Appsumo founder Noah Kagan joins the podcast today to share an important reminder that we all start small.
Noah’s path to success began by experimenting with various small niche online ventures.
This eventually led him to create several multi-million dollar businesses.
He was always willing to try out different ideas until finding product-market fit, and shares examples of failed ventures and the lessons learned from this approach.
But as he says – what’s awesome is that business is the one game where you only need to win once.
He understands there’s a shortage of time though and advocates you validate ideas as fast as possible, giving great examples for how to accomplish this.
Noah also shares awesome tips for generating these business ideas and the importance of engaging with people throughout the process.
He emphasizes the significance of asking for what you want and developing resistance through small steps like asking for 10% discounts on your coffee.
Some other key takeaways are:
- To focus on basics,
- Revisit successful tactics,
- Employ an experiment mindset,
- And persist with what actually works.
By embracing an experimental mindset he means running short experiments, identifying problems as opportunities, and validating ideas through quick tests. And he really gives some great tangible examples.
Learning the “language of making money” is also a skill that leads to financial success over time. As believing in yourself and taking action are crucial to bridging the gap between your current status and desired goals.
Persistence and consistency are highlighted throughout, with the recommendation to give an idea at least 100 tries before considering quitting.
The conversation touches on optimism, intelligent risk-taking, and of course, the journey of starting and growing a business – with personal experiences and insights from tested strategies.
This is an episode you’ll likely want to come back to as it offers equal parts inspiration and insight from a true online success story.
Watch The Interview
Topics Noah Kagan Covers
- Starting Appsumo
- Finding product market fit
- Validating ideas
- Building momentum
- The need to start
- Having an experiment mindset
- Common mistakes for entrepreneurs
- Empowering yourself
- Overcoming limiting beliefs
- Starting small
- Cost-benefit of asking for what you want
- Following through
- Benefits of failing
- And so much more…
Links & Resources
transcription
Jared: All right. Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bom and today we’re joined by Noah Kagan. And Noah, where do I even start with the list of things that you’re a part of? AppSumo, big YouTube channel with over a million subscribers, uh, a lot going on there. And I’m so excited to have you on the podcast today.
Noah: Thank you so much, man. It’s, it’s interesting because all my stuff started small, niche. Right. And a lot of it, we were saying before even the show didn’t work. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot. And some like AppSumo has worked and I’ve stuck with it for 15 years. And, uh, you know, a lot of people that want to get to whatever levels of wealth, it’s also, you start with 1.
So yeah, excited to be here and talk about that.
Jared: I can’t wait to get into, because I will admit, like I’ve been around for a while, but just following your journey and following what you’re, what you’ve been doing, it’s been. It’s been a perspective to feel like you have a big company and you have a big presence.
And so I can’t wait to hear more about how it all started with a small thing or a little thing, because you’re exactly right. That’s kind of the theme of the podcast in many ways. Like where do we start? Where do we get going with us? A side hustle, a website, an e commerce brand, whatever it is, maybe give us a little bit of backstory.
I’m pretty sure most people are going to have heard of maybe an app sumo. Maybe you follow your YouTube channel, but maybe just. Connect the dots for us in a couple of minutes, if you can.
Noah: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it was one of the first people at, at, at facebook. com helped build mint. com that got sold for hundreds of millions.
I didn’t make money. I got fired from both those jobs, more or less. And, uh, it kind of made me realize like niche, niche businesses, starting my own business and was my dream. And also the only way that I at least had the control over my destiny and my livelihood. So I tried so many things and I still am trying so many things.
I think now I’m, I’m trying to just keep doing the things that are working. That that’s probably my evolution in business. So in my twenties and thirties, I did conferences, community next. com. I started a Facebook games company. I started a payments for Facebook games company. Uh, and then I got really excited about the problem of helping software creators get customers.
That was just like something I’ve been fascinated with because I just noticed through all these different areas, like that was something I liked doing and it was a huge problem and I launched, I have people to notice, but I launched four businesses at the same time, which is super common for people, everyone, I noticed a lot of people, if you have a day job, you’re like, I launched 18 companies.
How are they doing? Not great. Well, which one’s doing well, I’m promise you one. I’ll probably do well. Let’s just do that one. So I launched a reward level software taco fishbowl and app sumo kind of around similar time solving the problem of getting Software creators, customers were getting myself good deals.
And, and, uh, AppSumo was the, one of the ones. I’ve been fortunate to experience what product market fit feels like, and people always wonder what that’s like. I can tell you it’s when you don’t have to convince anyone. It’s where you’re not asking someone to buy, they want it. And that was great. And the success of AppSumo to this day, you know, we, it’s amazing.
The companies we’ve promoted, the deals we’ve been able to promote, uh, It’s been exciting. We have some of our own products like tidycal. com, which is now starting to do extremely well, uh, which is a Calendly alternative. And so for niche companies out there, uh, well, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but I would say the success of AppSumo to this day is that it started making, my first sale was 12 bucks via PayPal.
And I, the whole backend CRM development was me using Gmail to send the person the redemption code. You know, so it could start really, really simple and that’s what I want people to realize and that 12 sale led into just literally yesterday I was looking at our sales numbers, we have a daily pulse and I think the sales number yesterday, I’ll share because it blew my mind, I couldn’t believe it, yesterday’s sales, holy shit, 284, 964, which is unbelievable, but the point I have to make is that it started with 12, that anyone can do, you don’t have to be tall, you don’t have to be ridiculously good looking, You don’t have to have great hair.
You can be bald like me, or you can have hair like you, or you got a lot of hair. You could be anywhere in the world. And I would say with AppSumo, we are, we stuck with it, which most people never start, then you have to stick with it. And then also I would say we chose an industry that over 15 years now has gone from nothing to a much larger industry.
And so that’s something to be mindful as you’re. Working very hard. Make sure it’s something that is likely going to grow with you. You mentioned something! I got a YouTube channel, got this book, Million Dollar Weekend, that shows exactly how I’ve done it. And I’ve done the book myself again two weeks ago.
I read it and I did it. And I’ve had another guy live with me for 48 hours. He did it. He now has a business. And so it’s, I’m excited for people who actually want to get their first customers and get themselves to a million dollars or beyond. I do believe in the book.
Jared: Well, I, I, um, I have a copy of the book and, but I’ve already given it away.
I had lunch with a friend yesterday and he’s has an idea about starting something. And I brought it to him and I gave him to at lunch because I was like, you need this. You just need to start. You need to stop talking about it. We need to stop having lunch about it
Noah: and you need to do it. Wow. Thank you so much that people, if you ask me where I wrote a book, it’s like, don’t you have enough money?
I’m like, yeah, the book is not how I’m going to get rich at all. And I generally don’t trust people if they’re getting rich off their books and courses only. Like I’ve been an operator and I’m still an operator in these businesses. And I just never found the book. I think Tim Ferriss did an amazing job and that was probably the closest one I found.
