisers so again who are the people in your corner who are the ones that are going to tell you the real [ __ ] and it it's not always a nice [ __ ] so I called my buddy Adam Gilbert and I thought he was going to like like really pamper me and caress me and be like bro I'm like dude this guy's quitting like what he's D he's like bro you need to stop your bike R and go home and take care of your stuff he's like

58:50who's paying for the bike rider you need to go take care of absum so I flew home the next day and I've been see since and that oh so you got pull after those three years you got pulled back in almost out a necessity I try to find someone else it's kind of like a pattern of mind and probably very similar to a lot of people out there I try to avoid responsibility and try to avoid maybe the thing I'm afraid of and then when I actually face the thing I'm afraid of it's not as scary as it seems it's the same thing as my videos like

59:14when I'm afraid of going up to someone to ask them what they do for a living or every time I do it I'm almost always excited or more happy after I chatt with them wow what I met a person I met a person who sells strawberries and is a millionaire or I met a guy who wrotes children's books or I met a person who does energy trading and it's created such a richer life and that's why I tell you if you want to have success you got to start you got to get good at asking and then the strategy how of business are in the book and so it was a it

59:39wasn't what I chose but it was a a blessing that aen left and I was able to try to find a CEO and and the CEO was always me and I just had to I had a I had to face my hardship for myself and I think everyone that everyone has it in them to face this hard moment okay so and in that three-year period perod what did aan do to make it work yeah so aan and I have different skills so I do think you have to find who like there's always this question that you'll see in business books and and content strengths or weaknesses which one should you work

1:00:10on just do the thing you're strong at don't do anything you're weak at that's it don't do anything weak find the people who are strong in your weakness and just get them around you so there's more deals yeah no it's not just more deals but it's just like aim and strength is consistency my strength was starting in novelty and just getting going like now not start things yeah like now not how which is one of my mantras and one of things that people really love it's just like get going now don't worry about how to do it just do it right and so aan was just like how do

1:00:35I stick with something for a very long period of time and and whatever works Double Down MH and so the things that aan did that made it successful um he found a few core areas that worked in the business and really like ran up the score on him so specifically with ads we did some ads aan then built out an ads te gotcha and it was Facebook ads and it was Google ads and it was just like run at the score and the ad te so he found Pockets that worked really well ads affiliate we weren't really doing affiliate marketing he basically built an affiliate marketing team and then

1:01:04that like ran up the score even more um they changed the structure of the deal was the affiliate marketing team like an Amazon style where like if you could just get a link at anytime anyone buys off of appsumo they get a percentage it was like that and to be clear we do test and invest I I believe we just used a Google spreadsheet and gave people links and I think we just did our best to trust them from when the sales came through MH as our V1 or maybe it was like a WordPress plugin mhm as the V1 of our affili prr which our program

1:01:29affiliate program now does a million dollars a month that's crazy yeah it might be more that's like an eighth of your Revenue almost or even more I think it's more the actual number like I'll also show you how the deals are set um but he ran up the score on it right and to be clear and this is an important part for everyone's business it started with a Google spreadsheet and a WordPress plugin originally even the app Sumo but this affiliate program was we tested it holy [ __ ] it's driving sales then we like upgraded now we have impact.com which is like $120,000 a year

1:01:57just for the software I use impact yeah we're building a competitor um don't really care for it bad I know maybe we should be building but with aan he found Pockets that were working and then was like this is working we're going to run up the score on that so ads fill and then the deals themselves we were doing like you know two-year deals three year deals and it was like I think someone on team was like how do we do why don't we do lifetime deal and so it was just finding specific okay I want to talk about this cuz this isn't like a uh

1:02:21Sound business decision objectively to do lifetime deals for the partners well so cly is your favorite this is what you're talking about right calendly and Tiny Cal well for all of our partners we went from doing like oneye deals to three years to 5 years to Lifetime are they subscription Services typically almost all of our partners are subscription software businesses and they provide a lifetime deal that that's what we promote so they already have one they don't normally have lifetime deals they'll try to do it themselves so let's say with revamp you have it's 10 bucks a month you'll come to us and we'll sell it for $50 for life but why would I do

1:02:51that so for Callen Le like Callen Lee hasn't changed I watch you I'm quoting you here hasn't changed it's the same software for years and still we have to pay 10 bucks a month to have the right to be able to schedule calls automatically yeah so objectively your fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value you know s that's not like they're they're doing that because they can just make more money but you decided to make tiny cow which is just a one-time payment exact same service but instead of paying 10 bucks forever you just pay what 50 bucks now $29 $29 so you get in two months of

1:03:25Cly yeah you get for life with this so as a competitive Advantage I get that but why would I do that if I am a Savvy Wall Street type Fu sh Duty maximizing shareholder value business person yeah I mean it makes sense for you to to do that with us though actually so if you think about it when you're starting a business like how much is you know it all comes back to how much does it cost to get a customer and how much are they worth that's it so let's say you want to get customers how are you going to get them and how much does that cost you so

1:03:51you're basically saying I'm I'm concluding here so you're gonna say calculate my LTV charge my LTV as your lifetime value yeah that's it okay and also so that you're basically you got it really quickly for people out there it's like how much does your customer cost to get it's probably going to cost you a few hundred dollars how much are they worth and if we can give that to you instantly with no risk for free and you get exposure and a lot of our companies are are launching so they're getting going like it's almost a no-brainer so that's why we have people every day submitting to be like can we please be

1:04:17on the site at AB suumo um and a lot of the partners what they do is they have a you know different prices so you come in at $50 but then you want certain features later you have you're going to upgrade on the software that you need so it's actually kind of like think of it as um kind of like a starter plan or and some of the partners were like their main marketing channel so they're like you guys just do all this marketing for us we'll just focus on building software which is more of what we want to be in the future which is how do we distribute

1:04:41tools software tools for solar preneurs see that's where the amazones kind of comes in in a way where people like just use Amazon as their distribution or their uh yeah their distribution yes and so software companies are doing that with you guys exactly I love also by the way I love how your checkout is literally just like Amazon like the colors are the same it's tacos inside of stars subconsciously makes me trust that because I'm familiar with that process that's really smart one of the very first things I picked up on well coming back to tidy cal.com which is a product we've created which is it's gone viral

1:05:09like it's definitely one of our it's our best we've created probably about 10 of our own products and so for everyone out there if you're trying to grow your own business is there a free product you can create is there free book books are kind of easy sometimes like PDFs but is there a template is there a checklist we create software as lead gen for the business lead generation to bring new people to find appsumo so tidy Cal which is calendars senf Fox which is email kings.com which is giveaways these are like our core three uh that bring people into the abso ecosystem so you're almost

1:05:38using those as like lead magnets like really high quality lead magnets and they're basically commoditizing these services that are just are getting away with I think it's expensive I mean I think paying $10 for something that doesn't really you don't need to pay $10 for um doesn't make any sense and then a lot of times people are like oh what what else does the site have exactly so that they get their foot in the door and then they can just explore and get in the habit yeah I mean we look at we have a framework that we use for choosing what products to build so one is there a

1:06:06competitor that's kind of expensive right two is it popular so C is popular do I think it's expensive and then create an alternative that has some viral has some verality into it so calendar you send out to other people but there's calendly.com exactly yeah so go to tidy cal.com and so basically we look for tools that people are going to want to tell others about right so invoicing tools is something we're considering and there's other options the team is building but that team think of it like a pyramid so that team is on the top most all the products that the originals are focused on or my content's

1:06:36focused on is getting people into our ecosystem and then the expectation isn't crazy high either like expecting like a premium like 177,000 features it's just like one problem one set fair price yeah this is why I like your philosophy of business and why I'm striving to be like you cuz it's like just more fair for the consumer and that's more important than maximizing a shareholder value yeah I mean the shareholder is mean we're we're also customers that's why I like solving our own problems like I use tidy Cal MH I I think it's great to have a business that you're a customer of I think that's