But there’s still some areas missing about how do you get started? How do you get better at asking people for things, right? And how can you validate with pre selling, which is literally how we buy most things on this planet. And so there’s things that were missing that I wanted to put together. So that I could have a book for myself and sounds like exactly like what you would give to a friend to shut him up and get him going.
Well, you
Jared: know, I was tired of buying him lunch. So I thought, give him the book. That’ll, that’ll at least occupy him for a couple of weeks. Um, you said something about it at the beginning and I want to go back to it. We’re going to get into the book and a lot of the foundations that are in the book. Um, it’s, it’s a great read, but I wanted to go, since you touched on it, it’s on my list at the bottom.
So I’m going to move it to the top. You touched on product market fit. You talked about how. Maybe over time, you’re learning better and better how to stick with ideas that work. You talked about how you launched four companies at once, AppSumo hit, and it was a product market fit. Like, do you have any thoughts for people sitting on the fence who can try to better understand that, whether it’s in advance or whether they’re in the middle of an idea?
Because that’s something that is so hard to get right.
Noah: It really is. And so that’s why one, I recommend a weekend because everyone is like, you have kids, I’m about to have a kid. You don’t have a lot of time. And when you have a lot of time or money, you’ll delay it and you’ll do everything but the actual thing, which is, this is something people want.
And what’s amazing about business is that you only need one hit. There is no other sport in the world where you get, you literally can have one hit and you win game over like that. That blows my mind. Right? Like any other sport you need, like three and 10. Wow. That’s great. Baseball, like literally Zuckerberg hasn’t had a great hit since 2005.
Right. That guy’s one of the richest people on earth. He stuck with it, which is a whole nother story. Now, in terms of product market fit, one of the most important things is that you have to keep trying things. All of the most successful people, in terms of cash and wealth, have also tried the most things.
And it’s realizing that it’s gonna not work. And so what you, what you need to be obsessed with is what are the problems that ideally you have that maybe let’s validate if there’s other people that have them and what that market looks like. So I, I’m happy to share different things I’ve done and why they didn’t work.
I think that the maybe more concrete examples will, will help people think about in their own journeys and what I’ve noticed from people, they get, they get their entrepreneurship journey backwards. So the things that are working, they don’t stick with long enough and they’re not sticking with long enough with that and the things that are working, they give up too soon.
So what they do is they’re like, it’s not working. I’m staying with it really, really, really long. I’m like, okay, that’s the opposite. How do you also find out quicker? And then they’re getting wrong. Like you can find out very quickly. Someone wants it, but they do it backwards and there is another way. And so.
I did it again two weeks ago. We can get into that, but let me share about some of the ones that have failed because I think those are also great lessons because almost every single time we took longer to build it and it was, this is a key point. It was kind of complicated to explain sometimes. So I built a sports betting website called Bet Arcade.
Because we had some sports apps on Facebook, spent six months. None of us cared about gambling, by the way, or sports at all. So, I generally try to build a thing you have some interest in. Uh, after six months, we try to send a bunch of traffic to it. And after literally 100, 000 spent on it, we made 1, 500. Oh, gosh.
We probably could have found out in a weekend, like, Hey, can we ask people to make a bet on some sports game? And we could literally choose a Google spreadsheet and find out, Hey, either we don’t want to do this or we couldn’t get money and guess what? Then we didn’t spend all this other time on something that’s not even very clear people want it.
So that was, that was one example of it. A lot of these other examples we built a, and I’ll speak, I’ll speak about affiliate sites and other ones. Cause I’ve done those too. We hated Klaviyo and I’m like, Oh, Klaviyo is big. I want to beat them. And so we spent another six months. This is years later, building a Klaviyo killer called meat fam, you know, way more than a hundred thousand in salaries.
And then I go to people who are using Klaviyo and I’m like, Hey, could Nick Bears use BPN supplements and others like Beardbrand? Like, hey guys, can we get you off Klaviyo? They’re like, like, I’m begging you. I’m begging you tell me what’s wrong with Klaviyo. It’s expensive. All right. We’re free. No. Why not?
Because we’re already using it and it’s fine. Okay. Well, tell me more about that. And then all of that would have saved us six months. And, uh, you know, I think a lot of the time either a, you’re not finding out if people really want it, or you’re really, you’re working really hard on something where the upside is actually small.
So I built a site called free calls to. com. You can go to it. Don’t go to it even. And, uh, I think it makes like a dollar a day, right? And I would be like, okay, it’s, it’s a voiceover IP affiliate site with Google ads, which is a very standard playbook. And I was like, Okay. The upside of how, if even if I executed the best possible on that, like the biggest it could ever be is maybe a thousand a month.
So it’s like, why don’t you just work that same amount of work, maybe on vacuums, like I road buzz where you can make that 10, 000 a month. And I think being mindful of, is it something people want? And then what’s the size of that market. And I’ve kept making that mistake over and over. Uh, where now I think I’m learning and teaching others that you don’t have to go that way.
So two weeks ago, I wanted to validate an idea. No building, no domain, no website, no using my social media or email, which everyone should be using. And I just messaged people that were using DocuSign. So I messaged people that emailed me a DocuSign over the past five years. And I just asked them, Hey, how do you feel about DocuSign?
Everyone’s like, I hate it. Oh, how come you hate it? Oh, it sucks. What sucks about it? Okay. What about the pricing? Hate that too. Okay. I’m going to, I think I’m going to build an alternative. What do you think about that? Oh, I love it. All right, cool. Can you want to send me 99 bucks today? I made 3, 000 in 24 hours.
And February 19th, so what is that? In the next four weeks, we’ll have a product. I don’t even know the name yet. We haven’t even come up with a name. But we have very clear market validation that I didn’t have to beg them, sell them or convince them. And I really recommend people try to find three customers in 48 hours.
If you’re building an affiliate site, that’s a little bit of a different thing. But I just like getting to the heart of it. Can I actually get people to buy for this idea that I’m building?
Jared: I think a lot of people who are listening will also be struggling with maybe the ideation behind it. And what I mean by that is maybe they have an affiliate website, but they are just sitting on the traffic and not going for the next thing with it.
They, uh, they, they have expertise in a certain market and they aren’t creating ideas around that. They aren’t throwing things up against the wall per se to, to see what sticks. They aren’t going out with ideas. What about people who are sitting here listening and going, I’m ready to start. I’m ready to start slinking 48 hours.
I’m ready to dive in, but I don’t have the idea. Where do you like people maybe start to ideate around what they already have in their life, what they already have going, some different opportunities to create some of this momentum.
Noah: Yeah. So there’s two categories. So there might, do you think, what do you think you’re splitting the audience of people who are making at least a dollar?