1:07:03ideal so that you're actually excited to keep improving it exactly and you won't be like you your competitors won't be one step ahead because you like know every problem I mean we're using it so we see the problems like I buy the tools on appsumo I use like I'm using a lot of different software I like software the affiliate tool that you're building it's super I think that's a further out thing it's not about necessar building an affiliate tool it's more who's our customer which is these part Partners how do we help them more right now we only help people who do lifetime deals M so only if revamp wants to do a lifetime

1:07:31deal on abs.com can we do that but how we know that yeah unless you're willing to do a lifetime deal we're not able to help you but so how can we help you when you're getting started like right now with revamp we could actually be helping you more and so we're working on solutions to help you when you're getting started with creating software when you want to launch your software and when you want to grow your software so it's really the same customer base we're not trying to create new businesses outside of the core customer which is partners and software creators uh for or Sol printer so that'll be used

1:07:57within your ecosystem essentially that makes way more sense okay wow that's cool I was going to ask you cuz you kind of changed like you made that Ascension from the 300K to like a million pretty much through a different type of content a different format yeah and so I'm so curious because I do the talking head style stuff you used to do the talking head style stuff and I'm wondering about the density of that fan base like or how much of a fan they are of you as a person when you're talking to them for 10 minutes straight and it's about you to you going out and obviously you're

1:08:24going to do bigger numbers cuz it appeals to a wider audience but is that I call density yeah is have you seen like what's that balance been like from your perspective the reason I I'm going to answer with the opposite the reason I don't do Tik Tok is because I don't think the quality of the audience is high right so I don't spend a lot of time on that most short audience is not high because they're not engaged we have shifted to you know your strategy depends on your outcomes mhm and my strategy was to grow the channel and expand the audience and that is the type

1:08:54of videos we do which is knocking on doors or asking billionaires for advice so that's so you need to grow the audience to get a million subscribers to be taken serious by the billionaires or no so let me let me let me clarify originally with the channel it was to grow the channel and our Channel's purpose is to help underdogs nice every one of our content if you go to our content it's to help an underdog on their business Journey that's it it's to help people that like myself I felt doubted I felt discouraged I felt like these Elite or better people in Sila Valley no more than me which is not

1:09:22true and we want to create content that in inspires and helps these people when we I did 50 videos I did 50 weeks of videos three a week for a year and at the end of the year almost none of those videos were really watched three a week three a week go to the channel still out there uh eventually like I would use like a nicer camera like a a Sony I think A3 no a74 a6400 nice I mean it's like a, camera maybe cheaper but I would do all these videos and like none of them are really getting watched and because at the end of the year we wanted to get to

1:09:53a quarter million subs and we were at we were about 170 what year was this this was three years ago okay so the first year we did all these videos every single week committed to it I was like I'm not giving up right now my commitment to content creation is 10 years I guess the timeline you're playing on I want to make 10 years of cont meaning I want to only because if I do stuff that I hate I won't stick with it for 10 years so there's a balance because you have to and this is where most people get wrong most people get wrong is like well I want to make

1:10:17content I like it's like well that's okay but if no one's buying it coming back to the original thing if no one's watching it like it's you're not going to last you're %. so because of limitations we were at the end of the first year we're at 170 or whatever around that number we weren't growing and I tried doing at least talking head videos and that's what led us to try the basically a 180 and that led us to do the knocking on doors um the knocking on doors video went viral we hit our 250,000 sub goal um and that kind of led us on this path of doubling down on the

1:10:48type of content what's interesting though I think this is really counterintuitive as we've grown faster our goals are less ambitious M you get it mhm our goals are less so as we've gone like last year we ended at 750 um oh no our goal we ended 500,000 Subs last year our goal this year was to get to 750 is they slowed down so we got to 500 we want to get to 750 we're almost at a million already you crushing it yeah it's doing well everyone uses your thumbnail format they that font is everywhere and a lot of people are now copying our content so we're evolving

1:11:22which is is fine it's frustrating and fine that's interesting the competitiv the competitive nature of that type of content there's I will say you're the best at it but thank you still to this thank you the congruency of your personality type thank you delivers it the best I you know we work very hard and so with the content we have less ambitious goals and now it's like could we put out two videos a month that we're proud of and we aiming for Banger call Banger so how do you do Banger videos uh that we believe you know will really Inspire as we're evolving though you know people

1:11:54can copy it so okay how do we evolve what can they not copy they can't copy me can't copy appsumo maybe they can copy some of the guests we get and so you know competition leads to Innovation and so a lot of people doing the street ones and things like that are leading us to probably do more long form or me talking doing maybe back to some of the talking head videos so I want to Echo a lesson you talked about earlier in this podcast is when you wanted to achieve this goal how did you go about that the the sub goal from 170 to a

1:12:21million did you bring on different people on your team yeah so taking a step back here every one of business exact same thing I learned when I worked for Zuckerberg which is have one goal that everyone's very clear on so at absum at abs.com this year our goal is $45 million net revenue so not top gross line sales but after refunds and all this stuff net revenue goal 45 million everybody the company knows this with with our channel the goal is you're 750,000 Subs so in the beginning of the channel you're asking about the team structure it was me by myself with my phone like what up I'm just going to

1:12:51make a video short list and upload it um it was kind of scary building out the team you know like actually investing in myself and spending money uh to put myself out there I think all of us are a little you know it's if I really try and it doesn't work it's like yeah you go in a way yeah and it's it's also good though you know like I think having some pressure you know helps you perform better uh and the team evolves slowly and I think this is probably one of the kind of underlying tones of what we talked about here where talk about this

1:13:18appsumo company making 80 million and I'm making 3 million and all these numbers that sound great but I also started and I made zero and then over time it's led to that but you're hearing only the final dish and so with the YouTube channel it's evolved where um I hired a creative director who kind of we were starting to work on all the different videos that creative director was like we should just get a full-time editor so Jeremy then brought on cam and then we started working with him and then it was like oh we should just have a videographer who can come with us and

1:13:45then we brought on Isaac and then it was like let's get a thumbnail designer so then we brought on SAA uh then let's get an an expert who can really who's really looking at YouTube from a strategic p standpoint then we brought and Patty Galloway years ago Legend now he's you know PR famous I think he's really famous for creators oh I yeah he's the go in my mind yeah he's definitely Elite um so that that's more or less where the the team is instructed now we're evolving a little bit more but I think one of the key things that we did very early on is that we were trying to

1:14:15do all the platforms so we were doing shorts we were doing LinkedIn we were doing Twitter we were doing Instagram and uh ultimately what I think what I know helped us succeed is we said we're just going to do YouTube like we didn't do shorts we didn't try to do tweets we weren't trying to grow anywhere else and so we just focused on one platform which we chose it because we thought it had the most upside said okay we the stuff we're doing here there's a lot more audience relative to other platforms relative to the work we're doing let's just do only YouTube and that's what we

1:14:42did for two years and now we're bringing on people to take the YouTube videos and make shorts and other things like that that's exactly my Approach I don't know how you could do anything other than YouTube like if you're doing YouTube it takes so much effort for me at least for my videos like unhealthy amount of effort to make a video and yours is kind of the opposite it's not a lot of effort but it's very scary and is it's it's e are you are you sure I'm so sorry that was rude but I don't think it was rude okay but like it doesn't seem like a lot of effort huh

1:15:10well it's simpler to do but you have to go out there and talk to strangers and the fact of like you don't have to like write like a spend three days writing a script planning it out doing all this maybe you do do we I mean I can show you behind the scenes like that think that's that's interesting because most people see someone that has a business or they have a car or a house or company and they're like oh yeah that person got lucky or that person like did these things but the amount of work that we do to get to the video is probably weeks of

1:15:39of production so is it ideas you're spending the most time on so every month there's probably a thousand different ideas and we pick two per month and then within that each video then has all this pre-production so there's a researcher that works with Jeremy the creative director and there's a researcher that put together okay what are the questions we're going to ask what areas are we going to go to like that is effort there's a lot of effort that goes into it and then finally getting to the shoots like for example I did the private jet video I had to stand outside the airport for two days right

1:16:11like it's a lot of life to stand I mean if you're I think if you're younger and you don't have a family or even if you have a family and you have the ability like it's a lot to just stand outside an airport no matter what right and then you have to spend two to three weeks editing a video for sure and like every mic cut it makes a difference yeah but the retention on YouTube at this level well and then all of our thumbnails there's maybe 200 to 300 custom photos to choose one that then the thumbnail are those taken photos or are they like

1:16:37out of the video just screenshot it it's a mix a lot of times we have a photographer come and take photos or it's going to be out of the um the H so I'm saying it's like like create I don't think you're insulting it it just I think it's cool to see like how much effort it takes to create this but at the same time it also just got started really basic and you build up to that right sorry I was misinterpreting my point but I was asking you comparing your talking head videos to those videos which one was like less like more difficult more timec consuming or do you

1:17:06think it's just different ways I think the the fulcrum that everyone's trying to recruit or the vend diagram that people are really trying to create is like stuff you enjoy doing and stuff that people actually want yeah so for me I do like talking about how we run app similar I think we have a lot of unique ways that we run this business or how we do different areas is that going to be as popular as me standing outside talking to people on the street no and so we're working on how do we balance creating content that people also want to watch and we're excited to make less

1:17:33people are willing to do that too like I just so brave of well I mean I think what we're what we're working on is quality over quantity so a lot of our videos get worser quantity of numbers and people are like dude you got a million Subs you got these things but the quality of a less viewed video of people who care more about who I am and what our business is and what we're working on is what we're going to start building more towards in the future how how do you okay so this is again you you had a video like three or four videos

1:17:59ago that just like got no views and then you had a video that got like three million views right after right before yeah that is the most brutal thing because I expect it too like there's no consistency in it and they either like die or explode it almost feels like yeah so how do you like how do you think about stuff like that I want to ask you how do you teach resilience because this is for beginner businesses yeah beginner entrepreneurs how to get your first customer is the same for even when you're at a million subscribers and you put all this effort into a video and it

1:18:31gets 30,000 views and then you're worried about all these people's perception of like oh am I not going to get an interview because my most recent video didn't do well I fell off like you have like this like inner dialogue of self-doubt which is at true at the beginning stage for self- beginning entrepreneurs and for your stage even I'm sure that that like doesn't feel great yeah well to give you even I mean to share behind the scenes lately like most of the team quit Rec oh quit like they're transitioning out it it sounds harsher than it is but yeah they're all Le are they just bored of this format

1:19:00and they want like a new challenge I think they're all doing what I think is best for them and what I mean by that is they're actually they're all extremely talented and I think they want to explore their own types their own businesses and their own material even though they get upside in the channel they're like I want my own thing and I and you know what when I was that age I did the same exact thing I quit these companies to do my own thing and so uh there was a Ted lassle quot that was great it was like a good Mentor wants you to to quit a great mentor will help

1:19:26you mhm and I was like that's true you know but it's really that where they're all leaving that and so in terms of resilience I tell myself I'm built for this nice I tell myself like I'm I can handle this and I you know I do that when I'm suffering I do that when I'm on the bike so that that super helps and you come back to these videos we're making at the end of the day it's really hard when your your feelings your feelings are dependent externally M so the videos we put out like we had a video for related I know which one you're talking about was like investing

1:20:00and stuff we did another one Airbnb that was total flops like that one that's what I'm talking about it was a great video but and so that's the point I can't control what YouTube algorithm does I can control and I I'll explain in a second I can control making of something I'm proud of my book appsumo myself in relationships these videos we can control the video we can't necessarily control what YouTube does and so that is where you have to measure yourself and so when you ask resilience I'm just like it's a good video and if people don't watch it that's okay now so now the next step though and this is

1:20:29true for every single business whether it's an agency or content creation or whatever what are we learning from this and so with that video specifically was it the investing one or the Airbnb the Airbnb one like he makes a million dollars for the one Airbnb or something like that yeah so I think with that video it was a little too short that might not be the content that our our audience wants I think the thumbnail didn't really perform well and so we take those learnings and we're like okay maybe Airbnb type content isn't the thing that's we're going to keep doing in the future H okay cool we learned

1:20:55something from that and so I think you know everyone is you know the thing I've noticed as I've gotten wealthier is that problems don't go away I thought they do it's just more I think you get better and so you're willing to figure out things from these problems so it's like okay this video didn't work we do it debrief same thing at abso debrief and let's use this information to then improve which videos we choose moving forward so how do you now that you have competitors entering the space how have you thought about evolving this content cuz that was a non obvious move in the first place to go from talking

1:21:26head to man on the street yeah I mean it didn't it was this is why million dollar weekend is called weekend it's not million dooll decade yeah right because you only have a weekend and you're limited you're going to be creative and you're not going to give yourself as much excuses and so that came out that's how that video happened like we started knock on doors because we everything we're doing is not working and we only had a month left for our goal so in terms of where the channel goes in the future um stuff is still working our talk our our on the street stuff works let's not

1:21:56abandon it our interviewing billionaires is working I'm not going to abandon it I do think there's things we want to test before we invest we the same stuff applies so we're testing talking head videos with me about appsumo that's one and it as a million dollar weekend comes out we're going to be doing videos where uh I'm going to start a business in a weekend we're going to help other people start business in a weekend um so I think that that that is a a bucket of content we're that'll be fun to watch I really like that one yeah we just started it there's a guy I'm flying out

1:22:24he's going to live in in my guest house uh in 3 weeks and talk about something other people can't do that's pretty cool yeah I mean I think it's interesting to think about in all of our businesses like what is the advantage that you have so like I have an advantage that I know a lot of tech people because I came from Silicon Valley I have an advantage that I have potentially more money than people younger people starting YouTube and so I can invest money to fly to Monaco or I can fly someone first class here or I can get a private jet like that's stuff that is going to be a

1:22:49little harder for someone else to do and so like even MKBHD yeah he's invested in so much equipment that is just like if you want to do a channel someone on him it's very hard to compete and so it doesn't me and so by the way if you're on the other side of that and you're just getting started you're like Noah's this old bald dinosaur he's not going to want to do these Street videos so I've seen these 20 year olds or 15 year olds go do that stuff and that's great too and so then it's figuring out what's the angle that you have an advantage because we all

1:23:18have advantages it's just figuring them out and then taking advantage of it those are earned advantages too over time that you get like that that's not just you didn't spawn with that like I didn't spawn with a $400,000 400,000 subscriber Channel you know so that's really cool I was always every time I watch your stuff and I like you're talking to a millionaire I'm always just thinking he just be asking himself questions just because that's like such a big part of it to me it's so cool because you don't ever like if someone sees your channel they actually have no idea who you are and no idea that the

1:23:46person that you're talking to people you're probably richer than this person that you're even talking to sometimes them must be later that's what I'm saying there's billion the billionair no but the billionaires and here's the thing it doesn't make me a better person no way or okay A little better no it it doesn't make there's like really good I think actually a lot of the nicest people I've ever met are really poor like sweet people just like kind generous people it doesn't make you a better person it's also you know I think for me as I interview like yes I can I can ask different questions because I