They’ve made at least a dollar and first people. I’d say over 50 percent of the listeners have made at least a dollar. Yeah. And then the other 50 though are wanting to. Yes. Oh yeah. I was in a sauna meeting this morning with the head of growth at AppSumo. That’s where we have our meetings in the saunas.
It’s awesome. And he said, no, you’re always talking about small ball. I’m like, what do you mean? You’re talking about getting dollars. Like dude, our company is 80 million a year. Like you’re worth a lot of money, but why do you always talk about the small stuff? I’m like, cause that’s what the thing that people actually need to then get to the 80 million dollars or a hundred million or whatever number you care to get to, or even get to a hundred thousand or a million.
And most people never get to the dollar. So we can break those out into two categories of people. Now, if you’ve never made a dollar, just get 1 today. You’re like, that’s so, so silly. Yeah, because most people, and Jared, this is what we were talking about with your guy’s success. Most people never start.
They talk about it at lunches, they bug their wives, they watch more YouTube videos to be inspired, and they’re never ready. But you’re never going to learn to swim sitting outside the pool. You have to get in. And you can do it in a weekend, which everyone has available to them. Now the question is, if they don’t have any ideas, the way I’ve, there’s a lot in Million Dollar Weekend about how to approach it very specifically.
The ways that I would like to think about it for them is, who do they already have in their network that they can help? Who can you call today? Are you in the Niche Pursuits community? Is there maybe people here within your own group that you can help? Is there people at your work? Is there your church friends, synagogue friends?
Is there your old colleagues? So for me with this DocuSign alternative, I just searched my Gmail and was like, whoever emailed me DocuSign in five years, and then I put them on a spreadsheet. I called it my dream 30. Because I had them already in my contact list. I didn’t do anything with social media.
Didn’t do any ads. I didn’t do a landing page. Didn’t even build anything. Now, so think about who’s in your network. Think about what you’ve gotten paid for in the past. And again, you know what, Jared? A lot of people are like, man, that’s so simple. I’m like, well, how much money are you making? Zero. I know it’s simple.
That’s why I’m talking to you about the things you need to get the basics right. Yeah, yeah. They’re like, well, I can do these other things. I’m like, well, have you done it? No. And so start there. Who’s in your network that you can help? And you can contact them. Hey, can I follow you around for a day and just see what’s going on with you?
Can I listen to any of the problems in business? All business is actually quite simple. Every problem is an opportunity. And then you have to find the problems that people are excited to pay for. That’s it. Simple. But starting the business, which most people don’t do or asking for the dollar is the hard part.
So that’s why I encourage everyone who’s never made a dollar. You can ask me at Noah Kagan on Venmo or PayPal at okaydork. com. I’ll give you a dollar, but then you have to ask someone else. All right. So now that we have some ideas about what have you gotten paid for, for your work, maybe you’ve done accounting, maybe you’ve done spreadsheets, maybe you’ve done marketing, think about how you can go and do that as your business versus a lot of times they’re like, Oh, I want to do affiliate marketing.
I want to do this like social media thing. It’s like, have you done it ever? No, which doesn’t mean you can’t, but why not make it easy? So those are two things I think are core things, no matter what your stuff is. I think now in terms of problems and business opportunities, my favorite approach is I would say that I’ll give you three and three minutes that you can use.
And there’s more in million dollar weekend. But number one, just think about your day, literally make, call it morning, afternoon, night, and just write down. Two items and think about what happened today and everyone will have something right like okay My sauna didn’t have a timer in it, right? Okay. That was something that’s kind of interesting That was a little annoying figuring out lunch with my girlfriend.
She’s pregnant is really hard I’m having a party next week and I need to get balloons because I’m having a birthday book party. Okay. Oh, these are literally all business opportunities. Great. And so those are things that I’m struggling with. And guess what? If I struggle with it, one, you could be your first customer and make yourself happy, but maybe others are too.
The other, the other two that I’d recommend, look what you have, you’ve avoided on your to do list. For a while, that’s always a great business. And then look at things you’re spending on your credit card bill. I think those are three ideas, three ways. And most people, what they’ll say, Jared, is, I don’t have any ideas.
And it’s, they’re not, it’s not, they don’t have any ideas. They’re afraid of who they can become. And I know that’s like woo woo y, but that’s the reality. They’re afraid of, if I did it, I might get rejected. If I did it, it might work. If I did it, what could happen? So that’s why, you know, what I’ve noticed is, just get a dollar.
Do these kind of silly ones, where you get a dollar, or with asking, you ask for the coffee challenge. So you ask for a discount when you buy coffee. Silly. But that’s the basics and the foundational stuff that’ll lead you to a really easy success in business. Now, for anyone who’s already making a little bit of money, the two things I would consider, one, your market size, like, is it growing?
And if it’s not, like, why don’t you put work just as hard in something that has a bigger opportunity? Or secondly, this is the number one mistake from entrepreneurs. They stop doing the thing that works. And I, again, very basic. And you’re like, no, it’s so too basic. It’s like that basics is running an 80 million business.
The basics is it, you know, think about all sports athletes, they’re not shooting half court, uh, basketball, they’re doing layups and free throws, that’s their practice and we think in entrepreneurship, which should be different, it should be all this, if I tweet, it’ll just save me, it’s like, no, how’d you get your first 10 customers?
Oh, I manually dm people on linkedin or I did a referral or I reached out to my network. It’s like, how, when’s the last time you did it? I haven’t done anymore or I used to blog every day. How often you blogging now? Yeah, once a month. Okay. And just revisit what worked. And if you just go back to that and then figure out how much of it can I actually do.
Most businesses can grow significantly without being innovative.
Jared: I I’ll piggyback on what you said. We’ve had so many people in this podcast over the years who talk about how motivating it was to get that first dollar through advertising or that first dollar check from Amazon. I mean, some people have it framed.
Some people remember the exact amount. I’ve had one guest say it was 11 cents. I had another guest show me their first check from Amazon framed at their wife. I mean, getting that dollar, whatever that amount is, is a huge motivating factor for people. It is.
Noah: It’s, it’s, it’s kicking fear in the ass saying, I’m not afraid of you.
I can do this. I believe in myself. And it takes time. One of my friends, this guy, Nick, who I work with said this, we were talking about this morning. He had a great way of thinking about it. Like there is a language of making money and everyone can be fluent in it. And I was like, Oh, that’s so good. The language of making money, the language of cash.
But to learn a language of making money, which is a skill, like you practice it. And I think people get maybe frustrated or they give up too soon. And they don’t realize like, Hey, just stay with that. Like I only got really rich on this AppSumo thing, maybe seven, eight years into it. Like really like millions of dollars a year I make for myself.
But that took some time to stick with it. And I did a fine, you know, I was making 50 or 70 or zero the first year. But because I stuck with it, and I was able to live the life that was still great. Most people, I call it the freedom number. You can live a great life without making a lot. And if you do that, guess what?