1:24:12also run a successful business and I have money so I can understand things that this other person does I think is so cool and then so do you use that like when you're talking on these interviews like are people ever like skittish and then you like literally say like hey like I have a successful business no I don't kind about using our status and ego in that way but normally getting to the point it does help um you know one of the things you ask especially for people who are starting out like how do I get these types of guests or how do I get someone larger it's like well you

1:24:38have to build up to it m you have to you don't start a fire with a log and a lighter how do you start a fire you [ __ ] twigs and you build it up and then you keep adding over time and if you can just get going on your fire eventually you'll have be able to get these types of guests that passion when you talk like that gets me so excited dude yeah man and it's getting going and so like John Paul deoria I mean for him it was I saw we wanted we had a list of who we wanted I saw him on

1:25:02the street I I was really like you yeah it wasn't my status I was biking in Austin Texas and he was on our list so again coming back to a lot of these things what's your dreams and one of our dreams was to interview billionaires and he was on our list of billionaires in Austin and I was biking in Austin and I rode by and I I swear to God I was like that guy has great hair he has great hair and so I kept biking and then I said I don't want to you know someone said this to me recently like I don't want to live a what if

1:25:33life I thought that was so powerful oh yeah I don't want to live a what if life and at that moment you stopped I stopped the bike right I went about a mile down the road and this is like in this is like in Hill Country I was like I got to just go see if who him because he's on our list and I want to see if I can ask him to come do an interview so we rode back we tried to find him and it took a while we eventually found him and he was with his friends and his wife and I was like I can't believe it's you man like

1:25:55we've been talking about interviewing you I'd love to interview you is it possible like he doesn't know who I am I'm in spandex yeah and he's like yeah send an email uh why don't you email my assistant and we'll see what we can make that happen and so I'm like awesome and then the universe tests you if you really want this stuff so I go home message his assistant she's like doesn't reply message her again doesn't reply eventually replies like ah he's busy and then I message her every week for a year a year a year and then event on Friday she said hey if you can be here

1:26:26Monday at 8:00 a.m. you can interview him for 1 hour so you're good at texting like that is I I the first thing I said to you like you're just like you keep it light you keep it fun keep it exciting but also like direct but you like try to like have a relationship with the person like you kept asking me like personal questions like wow he keeps texting me back like yeah this is awesome we're on a planet floating in space you know and I'm I'm trying to do my best out here you are too and I think there's too much um maybe too much transactional maybe

1:26:54too much to fluff but it's a little bit of mix and you know someone asked me what are you been remembered for I would say I want to be remembered for being fun being generous generous to myself and generous to others and so I think that's how I want to communicate and that's also part of appsumo success if you look at our site I think it's just like talking like you talk to a friend is how we do our marketing and our branding so this you said fun that's the first thing you said yeah that's always my answer too and so let's go dude and you have like more of a lifestyle

1:27:21business approach even though your business is like you good lifestyle that's what I'm saying like but you still have like the lifestyle approach to it and you're just out in Spain working and you're just always like so light and smiley and it's never so serious when you're giving business advice you're not shaming people for not waking up at 5:00 a.m. and doing all this [ __ ] like you're just happy having fun explaining people in a fun way to hopefully it unlocks their brain to start a business and take action excites them should be fun has that something that's been with you since you were like like were you did you have a

1:27:48cynical face and then just become like like it got lighter like I'm so curious cuz youve like done the race in my mind and it's like so just interesting for me to learn the little details like this yeah I mean it's not exclusive that I get frustrated like all last week I was pretty sad I was pretty disappointed that these three people that I've worked with for now a few years on the YouTube channel that I I really care about are leaving and you know it's going to a therapist about that I i' see him really just sitting with it feeling disappointed and then be like okay well

1:28:19it's good for them are you going to sub this YouTube no I have 10 years and I want to keep I like it it's not even 10 years I want to go even beyond that cuz I enjoyed doing this and being okay being sad for a little bit and then all right well it's going to even be better I I there there's a book learned optimism and one of the questions I'm that that I've been thinking about related to the book is like do you think the the best is behind you or in front of you and I I'm like dude there's some good stuff still to do in this earth and

1:28:46so I don't know there's just a lot of and we and the other part of the that the best is in front of you is the realization that you me everyone there has the ability to change it and I think that's a huge transformation for for myself where so many times I want to be the we like being victims mhm we like blaming the boss we like saying [ __ ] the landlord we like blaming the government and the more that we can figure out how to take power in these situations and say all right I don't like my boss which I didn't I didn't like my boss at Intel

1:29:15I didn't like working for a boss at Intel I didn't like working for Zuckerberg I didn't like working for a boss at minom I got to do something about it and using that to then feel more optimistic that I have power to change my situations like I don't like my relationship I was engaged I broke it off with my fiance D yeah which was was bad I felt really guilty about that for two years and I didn't like working for other people I didn't like appsumo when we weren't promoting great products power change it I didn't like that I was living in an 800 foot house that's

1:29:42falling down I can complain about it I can be sad about it or I can eventually change it did you put these things off for like months and like kind of like stay in misery or or was it something you identified quick and just took action most of us like suking you avoid it I think we like all of us like sulking and we want people to feel sorry for us mhm you tell your friends about how bad your situation is yeah like oh these people are quitting this thing or like this thing happened and I want people to feel sorry for me and I think

1:30:11really good friends like Adam Gilbert and others around me inspire me by their examples not just by words by examples and also remind me like what are you doing about it how are you going to take your power back in the situation so in these areas now do feel that you know my my health is good my work is good I feel good about myself with how I am I have a partner who you know challenges me to be a good person as well like teaches me a lot of kindness and but that's the mental trap is you could like look and be like but Noah you have $100 million doar you're

1:30:39not allowed to be sad like everyone on the outside isn't going to give you sympathy is that like something that you had to like really internally work on doesn't even cross my mind no good good my own demons over here what what's happening in your head no you just like on paper you're like if you're still like insecure about stuff or you're still like not like you're not if you feel sad or like not proud of yourself but on paper you're like achieved all these goals no other people aren't going to going to like I don't know it's like you think that you can't feel this way because you

1:31:09should be happy because you have your goal achieved basically just because you have money doesn't mean you can't be unhappy and you could be super unhappy and Rich I'm telling you it's much easier to be happy being rich and I definitely money buys happiness pretty cool being rich I it's awesome and everyone should do it and then get rich so at least you can decide right and it's not exclusive there's not some Club yes I've had I totally have advantages that like I had two parents I grew up in silon Valley but I also got kept getting fired and fired and fired and made no money for so many [ __ ] years which is

1:31:39not exclusive everyone else can not make money for lot ofers but I kept experimenting I kept trying to make it work and eventually it did but that took a lot of times of just keep swinging so why do you have the YouTube channel you know kind of coming back on some of these things uh I like making content I like being I like promoting I like finding cool things like your channel I was like these are good interviews like I was excited that you were excited to come chat because I was like this guy knows what he's doing it's exciting to come put myself in a place where I get to

1:32:07meet people like you I like it I like the marketing you know like some of these things I like the creativity of it all and it's an it's an awesome Outlet to be out there and what one of the things I would recommend for anyone out uh a thing to go do go look at your work from three years ago go look at your house 3 years ago and ideally there's some difference so two months ago I went to my old house which is now an Airbnb and I was just I went I opened the door door the door handle not locked in it's like kind of shaking um

1:32:39the floors are cracked there's like cobwebs there it's it's dirty and uh small and sad and it made me feel proud that I was like Hey like look at where you've gone man and I I think that's there for everyone to to think okay I can change my situation and same with YouTube I went back and looked at our old videos hard to watch no I I was I was proud I was like wow look at what you've done man I'm like I'm proud of you I'm proud and I think we have to figure out how do we parent ourselves I feel we have to figure out how do we give