You’ll actually end up doing the thing you like. And then you make a lot, you know, one of the things that I’ve noticed Jared from this whole book experience and then from my YouTube channel and from AppSumo and even my own life is that most of the people who haven’t made money don’t believe they can, they don’t believe they can speak the language and that’s just not true and I’m here to say there’s no guru that can promise you that they’re going to be a billionaire or some bullshit and they want you to believe that there’s some gap between you and where you can be, the gap is you starting and the gap is realizing even me who’s I would say experiencing this and I’ve done it so many times I’m still failing.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m still feeling a lot and that’s okay, cool. It means I’m learning a lot. And I think what happens is we get, we do one business on a weekend. We launched maybe an affiliate website for vacuums, which I still think vacuums are great or anything you’re interested in. It could be air purifiers.
It could be home studio setups. It could be just an affiliate site or it could be for me. I like the active activity of talking to a real person versus the passive prayer of business. And guess what? You can do it. And if it does work, great. If not, okay, cool. Didn’t. What I learned. Let’s do another one next weekend.
Mm hmm.
Jared: Mm hmm. Well, let’s transition into that point because one of the points on the agenda that I pulled out of your book was you talk about, uh, I think the quote you have is now, not how. And It I know pretty good, huh? I don’t know. I think it’s pretty
Noah: good. I should read this book
Jared: Oh, no, it’s already printed you can’t rewrite that part But I mean so we’ve been we talked about it a little bit before the podcast started recording But you know spencer and I last year set out in this amazon influencer journey He started first and to be fair.
I piggybacked off of him, but We just jumped in without a strategy and ended up going really well. Um And I want to juxtapose, though, that there’s like, there’s also the other side of the coin that says, um, you know, think through the details before you, uh, before you commit your time to it, right? Make sure that, you know, you are not acting on a whim.
Like, I’m trying to pose both sides and then give you that juxtaposition. And like, there are a lot of people listening who have been thinking about starting. A side hustle of some sort for a while they’re driving to work as they listen to this or they’re working from home or they don’t know where the band is going to come from and there’s a lot of people who have jumped into it and realized in retrospect it was a bad idea and if they had spent more time thinking about it yet you’ve had so much success by diving in by now and then figure out how later how do people wrestle with that?
That back and forth or do they do they just ignore it and dive in and figure out that you’re going to have to make mistakes and make some of those bad ones along the way.
Noah: It’s like if they’re I want to be in their ears and like I’m here with you. I’m up in your earlobes like I’m cleaning out your earwax a little bit. I’m telling you can do it. We all can do it and no one. I think there’s there’s these beliefs out there. You know, I come from a middle class family, and I think we’re told like, Hey, you know this middle class lane?
You’re stuck here. That’s where you’re gonna be. I’m like, fuck you. And that, that for me is a lot of this book for myself and for others, realizing what we can do in this life, and we’re afraid. And what I’ve recognized is that that fear is also where the biggest growth happens for us. And so the question for people out there is, and again, this is supposed to be fun.
We’re on a planet figuring it out. No one knows. No one knows. And the cool part about entrepreneurship, you get to, you get to control your destiny. You get to choose how this game, game works out. Now, the reality for people that are, are driving, drive safely, and they go to their work and they’re maybe go home and they’re like, you know, how much longer do you want to keep talking about it?
And. The other side of that coin, though, is what could you do right now that’s small? Maybe it’s asking for a dollar from someone. Maybe it’s posting online. Maybe it’s posting a blog. Maybe it’s putting something on social media. Maybe it’s even posting on your Facebook. Hey, is anyone here interested in vacuums?
I don’t want to keep talking about vacuums. I didn’t have a good vacuum. My first website was about
Jared: vacuums, actually.
Noah: Vacuums are high margin items.
Jared: That’s great. I was trying to figure out what vacuum. I thought it’d be a good thing to start a website back in 2017. I think
Noah: do it about your curiosity. I started with a guy named Julian sleep sumo.
Don’t don’t go to the website because I you know This is 20 something. I don’t know this 2017 around then I was just like man. I would love to what are sleep mattresses This is before now. There’s like all these like hipster brands, but the reality I think for someone out there Who’s been sitting about it is what can you do right now?
You can call it like stop the podcast and call someone you can stop the podcast and text someone you can stop the show and Post on Facebook and find out how you can become but it’s never gonna happen You’re never gonna be ready for it And the way I like to think about it for myself is what are you gonna?
Thank yourself for today in the next five years Cause I, I, I truly, you know, real, real talk, man, like I, you know, I wake up insecure. I still have a lot of problems just like everybody else. But I, I noticed that through business, I feel more confident. I feel like I can approach these problems. I can handle these problems.
And I thank myself. I thank God that some version of Noah 14 years ago. It’s like, at least try something, just keep trying, eventually it will work. And it, and it did, it worked. And then the other part that you have to really remember is, if you have something going, you have to stick with it. Yeah. All the success I’ve seen from anyone who’s got it, and I call it law of 100 in business, which is like, do it 100 times before you quit.
Cause most of us quit too soon and something. And if I would have quit HapSumo, someone, uh, these guys stack social, try to buy it for 2 million. And I was like, Oh shit, that’s a lot of cash. And thank God it didn’t sell up then, right? I felt like we were, we made 4 million in revenue that year. So I was like, that seems a little low, but just because we stuck, stuck with it.
Right. And maybe, and by the way, you know, in these businesses, I think this is a real surprise. You don’t have to stick with it yourself. You have to find someone to stick with it. Really? Yeah. Trade your money for someone else’s time. And pay them a shit ton. Make them happy too. I think that’s not talked about enough.
You think I’ve gotten a deal on AppSumo in the last 10 years? No, there’s, there’s like, an amazing team. Jared, and Genvieve, and Ashley, and all these people that do get those deals. And they get to live cool lives. Alex, all these people that do that. So, I, I think the thing I would encourage people to realize is like, think about it yourself as an experimenter.
You’re going to experiment today. Experiments might fail, but I promise you, if you do something right now, maybe you get a dollar, maybe you post online, maybe you call one friend or text a friend about this thing and not, not, Hey, give me feedback, but Hey, will you be my customer and pre order, which if you realize business, almost everything is pre ordered hotels are pre ordered events are pre ordered flights are pre ordered concerts are pre ordered.
Airbnbs are pre ordered. You can start a business pre ordering, validating, see if you want it. And if they don’t, great, you didn’t waste a bunch of money and time. But you can do that right now, and I think you’ll start realizing the power of now, and how much maybe you’ve been avoiding the hard part, which a lot of times ends up being the easy part.
Jared: Yeah, my mentor once told me, a very valuable mentor of my life said, uh, jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down. Which is scary as all get out, but when it comes to business, it’s, uh, worked more often than not for me. I’ll tell you. Well,
Noah: so I, I, I love the analogy, but I’m never jumping off a cliff without a parachute.
Yep. And I, what I do do though is while I’m getting ready to jump off the cliff, I’m building a parachute to know when I jump, I have something ready. So for me, I never quit my day jobs. I worked at mint. com and I was trying different things and not a lot, not all of them worked. And that was okay because each thing kind of got me closer and closer and closer to AppSumo.
So finally though, while I was at Mint at night, I copied someone else’s business, which was a Facebook app for, I think it was soccer. And I made up a Facebook app called Hockey. And this is in the early days and it exploded. And then I worked on it during my lunch breaks. And then I think about two months, three months in, it was making my freedom number, which was 3, 000.
And I quit my job. And the same thing with AppSumo, I had a day job working at speeddate. com, don’t go to the site. And I just wanted to solve a problem. And again, don’t worry about your solution. And if you’re an engineer or worry about the solution, if there’s AI, no one cares about your solution. They care about the problem.
Right? So what’s an exciting problem that maybe you have? And let’s see if others have it and solve that. And when you get that going and you have success with it and you, it’s like, Oh crap, this is working. Then jump off a cliff. I don’t know why people are jumping off cliffs, by the way. When’s the last time you jumped off a cliff, Jared?
Oh man,
Jared: just last week. Yeah, at the end of my run. I just go, I mean, it’s just, it must be a California thing. You know, we just, uh, that’s how we finish our exercise routines.
Noah: I know. After you see your tax bill, you’re like, geez, where’s the nearest cliff? I’m going to fly over to Texas. Or Puerto Rico. My
Jared: tax bill, my energy bill, my water bill.
It’s just, this is why we jump off cliffs so much. Yeah.
Noah: Now, California, shout out California, man. I love them from there. I love California. But again, I, I think there’s the, and I think that’s not bad advice. I think there’s, I think what I actually take that advice to be, Jared, is how do we have optimism in ourselves?
I think that’s what I really, when I hear that quote, which is, you know, jump off cliff and build this stuff on the way down. It’s like, how do you believe that you can have this kind of life? How do you believe that the business will work? How do you believe that I’m going to start right now, see if this works?
It doesn’t. Okay. Well, next week I’m gonna try something else. And believe that you can have these kind of lives that we can live. And I think that that is a practice of optimism is the future.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Having the confidence that you’re going to, that you’re going to live the life you want to live rather than, um, than subjected to something other than that.
Noah: Yes. Let me,
Jared: you mentioned it just now. So let me, let me, let me ask about it. Cause you talk about a lot in the book, the experiment mindset. Um, you know, this kind of art almost of running short experiments, seeing what works doubling down. I have a quote. I pulled out of the book that. That that that you mentioned great companies were founded as experiments, which I think is fascinating when you think about it.
And you’re like, Oh, yeah, that’s actually a really good point. Um, I’m guilty of coming up with experiments that are too lengthy, too complicated. And then when you get the results back, you look at yourself and go, did I really learn anything? Like, what’s the art in coming up with? Short experiments. Any tips for validating an idea based on experimentation?
You’ve mentioned a few already just in passing on the, on the podcast interview here, but centering around that, like how can people come up with quick experiments to validate and see what works?
Noah: Yeah. And, and I want to just reiterate that point because it’s so important. A lot of times people will start a business.
Like I had a guy last night, he dropped off Indian food. Cause he wanted to meet me and he wrote a note. He’s like, ah, this could be a million dollar week in business. And I’m like, and he, and he said, ha ha. And I was like, ha ha. Yeah, it can. And my point here though, is that the things that we might take as jokes or hobbies or experiments can be businesses, right?
Like Airbnb, none of these businesses that are literally billions, hundreds of billions of dollars started out that way. Airbnb started as an email to a conference saying, Hey, does anyone want to rent our couch? As an experiment, a hundred billion dollar company. A very annoying one, but a separate, that’s a separate point.
Uh, you know, the cleaning fees, we all know about that stuff. Oh man. No, in terms of experiments,
it’s getting, as we talked about them getting, it’s thinking of it as a skill. So I’ll just get, what I was thinking really in my head is, if I had to make 100 this weekend and get three paying customers, what could I do? And then we already talked about some ideas you can do, but let’s even just go through stuff that I think niche pursuits and what’s maybe typical, right?
So I could post on Twitter, you know, something that’s good. That’s a practice of getting in the now. It’s an experiment, feeling a little comfortable putting yourself out there. I could post a video on YouTube. Okay, I’m getting somewhere. I could list something, but by the way, do you think you’re gonna get paid from that in a weekend?
Do you think you’re gonna actually get like any result? Probably not. You might get some validation. People want to watch you. That’s how I felt. Like when I started my YouTube channel, I just started with my phone shirtless. And now, you know, there’s a studios and there’s producers who are, you know, there’s all this different stuff there, but you have to get started and then evolve.
So when you have a limited time set and you say, Hey, I need to make this money in a short window to see if people want it. Then you start, well, what could I do? So what, what comes to mind for you?
Jared: Well, in a weekend, I think of the fact that I would probably think of a pain point that people in my network have that follow me on like Twitter or my email and try to solve that. Just last week, I was actually telling this story. This will age a bit when the podcast comes out, but just last week. I was writing an email series on schema implementation for websites, and I got a couple of people emailing back saying like, nice email, but I don’t really want to do this myself, and I realized, oh, what if I whipped up a landing page and said.
We can do this for you. I run a marketing agency. We already do this for customers, but we do it as part of a bigger package. And, uh, I got, uh, I, I got, uh, over a, well over a thousand dollars with the orders just by putting that landing page together.
Noah: That was a great example. That’s exactly the point. I mean, I think when people like take a step back and then they, they notice the things that people are responding to, or they notice the problems they have.
Like, even as you said that right now with, uh, with my YouTube channel, I’m really struggling with video editors. And we were testing out a new one. He’s fine. No shit. No shit on him. But it’s like, man, finding him was like, I have to put out a thing and I have to hope for a thing and I have to pray for a thing.
And then I have to do a test. Is there another way that I could find video editors for myself? Because maybe other creators have that problem too. It’s an interesting business problem. Or literally yesterday I spent another maybe two, three hours trying to find a VP of finance. Is that something in a weekend that I could see if other friends who run companies have issues hiring, or maybe it’s how they run their finances?
And so you just start noticing, like, I was even another idea yesterday. Was it yesterday? No, it’s last week. My neighbor and I are having kids. And so we want to have an office. And I was like, Oh man, office is kind of annoying. And they’re far away from where we live. Can we rent a house? And then here’s, here’s a simple experiment.