1:33:14ourselves what we need versus waiting for someone else to give it to us and um you know that's that's generally how I feel with all these different things I'm I'm working like I'm proud of the book I'm proud of abs I'm proud of YouTube I think I can be a better partner in my girlfriend and I'm working on that yeah you think that YouTube is like scratching the itch of starting a new business because almost every video is like a whole new like um I think YouTube is really just creative it's like what can I create that people are excited to consume and I'm also you know a lot of people talk

1:33:44about being a contractor I watch probably 15 hours of YouTube a week maybe more I watch just an exorb amount of you I love watching YouTube I like watching poker vlog ERS squash players and chess players and fishing and camping I just enjoy I enjoy consuming in it and I feel lucky I feel special that I make content that other people are excited to to be inspired by on their own business Journey you think everyone should be a content creator I think everyone should document themselves yes so you think they should just like explain like this is what I'm doing right now yes and this is my

1:34:14framing on this is my goal hopefully this happens yeah even if it's not a lot of people it could be anything and it could be being a TSA agent it could be you know there's people that do I watched weird I watch people that do like McDonald's POV cooking nice they work at McDonald's and they put on a a camera up here and they just film themselves at McDonald's it's pretty fascinating and so I I think the action creates momentum and just by putting yourself out there a little bit and you don't even have to be on camera you could be the videographer you could be

1:34:41the editor you could be the lighting person but just by getting going uh can lead you to such an interesting life and and that's what everyone should be documenting themselves or putting themselves out there or around someone else who's putting themselves out there and reporting it I agree I consume a ton of YouTube YouTube's the only platform I can like make content on like since I don't consume Tik Tok I can't like I don't doesn't make sense to me so just only focus on one on YouTube get that right what are all the software tools that you guys use to make it work oh to run app Sumo yeah oh man I mean our

1:35:11software bill is a quarter million dollars a month like H how like our technology and services Bill like mail chimps charging you something like Breaking Down uh you want to know all the software or that you like use internally to run it um so starting at the basics like the I it's easier to pull up like the technology cost uh I mean the AWS like our server bills one that's probably 40 to 50,000 a month uh clavio for emails stripe transaction fees um use dovetail for user research dovetail dovetails are user res you basically can watch you can have people come and you can record customers using

1:35:50your product and you can interact with them so it's a way to kind of keep improving your customer experience you can like you record their screen yeah so with their permission with their permission it's not how do they how do you get their permission we get people so you go and ask a customer hey will you come do a user experience you'll get something yeah okay so we dovetail dovetail has been really really powerful we've used that a lot um we use mixmax for sending emails we use HubSpot for CRM I use cleanshot for screenshots I I like that one a lot that's been really exciting uh what is mixmax mixmax is one

1:36:25of these like uh automated email senders and why don't use clavio clavio is so there's just there's just so many different things and you also have to break it down by categories so we have a people team so we used to use a thing called lattice which is as you get bigger there's just there's HR things and there's like rules for different states um so for HR you have like HR platform so we using sparity is like payroll health benefits 41k so that's that's the people team I'm trying to think by category yeah so mix if you want to email a partner you can set up sequences so you can send an

1:36:57email and if they don't reply with a certain amount of time it can send a follow-up email and if they do reply you can put them in different flows and then we have HubSpot which is our CRM for all of our different partners um what is we use privy for email popups now slack we use slack I can look up the list if you want to you want to see the whole list that's actually I mean it's pretty all right so here's our spending in order um of all the different software we have so impact radius we spend uh 13,000 a month on clavo impact is the affiliate

1:37:34software impact as affiliate software 13,000 a month clavio 5,000 s grid because we have senf Fox which is our email sending software that people can send up for 5,000 a month five Tran which is a data migration for our business intelligence is five 3400 at lastation for business intelligence so there's like basically data warehouse so have you have AWS but then you need special software you need special servers to be able to actually do analysis on the amount of data that we have like a data analy so we have snowflake which is to help us analyze it as well as F Trend to be able to provide

1:38:07the linkage between our software of aw or the servers of and snowflake so five Chan like cleans the data basically yeah it helps connect it between snowflake which where we can do analysis on and servers and then does snowflake connect to hub spot can you like see it or or snowflake is visual snowflake is no no snowflake is more right you can do it through anything but snowflake right now is more about our ads and our pricing and then the overall business performance so like mil's net revenue and this inst okay how do we forecast so one of the things we talked about is our ads we can understand that within the

1:38:39same day how well every single ad we're doing is going to perform over its lifetime so we take in the data of the ad like based on the Impressions based on the spend and based on that performance and then use a predictive formula to say all right here's how much revenue we think this ad's going to do and how much are we spending on it so we we can either increase the ad spend or decrease the ad spend and that's snowflake that is we and that's forecasting basically yes thank you dude never heard I can show you some of the stuff it's actually pretty crazy so we

1:39:04have a you'll see like with with Google ads like at a high level like we spend I think we try to make about 20% of our money back the first week and then within what sorry it's okay what are you ranking for on Google ads or what keywords are you like targeting so there's let's just take different layers to this at my where I'm at and the CEO level I just want to see how much we're spending and then what the performance is yeah and then down to the person level so we have a woman named Jessica she runs like the keywords and like is it in display is it in search is it in

1:39:34YouTube she's figuring that out my question generally is like what areas are working so we can do more of and which areas are are not underperforming that we can kill okay so I guess a faster question because I don't maybe we'll have to have Jessica on for a full podcast for that one but is it's Google ads Facebook ads those are the major and affiliate and affiliate those like your main three outbound top three paid performance channels okay and then is there you guys are doing cold email outreach are you doing any sort of like we want to keep going yeah it's no no no it's okay I mean we don't

1:40:06so there's two we have two customers we have software creators and we have uh solopreneurs and so the software creators is mostly the sale we have it's like a 20 person sales team and there's there's basically three stages of the sales team there's an ldr um and an ldr's generally job is like to look for leads I don't really like call people leads I think it's a strange way of calling people but in ldr is basically going out we have software that scrapes the whole web that basically has every single product that's launching or is launched and then they're reviewing it and then they see if there's anything

1:40:35qualified based on what criteria we have internally that could pass potentially as a deal then that passes to a second person that we think okay these are qualified does that make sense what I'm saying yes okay so you have a softare but I just don't get how it scrapes so there's basically like 20 sites that people launch software on on Twitter on product time and on there's a few there's actually a lot of places that people try to get promotion for their software we have software that scrapes everything all the time brings it in and then we look through we have criteria that says like okay this is a software

1:41:06we based on our internal data yeah that will do well on app soon your requirements that fit your okay so filters is this a software you guys built yes ah Competitive Edge okay yeah keep going sorry no no that's the lead so that's how you have literally you built your own internal software so an internal Business Solution or you to scrape all these leads that fit your requirements as a potential customer yeah okay so and then these people are double checking it they basically pass it to a um a business development representative that that tries to get on a call with these people so they use

1:41:37mixmax they use LinkedIn Twitter Instagram referrals to see the ones that we think are qualified they're going on call just to see if they'll they'll beat open appsumo if that if they're like yes I'll get in a call then that call goes to an account executive account executive I think we have seven of them uh well then tried to see like can we help this partner and make it work for for their business and for ours um that takes those it can take like it depends on the partners so you have 22 people in sales team be it might be 25 it might be a little and then those within the sales

1:42:09department there's they're divided by three so like there's three categories yeah eight people in each one of those eight people are getting leads eight people are doing whatever the ratios depend because you don't need one to one like the in terms of the original people like I think we only have two we have one fulltime contractors in our uh ldr Team the lead development research representative and then that passes to the business development representative which passes to the account executive but it's not one to one I think it's like two people four people and then it might be more like eight just there then you have then you have like a a person