So then the business idea was, can we rent a house and then rent out the rooms as co working spaces? Right. So four bedroom house, 1, 000 a room, 4, 000 a month, maybe we rent the house for 2, 000. Now most people, and then literally that could become an Airbnb for coworking. You can compete with them. Right. Or, another AirBnB opportunity, I fucking hate these cleaning fees.
It’s like 200 and I have to clean the house myself. And then they give you all these rules. I just, I got in trouble. Load the dishwasher
Jared: on the way out, get the towels on the floor, strip the bed. It’s like, dude, I’m paying you to do
Noah: this. Yeah, or, as well, I was at an AirBnB in Sarasota where the bed was covered in hair.
I’m bald, so it’s not for me. The air conditioner is on, even though it’s winter. And there’s just all, it’s inconsistent. All of our experiences with Airbnb are inconsistent. So again, now let’s take those two ideas. So the first one, let’s just focus on that. But I’m just saying there’s problems that are opportunities.
First one, okay, cool. Let me not put up a landing page or an ad. Let me not rent this place, which costs money. Let me see if I can find four people. That would want to do a co working spot with me. So I already, and then what you can do really quickly is you can look on Google Trends. You can look on chat GPT.
How much are people spending on office spaces? How much, how much is a co working space? You can get in a sense of what would it take to get a million dollars of profit from this business? Like, is this one that a lot of people are problematically having? Yeah. And then how much are people spending on corgi?
Okay, that’s kind of interesting. What would be my business model? Put together some quick math. Like if I charge a thousand and it’s going to be, uh, the rent, well, you know, maybe it’s, I don’t know, 500. So I get 500 bucks per person. So I’ll make 2000 per house. How many houses is that to make a million?
Jared: I can’t do that math.
500 houses. There you go.
Noah: That’s only 500. That’s pretty doable. Okay. Now, again, I’ve run really fast and I’ve done all these like side projects and hobbies where like Free Calls 2 is a great example, which I think is very comparable to a lot of potential audience members. Not you guys, because you have great audience, but other shows.
And I just worked on the show site. The site for so long. And it was like the best I ever got was 50 bucks a month. So all I’m saying here is if you understand what it would take to make a million dollars cash, not, Oh, if I had 1 percent of the market, it’s like, yeah, everyone can be spreadsheet millionaire, but really to see what it would take to be an actual millionaire, 500 houses, pretty doable.
Now I would see, can I get four people? I would get my neighbor and then I’d be like, well, how would I get other people? Well, if you can’t do it now, it’s not going to get magically easier. So I would ask my neighbors, I would ask for referrals, I would post on Nextdoor, I would post in maybe some WhatsApp groups, I’d post in some Facebook groups, and I would see.
I could find literally in a weekend, this is something I could easily rent out. Like, huh, that was hard. Okay, good. I didn’t spend a bunch of money and time to find that out. And that’s, that’s literally the million dollar we can process. There’s obviously more to it, but you ask for like experiments, like you could literally experiment that idea, your idea, they’re out there, it’s not always gonna work, but you have to at least be mindful of it and get started on it.
We’ve been
Jared: talking for over 30 minutes, and I can pick up a thread, which is, a common thread, which is, you’re asking a lot. You’re talking to people a lot. You’re you talk about the coffee shop challenge in your book about going and asking for a discount at the coffee shop. Um, let’s say maybe a lot of our audience, uh, it likes the idea of, you know, building a website because it’s passive and they don’t have to maybe put themselves out there.
They can, um, uh, you know, write content, create content, publish content, but not have to maybe go into some of these things, even if it’s not someone that might fit the stereotype of our audience in general. It’s, it’s a lot of things you’re asking about, like take a little bit of inside work to do picking up the phone and calling someone, asking them to rent a house with you, uh, going out and messaging people, these sorts of things.
And, um, what have you found helps for, especially for people who don’t have that nature inside of them asking, isn’t part of their, their personality, their nature.
Noah: You got me picturing all these like. Info course marshals, get rich
Jared: on your laptop at the beach. Hey, we, we love to sit. I mean, I love to get on a call.
That’s why I’m hosting the podcast. But I, I’ll tell you, man, we love to kind of sit in a dark room and, and make, make stuff happen without, without necessarily having to talk to people. And so, um, there, there’s, there’s good in both, right? But like, how do people validate these ideas by, by asking and getting themselves out there, you know?
Noah: If you can ask in the beginning, you don’t have to ask as much at the end. And what I mean by that is that if you can ask and find something people actually want, then you can sit on your ass and sell it all day. You don’t have to do much. You can run the ads, you can run the landing pages, you can do affiliate, you can do social, you can do press, you can do speaking tours, whatever.
The idea, and it does work, you can go put a landing page, you can write ads, you can spend a week, you can spend money, and yes, it might work. Or you can shortcut and cheat. This is the only time where people are, like, cheating is winning. You can find out really quickly whether it’s stuff people want. You want to do a vacuum business?
Great. See if you can get people interested in vacuums that are within your network. Yeah. Post online. Post on your LinkedIn. I’m gonna start a vacuum thing. Great. No one replies. Okay. But I think the fantasy of, I create a website. I put all this WordPress widgets on it. I have affiliate ads on it. In a month, I’m magically making 20.
Like, it can work. Yes. But there’s a better way. Now, in terms of asking, and again, I’ve done it both ways and you can do it. It’s fine. It just takes longer and it’s not as guaranteed. And I like finding out very quickly, like put your site up on a weekend, put your site up in a day and then run traffic to it.
You know, run ads, run social, run whatever you think you need to do for that. Now, in terms of asking, when you actually zoom out and you look at the skill set of most billionaires, like Larry Ellison, uh, the interviews I’ve interviewed on my show, John Paul DeGioia, some of them are technical. But a lot of them are very good at sales.
When you think about what is a sale, a sale is an ask. And you think what an ask is, it’s what business is. It’s an exchange for something. And this is the big, the most important part. Asking is a skill that you can get better at. Mmm. And it doesn’t, and when people think of ask, they always think it’s like, I’m, I saw people even commenting about today, I’m taking from this other person.
That’s probably why you’re not getting what you want because you’re getting what you get. Only way to get what you want is to ask for it. Hoping for it won’t make it come true. But if you ask, you’re more likely to get. And if you realize that the upside of an ask is a girlfriend or wife or a customer or a business or living wherever the hell you want.
And the, the downside of an ask is maybe a moment of discomfort. Seems like a pretty good investment, pretty good investment trade off. And. Yeah, I can see myself in my twenties saying like, okay, this asking is uncomfortable or I’m introverted or I want to be behind the camera or I want to be great. Well then how do you ask in that type of way?
Do it a little more passively post on somewhere. Hey, I’m thinking about helping people with their finances. Is there anyone here I could talk to today on the phone? You don’t even have to be on public, but like maybe do try to figure out how do you do it behind the scenes. I don’t think you have to be an extroverted talker and show man or show person, woman, uh, to have success.