1:42:41who is an analytics for the sales team so all she's managing her name is Christine not all but she's managing all the different like how many calls are we talking to how many people have actually said yes to the calls what like all the pipeline optimization conversion rate of like each sales person exactly and like which person's performing who's underperforming what's the revenue of this rep yeah non and then basically from that we can forecast how our performance of our business will do more accurately or like Hey we're not going to have enough deals to hit the revenue targets that we're forecasting that was so helpful dude because everyone says oh

1:43:10I do sales this company but they never explain like yeah most sales people if you want to join a a startup we're I would say we're more of a business than a startup at this point you're going to start getting leads finding leads in whatever way you possible like dming people or whatever it is then you move into this like SDR Ro sales development where you try to develop the lead and make sure that this person is excited and you move into a closing role which is an account executive so are the sdrs or the ldr sorry ldr that's different than your internal paid traffic yeah so

1:43:41this whole team's only job is to get software creators and part we call them Partners uh on appsumo we have a whole separate Market Market a two Marketplace exactly and then we have a whole marketing team there's 17 of us I I help I'm a part of the marketing team that brings the customers into absum we that's the B Toc side exactly we used to do a lot more marketing to bring in partner stuma we don't do as much of that gotcha because most Partners now either we reach out to them so we don't have to do as much advertising to bring them there's just there's a tremendous

1:44:09amount like uh Sentry so it's an error log tracker error log error error so you know we're deploying all the time to the website there's all this developers we have two sadm there's it's a lot so things happen it can detect any things that are going wrong and notify us right away so we can fix it gotcha in terms of Airy senty this scn TR crazy story actually Cy this company is pretty big now the guy who built it was actually the first real first developer at appsumo D framer did he see because you guys had so many errors he saw the opportunity no he actually was crazy I I was just I

1:44:45started abum with a website and a PayPal button and I hit up my friend Paul statio and I was like do you know any developers that could just help me build this cuz I don't know what the [ __ ] I'm doing so he like yeah sure I'll bring this guy David I just met over so David came over and I was like hey can you just like help me with this website and he literally just started coding appsumo while he was at my house wow that was that was that was kind of the start of more of like actually creating technology around having like the codes

1:45:07and building at a back end for what app s is there's a lot we use a site called tail scale I'm trying to give you one you haven't heard of so tail scale is a VPN software for companies at smaller scale so if we have logins to Appo backend and like we don't want to get hacked so you have to use tail scale to log into a a virtual private Network to be able to access the backend so anyone who access the backend has to use our tail scale software and be certified human interest which is our uh 401K software for the team okay human interest human interest is basically we

1:45:37have you know 77 full-time teammates a lot of them have families and and so forth they want retirement plans so we use human interest um to provide retirement plans in a fit never when someone says 80k a year plus benefits yeah and benefits are expensive so this is crazy when you have a a company most so let's say you get paid 100,000 it costs us 100,000 plus 20% because there there's salary there's Sal uh salary tax payroll tax there's state tax on it we have to pay for the health benefits we have to pay for just like the amount of things extra it's around 20% on top or a

1:46:12company and you're at the stage where like everyone that's assumed it's like everyone we have to account for it and we do our budgeting and how many people do you have an office are people in person we had an office that no one went to and so now we have a small office and then we do co-working stien so the business they like a Wei work yeah the business development team they meet in person in Austin uh and we're trying to give it do it it's expensive because most co-working is like 300 a month times up by 100 people and you're not spending 30,000 a month like would you

1:46:39want a SP co-working or give you more salary so it's all it's just an expensive thing to do um yeah yeah we have a guess we have a lot of different software stuff frame.io you know that one later.com these are social media later is it posting yeah posting software scheduling yeah what other features do they have I the team does it I don't know I want to talk to someone on that team for posting it well I just I don't have a tool like that and I might have an idea okay but I'll talk to you off camera about that okay there's a lot bit warden so it's kind of like a

1:47:12pass password manager because as you it's kind of crazy as you get bigger it's like how do you give person access and what if that person quits and they had their only access to te years of access yeah or someone's the only who has access to Twitter but they're the individual do you just give the password out to all the contractors too is there on one Google doc yeah exact that's how it historically is and you know I don't want to pay you know we don't want to pay money yeah so now you know I can give out the password but you can't even see it you just have to you can use it

1:47:37through a Chrome extension with bit Warden there's other ones out there that's this is what we use bit Warden um and frame is for video feedback like yeah so frame is video editing software so I can upload a video and we can all collaborate this is what we use for our YouTube yes me too my animators there's more that that's that's enough so keep going I feel like you might be assuming I know what these are and no I mean some of them I'm not even as familiar I haven't even used it in a yeah honestly like Victor Ops I think is notifications as well okay so

1:48:07Victor Ops is what the engineering team uses Beamer Beamer's pretty interesting one it's notifications so you go to sites that has like you know Facebook has notifications or like on you on Instagram has like little notifications you can have it on your own site so if you want to post a notification like when someone comes to your side it's like hey check this out it's like an API integration almost yeah so you can post messages your new software deal just came out on the website itself yeah yeah so if they like log in they can see up there yep ah okay so it's not like personalized comments on your feed but

1:48:34whatever you want it to be no so if someone if someone comes to your what's your website now revamped that yeah if you want them to check out a new feature you could have the little notification thing there's Beamer and there's other competitors you click that and it'll be like hey check out our new thing that launched today and it's just a way that to have notifications on your own site that's cool yeah get Beamer um they little optimization that's what we pay to see ladies dude that's uh there's a lot yeah I mean we pay for a sauna for project management uh better proposals that's

1:49:05the proposal software we use from our sales team when they're sending it to Partners is that like a pitch deck but like a not Pitch deck but when we want to actually have like contracts are baked in exactly okay so we use better proposals web flow for landing pages same um figma I don't even know some of these checkle don't know but we pay for it like yeah maybe reimbursing people I don't know I don't know cypress.io don't know pay for it like maybe a financial thing I use rocket reach that's a pretty good one to find people's email addresses yeah I like rock I give you

1:49:39like okay okay huh how do like explain how you use that I use it almost I'll use at least name in or because let's say I want to message you let's say I want to get a hold of Brett mhm so most people send they want to send you an email or they want to DM you if they DM you it probably goes it gets ignored so I always try to do at least three to four ways of messaging someone I want to get a hold of so a LinkedIn DM a Twitter DM and Instagram DM a referral ideally or if not try to send you an email and

1:50:04so rocket reach you can basically find anyone's email have you heard of retention. comom no oh dude though basically they' bought a ton of data and if you set up retention you can get any emails from people who just visit your website they don't have to opt in dude I got dude it's so funny I hate that though me too because like it's more they I got an email I've gotten two emails recently and I was like I know where you got this email from and it it just it's a little creepy I'm like this can't be legal so I know want to get in a web three conversation yeah it's just

1:50:33like it's like I was just it's like you're on a date and they kiss too quickly it's like like let me go of my own pace but I I get the idea of it I think you could do that and then use retargeting which might be a better approach that's what you do you use retention they have so many emails that anyone who visits your site they can just match and so you get all the emails of people and you pay like a set pery email very inter okay so then for your business app Sumo CH direction again those each department what is BISD so it different in different

1:51:04companies sometimes business development is Partnerships so a partnership could be you're a a restaurant and you do business development with maybe a gym and then you guys send businesses back and forth that that I think is traditionally Business Development our business development is more going and getting software creators to do deals on appsumo that's that's what is our business development team gotcha so how many departments do you have how do you break it down your mind I have I can look at our org chart i i in terms of leadership team there's seven of us so there's a people team so that's HR um recruiting just anything company

1:51:39basically making sure the people are happy at absum yeah so there's a people team there's a finance team so Finance team is paying Partners making sure Sals are paid budgeting modeling to make sure like hey what are we for like we've already planned 2024 that's already like mm what's our growth rate what hires do we think we need to do um can we invest more in any other areas so there's a whole finance department there and we have a a revenue department so the finance team is kind of more of the if you think about business there's revenue and expense they're more the expense side they have control around the

1:52:10expenses now the the revenue team is the top side the gross profit the revenue the refunds margins so lost but oh okay okay no dude that's good no it's good to tell me so let me let me slow down and I'll explain it more clearly so you got you got our people team they take care of all of our people I get that one you get the finance team let me separate Finance versus uh Revenue CU then I'll make it clear it's interesting and this is stuff dude I started it by myself like I am I don't know what the difference is yeah so and this is stuff as you see these

1:52:38billion dollar business this is how they're structured and what you can do there's a company you can go to the org you heard to the site the org you can go and it has or charts of all companies really of all yeah you can go it has airbnb's org chart it has like than the squares or chart and you could see or go on LinkedIn so I studied I went and looked at WP engine who's a company in town and I know Jason you could see who they hire and you're like they're hiring these people what do those roles do and just go hit those people up and talk that's

1:53:05WP engine yeah it's a Blog their blog hosting okay my point being is that you can go look again I think a lot of life you don't have innovate in one out of 10 copy nine out of 10 go look at other companies that are already successful same as these advisers that have already done it and just replicate or learn okay what are they doing that I can cop here they're hiring a lot of AI prompt Engineers so yeah possibly possibly and so okay so our finance department we have a vpa finance controller and then uh accountants and so Finance if you think about a business you have Revenue

1:53:35coming in and then you have expenses so you have our top expenses is our team number one our team costs about a million one to one and a half million per month then we have marketing expense then we have our technology expense those are generally like 80% of it so they are responsible for all the budgeting around that you're with me that yes making sure bills get paid people have raises um proving invoices invoices we have to negotiate with Partners or uh we have to negotiate with vendors anything that's an expense they they own now the next department is the creation of Revenue so it's the revenue department so we have a

1:54:11guy named Sean and his story is really an epitome of the appsumo story in in perfect example like he came in as the most Junior salesperson of our company and now he is responsible for all of our Revenue $80 million almost he runs the whole basically all of it he has he does have an awesome team but he's it's just an example and what I'm proud of in our business where came in as Junior and he earned he took like this role and we've supported him but he's really done an amazing job I feel very lucky to work with him so his job now on the top side

1:54:42of the business this Revenue side is what is the revenue we're going to get and how do we make sure we're going to get it so let's just say for this month it's Black Friday it's crazy November it's our biggest month of the year we have a forecasted Revenue he's responsible for forecasting Revenue let's just say it's $6 million I think it it's more than that but let's just say it's 6 million he has to figure out the 6 million and he has to then make sure that everything adds up to it like the amount of deals we have the price of the deals wow when the deal

1:55:08starts when the deal ends should we have different tiers within the deals and he works with then the business development team all the salespeople work report into him to make sure that we have the right amount of products that people want the prices they want and then around the same time periods cuz we have deals that end and start so that's the scaled version of 3333 of course at $300 yeah I mean it's a much more sophisticated example of that cuz like that was your when you were a smaller business that was like the one thing you needed to hit your goal and now you have probably 10 of

1:55:39those same things and he has to oversee manage and talk to the Departments yeah so one thing that I would recommend for anyone out there whether you're a company of you know one or a company of 100 or a company of a thousand is creat scorecards so every single person on my leadership team has a scorecard with three things for every quarter okay because otherwise like how you start thinking like there's a lot happening here yeah and so scorecards yeah so I want to SC so every single person I can I can show as an example so Shawn Sean he runs all of our Revenue Shawn has a

1:56:06scorecard he's he's our head of Revenue and so his he has three things I'm pulling his up um net revenue gross profit and 2024 grow revenue and he has specific outcomes on his scorecard and so it's very objective what's important for him his one goal his one kpi his one kpi is net revenue net revenue and so he has three core projects around that and that's the scorecard of how I know he knows how what he's doing I know what he's doing I let him do whatever the hell he needs to do to hit his goals and I'm here to support him around it but the point being is that in

1:56:39businesses it gets harder as you get more people and then also it gets more unclear what success is for these people right so you need to create a scorecard for them generally with no more than three things we only do three what's the three things you're working on this quarter that is success for for you and it should be a conversation where they choose it that aligns to our overall goal net revenue that we can all then combine so they have a they suggest it I then give my input and then we finalize it on their three but everyone needs a scorecard this is so high level for me

1:57:06it's like hurt my brain no no so everyone has a scorecard so Sean runs all revenue he has a scorecard his three that I told you all of it adds up to his uh 45 million net revenue this year uh and then all the sales team reports into him and then there's a marketing team so marketing team has three main goals that again all add up to 45 million new buyers existing buyers and then our plus buyers and so we have uh different team leads that each that lead each of these different responsibilities so Nick runs all of our new buyers I run all return buyers and Mitchell runs all of our plus

1:57:38buyers uh and then we have two other teams there's an operations team and a customer support team what does operations do so yeah it gets complicated so we have 600 plus deals on the site at any time so you have 600 different partners Across the Universe that have different requirements about the images that we need on for their deal the copy whether they want a video on YouTube that we're going to make from them maybe they want to change their pricing maybe they have uh codes or we we built on an API for them to get on appsumo so there's a team that's awesome Vanessa Dusty and this

1:58:10team they can make their own listing basically there's always issues yeah and you know people are these Partners I was going to show you so like Partners today are making hundreds of thousands of dollars so we're looking I'm looking for scrap guys like this guy named Jake or Scrappy anybody Jake was a student at Georgia Tech which I thought was awesome and he he like messaged me on LinkedIn question about business and I was like do you went to Georgia Tech what are you doing off for college he like I'm gonna go work at Amazon I was like yo [ __ ] Amazon were you gonna work on the help

1:58:36Pages yeah what are you going to do mobile he's like well I want to have my own company and I was like why don't you just come to entrepreneur boot camp over at appsumo and then in two three years if you like it stay and you're getting getting paid you're enjoying it or then you can leave and you have all this actual experience running a business and so Jake is someone I would say we poached he he gave up Amazon offer uh and he's now been with absum two years out of college um it's been a Miss I think sometimes we think these experts know a lot and they don't they really

1:59:03don't um they they know how to work at bigger companies so some of the people like I found like the advisers are better what we've generally done appsumo Playbook is that we hire we tend to hire more Junior people and then partner them with a senior visor that we're paying for that that has traditionally lately been our our hiring so look for like people that are like underrated basically ands Underdog oh yeah it's all I mean it's coming in and you know we've hired you know Alona who's our coo she came in as our email marketing manager and just is such an amazing person inside as well as and you

1:59:40know just such a good performer uh so amazing and she's elevated herself and we've supported her to become the CEO of the entire business so I'm interested you bootstrapped all this yeah you didn't bring an investor are you glad about that yeah yeah I I think investor so what we do do though one of my buddies uh I gave him 5% Andrew Chen I think it's helpful to have the the investors pressuring you to grow a business just to make money to give them a return I don't like right because then you're optimizing just for the growth so Venture Capital basically or any investor because they're they don't give

2:00:12a [ __ ] about you they care about their money right but the benefit of an investor what you can copy which is what we did is that they give you accountability and they give you expertise from a strategic standpoint and so we have an we have a board of advisers that we meet with quarterly and so that's kind of what a venture capital firm would do for you and generally you're looking for people that are disagreeing with what your strategy is you want people who are not like oh that's a good idea so we have a board that we meet with uh once quarter so