But I do think if you can practice asking in small ways, because eventually you’re going to ask someone for something. And if you can get better at it and fight through that discomfort. The upside of what you can ask for is really unlimited.
Jared: I love it. Um, I agree. I went through some like sales training early on in my, in my, in my career at my day job, and I wasn’t really in sales.
Uh, I didn’t see myself as a salesperson, but the training was so good because it really, Helped me understand how to ask and just went through and broke some of that, uh, fear of, of getting rejected. And some of the things I think I was dealing with, and I still have the same feelings, but I think you learn some mechanisms just by doing it and you kind of learn it’s not as painful and it’s, it’s not as hard.
And it doesn’t change internally that I’m still a person that needs approval just the same as I did 20 years ago. But there’s something about the mechanism of doing it that does help you get through that, that, that mind block
Noah: sometimes. Yeah, let’s, let’s even break it down into a niche business. So let’s say you’re excited about air purifiers.
So I’m starting to get, you know, we have allergies out in Austin. Stuff’s crazy out here. I want to air purifier. Now, I would say a traditional, like maybe early 2000s approach is you get a domain. That’s 12 now. You get a site, maybe you have to have hosting or maybe use one of these new no code sites, Bubble or Webflow.
You have to build the site. You have to write some, you know, chat, GPT article. Then you have to find a product. Then you have to get the affiliate program. Then you have to post it there. And then you have to see like, okay, now in 48 hours. Or in 48 days or 48 months, like, can I get four nickels? Now let’s say you’re an introverted person.
Could you talk to somebody in your network and see if that’s actually something they want to buy, like an air purifier, and then maybe, maybe you just get the affiliate link and you directly help that one person. No, no, no, no. Don’t make it so easy, but maybe there’s another way. Right. And I think just like, it sounds like you did Jared, your friend might not need an air purifier, but maybe they’re going on a vacation or maybe they want a vacuum or maybe they want a fridge or maybe they want new soda.
And instead of building it and praying, you’re, you’re finding what people want and delivering. And I’ve, I just really appreciate that approach. And also, I enjoy it. You see the satisfaction. But again, you don’t have to be in front of the camera. You don’t have to have a big social media following to have a big, to have a big wealth.
Most of the richest people I know don’t have social media. Right. The actual richest people. Really? And I know people hear that, but I don’t know if they think it. I think they see these dumbasses on, on YouTube like, You’re so, I’m worth a hundred million bullshit. The people worth a hundred million don’t talk about it.
People worth a hundred million can show you how they made it. But they don’t, because they don’t need to. They’re working, they’re enjoying their life. They’re, these people are selling you courses. These people are selling you stuff. Because that’s how they’re going to get rich. And the reality is that you can do these things in much simpler, more quicker ways.
And guess what? If it doesn’t work, great. That’s the whole point. Now let’s, let’s deal with the rejection and realize it’s not so bad. That’s why I encourage people to ask for discounts, get rejected on the coffee challenge, and then move on. And find something people are excited for you to serve for them.
Jared: I want to make sure I get to this before we come up on time. And I want to ask about it. You mentioned it earlier. Can you explain it more? Because I, I guarantee a lot of people listening are going to be guilty of moving on from a project that was successful because it was boring or they got excited about the next thing, or they thought they could double it, or they thought they could pivot, expand it.
Right. So you have this law of a hundred, um, do it a hundred times before you even think about stopping. Like expand on that. Where’d that come from? Like, what’s the genesis of that? It
Noah: came from because I keep giving up too soon. And because every entrepreneur, every single entrepreneur is like, that other thing that I’m not doing is going to be the easier thing.
You know what I’m talking about.
Jared: Grass is always greener. Exactly. Dude, by the
Noah: way, I have to pay my lawn guy every week, and then the grass died because I messed it up. Like, just get artificial turf. I have artificial turf in my backyard. Never have to water it.
Jared: This is probably nice. And
Noah: so the, as I’ve aged, let me, let me take a step back.
Everyone knows compounded interest in investing. You’ve heard of that? There’s compounded business. No one talks about that. And it’s the momentum that builds by businesses that are working. So it takes some time to get a ball rolling. It takes time to get a trainer for track. It takes time to find a business that people actually want.
But if you can get that slow momentum growing, it is very hard to stop it in that compounded returns keep increasing year after year. And so what I encourage people to do is the best business is the one that works. And I promise you, if you just stick with it, or find someone else to stick with it, or find software to stick with it, maybe from AppSumo.
com. And you do that year, after year, after year, after year, those returns produce themselves. And so, myself, with AppSumo, we’ve gotten distracted. I’m like, well, AppSumo, it’s all over the place, you know, we all make excuses why it’s not working. I’m gonna start Sumo. com. I’m gonna start HallDrop. I’m gonna start MeatFam.
I’m gonna start SumoMarket. And Now, when we start something new, the question is always, who’s the customer, which is an AppSumo solopreneur, that’s who we think our customers are, and how is it helping them more? And if it doesn’t directly help that who, or software creator, specifically our hero is a software creator for solopreneurs, if it doesn’t help, then we don’t do it.
Right, so if you think, we have these new, we call them AppSumo Originals, which are low cost entry points. Low cost alternatives of popular products. We have tiny cow, which is a calendar alternative. It’s exploding and why it’s our number one lead gen for AppSumo. It’s the number one degree lead. Generally sounds so weird.
Cause it’s like their leads. It’s number one to bring new customers to AppSumo ecosystem. And everyone can copy that, figure out what is a great entry point that you can repeatedly keep doing over and over to bring people in. And for us, it’s these low cost alternatives. Shout out David and the team who run it.
And as I’ve matured, I would say that just whatever is working in your business, just stick with that because the new thing is not going to be as easy and it’s not going to be significantly better. And I can even tell you like with AppSumo, if we never got distracted with these things, with all these other things that we try to build and we like got, you know, Oh yeah, it’s going to be great.
We just did AppSumo all along. One, it’d be easier. And two, my goal is not to build a billion dollar business. I don’t care about that. I like promoting products. But yes, we would have probably been a lot further along. It would have been easier to do along the way. And I see so many people just get distracted, do something new.
And I say, what was working that just go back to the thing that works. And, uh, it’s been, I feel grateful that we’ve had a lot of people that are good with the consistency. And, and I would say, you know, people talk about boring businesses. You know what’s really boring? Success. Why? Because it’s working. And it’s exciting to do new things.
It’s exciting to try. Like, how many times are people watching the same Netflix show? Zero. But if it’s a really good show, why not watch it again? Because I already know what’s going to happen. Huh. But if you can apply that same mentality and just feel like, Hey, how do I make it a little more interesting?
Maybe I put in a different language. I’m trying to learn Spanish, so I watch Spanish shows over and over again. Mm hmm. And you think about a professional athlete. I make this comparison because I think this really hits home for people. The guy I bought this house from is a professional NFL kicker.