2:00:39there's Moody on it there's Raj who's on it Andrew's on it aan the former CEO's on it and we go over the things we're thinking of doing and they tell us how we're wrong and then we don't listen to them and then six months later we do what they want but having accountability and having that supportive board uh is critical it's critical for us to be where we're at but I feel like the ethos of starting a bootstrap profitable company from day one is like not talked about it's like everyone glorifies the VC exit for a billion dollars what's your counter to why people shouldn't do

2:01:09that I didn't want someone telling me what to do I wanted to be able to run the business where we didn't have to make money or we could make money or we can I can go you think most CEOs can go leave for a week on a biking trip probably not probably like have to go make money to return for this investor and I also think you're not as thinking longer term because you're like all right well I've got to get my this big funding I got to do well so I can get more funding that I don't have to do that there's just so many more

2:01:34advantages there's limitations that I have I didn't have as much Capital but that's also an advantage to me it's like all right well I have to hire different I have to compete different that's why I like your style because you're just like chill it's worked out I mean it used to be frowned upon to have a lifestyle business then you you kind of look at the the whole Ren of the Venture Capital Market and the entrepreneur Market or the software Market most of them now are replicating our business which is to be profitable and to sustain and to try to figure out how to keep innovating um in a in a

2:02:05slower pace which has been different for us we're we have very unambitious goals in our business too like so our growth rate for I know it's crazy our goal for atsuma this year is 45 million net revenue not gross our goal next year is 10% higher 55 million we're going to end the year at 51 net revenue we're outperforming our goal so we said 45 we're going to end 51 next year we're only going to 55 most most if you're in a VC company they'd be like you're failing like Andrew Chen he's one my best friends he's always like dude you guys suck he says it would love but he's

2:02:34like you're not why don't you get to 100 this year and what I found is that I don't find that sustainable and I find at the end of the year I'm I'm not actually like I'm not satisfied I don't I can't hold that level of pace and by having less aggressive goals I have more freedom to experiment and I actually think we outperform what we would do if we had to go rush and pressure ourselves to do super super well do you think it would hurt your long-term like sustainability you make those also what I've noticed the team is happier when they see green all the time they love

2:03:01the color green they love every time they're winning and the more they're winning the more they're feeling okay let's try some new things out but two years ago we tried doing um a marketplace where we just let everybody on absum moon we had 13,000 products and every month we're losing every month literally was like revenue's off this number's off this number's off and you're just basically scrambling all the time and it's never feeling you don't ever feel empowered to try new things out when you're only just trying to cover your bases so that's why we've now become very more about less ambitious goals and then you we've noticed that the company

2:03:34and the team outperform them so now it's curated like no one can sell on apps unless they apply and you guys or reach out to them you can submit you can go to apps.com sell revamped and submit it and then there's a team that vets it I'm just going to text Noah Kagan I I mean I don't make the decision okay no I I I can tell the team to look at you but the team makes the call I there's a guy Ricardo semar I highly re he's one of the my Idols of leadership and his whole thing is that if you ever override your people you take their power and they'll

2:04:04never do great work that's a good point that's a good point so I never like if I ever say I'm the CEO and that's why you should do it I think I've said that once in the past 13 years and I still regret it and that's the moment that you start losing the power and you have to really tell people like let them make these calls uh so I don't I I can't get you on I can tell them to check you out and then if the team likes they get you on email me Ricardo we'll talk this a great book Maverick and four uh 4day work week

2:04:29a 40 weekend phenomenal leadership books I love his books okay good to know then I have two questions on your how is where's Revenue divided by like how much revenue comes from Paid ads how much revenue comes from how's how podcast sponsors done I don't think we do any of it now not very well that's how I got connected to you they reached out we were trying so not for podcast sponsorship but we're our affiliate program is crushing it's doing really really well oh that's what they're going to yeah and so what we our adviser Moody said is like hey it's really good you're doing affiliate but it's kind of

2:05:01one-offs like why don't you think of doing more video affiliate so go to YouTube and where the content's going to have a little bit more lasting power so that's where we now created a it's called an ambassador program where we're spending more to get more people who have videos to uh promote appsumo has that done well exceptionally well yeah and so it's more also as you build like what's an advantage now we have a team I think have maybe 100 ambassadors and then it's like if you want to come compete against Zumo it's going to take you a year to get Brett to at least respond to you and Brett's already

2:05:29worked with us and so I'm encouraging the team to work with the smallest people possible to build with those people as they build their careers uh and that yeah that's done really well so if you have a business if you're doing like jewelry if you're doing fragrances if you're doing watches like try to I always like finding the pre fluenc find the smaller people I don't think you're SM this point yeah micro but I want the people who are even before that others aren't paying attention to and grow with them and find people you just admire their content that have high engagement and so the team has reached out to you

2:05:56and we sponsor these people and support them and as they grow they they like appsumo and we like them and it's helped our business a lot that's typically who I only talk to on podcast you're like by far the biggest person and even then just like these it's really helpful for me but sales all these like HR and stuff like I feel like it's going over a lot of people's heads is it really you think so I think it's more it's just not like they're not there yet well I think that's part of it where it's like I try to bring it back to where the audience

2:06:20is at and and share like it didn't start that way mhm right like the finance person originally had a bunch of tattoos this she was a bookkeeper that a bunch of tattoos and just was not reliable and then it was like we went to this other lady who was even better and then eventually we went to a firm and then eventually we now have a team of four and but the point is you have to get going and then EV you have to keep thinking how do I keep improving the system they're seeing the 13 the 13th year yeah not the third and the most important part for everyone is starting

2:06:46you know getting going so you can get to the 13th or the 26th or the 39th year like I feel like in business success is just staying in business like being alive and enjoying and being happy and having fun and enjoying your life while you're doing it like that is Success if you can pay your bills enjoy your life and stay in business profitably in my opinion I've yeah I've never been happier I and I don't I don't say that lightly I think I was pretty unsatisfied for 20 years of work it was frustrating man I was like trying to do videos and you know looking for satisfaction when

2:07:17it it's always there inside and I think it's finding really finding the piece of whatever it is that you're doing like finding it with the work finding it with your relationships finding with yourself do you have ai in absum mode at all like what's your take on this whole AI Trend I think it's overrated I think it's way overrated I think there's a lot of uh charlatans selling courses and information on YouTube that's like how to get rich to an AI I think people are missing the whole point which is like what's the problems that AI can support not here's AI let me go try to find

2:07:45problems should not be your website should not be name. a like should be IND over you know it's kind of how there was like web three and everyone had to have a contract which it's good and some of that will last and there's opportunities same what they add there's going to be opportunities and it's going to last I think what people need to think about is like what's the problems that that are really important and then can this support that can you validate that and support it versus the other way around so at appsumo the way we use it one we use it for people searching for

2:08:14Solutions like you come to appsumo you may not know what tool you need but you need a customer support tool I'm having this problem with customer support and so basically we kept getting all these questions to our customer support team for looking for software like what product yeah yeah like hey I'm trying to find a tool that can send emails so we use chat GPT to update our search software so that as you search now it can help you actually answer those questions it's called asumo doai and it's basically just like people kept asking support now we don't have to send them support they can just do that the

2:08:41second one is um just asking questions on products so for tidy Cal and King Sumo and senf fox you can go there and ask questions how to use it instead of having a go to support and it takes a bunch of time uh now it just has the answers for that so everybody no Kagan YouTube sensation and an amazing new book million dollar weekend coming out on January 31st January 30th yeah January 30th okay you can get the pre-order on Amazon yeah just go to million dollar weekend I I have if you join million dollar weekend I share my income stream uh we have an insane

2:09:13amount of templates and step by steps for people that get the book and a lot of amazing resources there for people who want to change their life in a weekend well guys go check out dude thank you so much I learned so much from you and I've been a big fan for a long time thank you and you left it all in the court dude I know there's nothing left that was everything