Imagine his work week, Jared. What do you think a professional NFL kicker does all week?
Jared: Practices, field goals of varying lengths. And that’s got to be it.
Noah: That’s, imagine he’s like, oh, I got to go watch tape. And if you can just think about that for yourself, which is number one, most importantly, spend as little time finding something that works.
And then spend the most time just help sticking with the thing that works, you will get paid. These NFL kickers make 3 million a year and he seems really happy doing it. Now in entrepreneurship, it’s the same exact stuff. So don’t spend no time in the beginning and something that’s not working and then stick with it for a long time.
Find the thing that works, which again, I’ve shared with you. Some of them shorty SMS never worked. Email badge never works. Sleek bio never worked. Like all these things I’ve done still didn’t work great. We didn’t spend a lot of money and time. But then we find the thing, TidyCal that works, that brings in new customers.
Now it’s been two years that we’ve dedicated to that product. So for everyone out there, find the thing that works for you and stick with it. I like the law of 100. Do 100 days of it. If you’re doing content, do 100 posts. If you’re doing a business, do 100 sales. For AppSumo, you could say do 100 products.
Because I know when I did my podcast, I quit at 50. And with my YouTube channel, I said, no, I’m not. I’m gonna do at least 100. And around the 100th video is when it finally took off.
Jared: Wow. So, um, a lot of what we’ve been talking about is obviously in your new book, the million dollar weekend, where can people find out about it?
Where can people get it? Um, uh, and learn more about
Noah: it. Yeah. You know, when they can go to million dollar weekend. com, what I would say, Jared, which is, I know I’ve been reflecting on this, the way I’m running this book is the way I run my businesses. And so if you’ve liked how you, what you’ve seen a million dollar weekend, You’re like, wow, that book is pretty good.
And like, I can see the books in a lot of places, or it seems like, like, yeah, that’s how you can run a business too. This is the exact same way I run AppSumo. Like, how do you make sure something people want? How do you practice asking for it? How do you then get more people to find out about it? And that’s the same thing I’m doing in this book.
And it’s, it’s been fun and I’m excited. I know it works. So I’m excited for people to get in their hands and for people to change their own lives.
Jared: It’s, it’s funny because when you and I first got connected and, uh, we were going back and forth about what to talk about, um, I was like, man, I just want to talk about AppSumo and like how he launched it and how he got it going.
And we kind of started talking about your new book. And then when I read the book, I was like, well, actually this really is about AppSumo just from a, a way that’s kind of packaged up in a really pretty bright neon green cover now, you know?
Noah: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, um, yeah. You know, I think if you would’ve asked me when I started this.
Where did you think AppSumo was going to go? I would say, I’d love to make 3, 000 a month and work remotely. And so, and then over time, it worked. And I was like, oh crap, this is cool. And then, if you would have said, hey, I’d be able to have a wife and kids, and live in Spain, and live in America, and have this kind of cool houses and stuff, like, I would have never believed it.
But believing, for all of us, that it can be possible, and then putting in the work right now, Planting these seeds, starting the farming, and just realizing that it can be true for all of us. And that, that, that’s what this book is about. And yes, it’s, it’s AppSumo, it’s my stories, it’s my failures. It’s about other people’s experiences with it, but it’s really about, you know, who, who each of us can become.
I know that’s very broad, right? But that’s the belief people need to have so that they can start with getting a dollar today or doing the coffee challenge today or posting something today. And holy shit. I could like, when did you finally quit your job?
Jared: Well, that’s a good question. I mean, I quit my job when I was 21.
And retiring from, uh, or graduating from college, I had a choice to take a full time job with the federal government or continue working on my very part time photography business that I had started during college, but. The photo business, I had gotten it to the point where I could literally eat ramen noodles and pay my bills off of it.
And so it was to that point where, like you talked about, it was earning me enough money to where I could go all in on it, and I did. And I ended up selling that company 11 years later.
Noah: Good for you, man. That, okay, so I gotta highlight that. Which is one, that to me is jumping off the cliff. With a parachute that was there.
Right, it was like there was something already there for you. A couple thousand dollars a month, there was a parachute. That was your freedom number. And it’s beautiful that you had optimism and there’s a book called learn optimism. I think it’s Martin Seligman and you don’t need to read the book, but it’s just really realizing that optimism can be learned.
It can be learned. And it’s great that you, as you got that going, you’re like, I had the same thing. I was at Berkeley and I remember graduating and I was like, everyone’s getting these horrible jobs that seem like, like that seems so risky and so crappy. And I was about to take a job at Wells Fargo. Oh my God.
I was going to build their SMB mid market website. Right. Like, and I just was thinking about a future in that and what that future would be like. Yeah. And that was a little bit of a bet that like, okay, it’s not, I can’t take this job. This is not going to be the future. I ended up at Intel because at least it was in tech and I live at home for free with my mom.
It’s funny because a
Jared: lot of what you’ve talked about, I just reflect back and there was a moment for me where I was looking out the window of my office because I had been working, you know, for the federal government for a little while in my senior year of college. And I had this moment where I was like, you know, I’m probably going to fail.
At this photo business, that’s okay because I can come back and get this job again. And then when I’m looking out that window, at least I won’t be wondering what if I had tried it. But if I sit here and don’t do it, I’m going to look out this window every day for the rest of my life and wonder what if, and at least then I can come back and not have to wonder about that.
Noah: Yeah. I met this guy, Jake, who read million dollar weekend and he has a, he’s got a day job, three kids. And that’s what he said to me. He said, I didn’t want to wonder what if, and again, I don’t think, you know, people are trying to scare people into the, it’s some big scary thing. It’s not. And I think when, you know, what’s funny, Jared, most people, a lot of times they meet me, they’re like, yeah, you’re not, you’re not much better than me, but you just got started and you stuck with it.
Now you have more experience and I have more reps, but yeah, no, there’s a lot of rich, ordinary people. And the only difference is they started and they stuck with it. And yes, there’s different strategies and there are marketing tactics and there are things over, over a period of time. But I think you’re another example where you guys started with this FBA thing.
You get started and you’re like, holy shit. Okay. This is not working, but at least we’re in it. And now we can figure it out, but it’s very hard to figure it out in the silent. It’s very hard to learn how to cook when you’re not in the kitchen. Yeah.
Jared: Well, Noah, this has been wonderful. That hour flew by.
Thank you for coming. I really appreciate it. And, uh, this has been a treat. I hope a lot of people listening were, um, well, I hope we get a lot of stories over the coming months about people that got started and started building something from this. So I really appreciate you coming on and kind of inspiring the audience.
Thank you so
Noah: much. Hell yeah. I look forward to the success stories of the audience. We’ll
Jared: share them with you. All right. Talk soon. Bye bye.