Facebook Fired Him And Then He Became a $300M CEO | Noah Kagan

All right, this next interview is with Noah Kagan. I've known Noah for a very long time. He has a business called AppSumo, does $80 million a year. His YouTube channel just hit a million subscribers. He's got a new book coming out called Million Dollar Weekend, which is basically how you can start your million-dollar business in 48 hours.

Making money is easy.

How do people make a million bucks in a weekend? In 48 hours?

Yeah.

We have a wide-ranging conversation around dating.

I had dating coaches, I had relationship coaches. I was actually, all right, I'm gonna be focused on my dating. Like, it was pretty quick to actually find someone.

It's a wide-ranging conversation around marketing as well, how a lot of creators are falling short on this one channel and how this one channel can make you a lot of money as well. So there's a lot. I recommend you listen to the whole thing, jump around, and without further ado, here's the interview. Tell us about how you go to therapy and you talk about Alex Hormozi.

This is how it's starting. Wow. For everyone out there, when we we look at other people and we get jealous or we get envious, and you know with Hermosi and some other people, you seem like oh man, I'm doing just as good, but they're doing better than me. And so I went to my therapist, Dr. Larry Resnick. Shout out, Dr. Resnick. He's like now what? What is it that you don't have? What is it that you want that you don't have? And It was an interesting moment to reflect back on my own life and my own, you know, YouTube videos and my relationship and my work. It was nothing. And that's an interesting kind of moment for all of us out there where when we look at others, it's good. It's good to be jealous. Jealous is good 'cause it's a direction of, do I actually want that or not? Do I actually like that or not? But then the moment is coming back into yourself and it's like, do you have the things you want? Are you doing the things you want? 'Cause the reality with it is that there's no amount of views that'll make you ever feel good. Like, if I finally get a million, you will feel good getting a million. That is true. A million dollars. But there's never amount of views or never amount of external things that finally make you feel good. And so it's coming back to how do I feel good and grounded internally? And so that was a, that was a $200, thank you, Dr. Resnick lesson, just coming back to myself.

So you— I think the key takeaway here is you realize that you have enough.

Yeah.

And you're just enjoying the journey now.

Yeah. And I think it's fine for us to be jealous. It's cool to, to see other people living a life and say, do I like that haircut? Do I want to be doing those things? What is it about what they're doing I can learn for myself? And Sometimes also going into it, like calling the person or reaching out to the person or being nice to the person and trying to understand maybe some of your envies or jealousies.

You had a— and we can move on from this topic right after, but there was a tweet where I was like, you tweeted about him as well. So like, I thought he was gonna respond. I thought it was gonna become this flame war, but it didn't materialize.

Yeah, I'll just— I will say it. I like learning from people I can see their businesses. I like learning from Andrew Chen. He's one of my best friends. He works at A16Z. My marketing mentor, and this is a cheat code for everyone out there, is you can get these elite mentors, 10,000-hour people for $1,000 an hour or less. It's Moody Glasgow. He is the CMO of Zapier, CMO of Glassdoor. He's the VP of marketing at EA. Like we have Rajatish Mukherjee, who is the GM of Indeed. Like these guys work at real businesses. You can see that's who I want to learn from. And so When I see people out there that are like, yeah, I have $200 million business, I'm like, okay, show me the business. Oh, you can't show anything? You can't tell me anything? You just talk about something? I don't believe you.

Mm-hmm.

And I've seen a business that Hormozi bought, who sold or bought, it's called Allen. It's like an SMS tool and it's pretty much dead. So I am curious, these like $100 million businesses that no one else can see or experience. And so I think for everyone out there, it doesn't mean the advice is not good. But it means like just be mindful and thoughtful about who you want to actually learn from. And I like learning from, you know, women. I just literally was on a Slack message with Jenny Bloom. She's our CFO advisor. She's the former CFO of Mailchimp. I'm learning from people that like our company, this is how everybody in our company gets an elite advisor that we pay for. And those are the people that I admire that I want to learn from. And so it's only just for a lot of other people say, oh, he's so interesting. It's like, okay, what's the business?

I think there's a couple takeaways there. One is like question everything. 2 is like you're coming from a place of curiosity, but also like you're also creating content at the same time, right? It's like it might— that tweet might have— might or might not have taken off, um, in a different context. Who knows?

Yeah, I was just expecting him to be able to prove it. Like you're talking about worth $100 million, which is a lot of money. And if you said, hey, I'm actually only worth $10 million, which I think is what he's worth, no one's gonna listen to you. And so when you're claiming something that that extreme, you need to prove it.

Yeah.

Like you can go, I can show you my Stripe right now and show you AppSumo revenue. I can show you our PayPal account. I can show you this stuff. You can go to our business. And so when I'm talking about what it's like to run a $100 million business or work directly for Zuckerberg, I can show you. And it's not, it's not that anymore I need to prove against him. It's just like, I think people need to just double-check who they're learning from and think about it.

Right. Nice socks, by the way. Um, so going to coaches, by the way, so actually, Neil and I, we, um, so he, he tweeted something last week and sorry, posted, uh, he posted something last week and he's like, you know, I think hiring coaches is one of the worst use of things, worst use of money ever. Right. And Mike Maples responds, all these people respond. And I'm just like, dude, he's like, he's like, has your coach helped you make money? Blah, blah, blah. And so we started going at it a little bit and then I actually copied you. We have some coaches for people on our team and we're paying $500, maybe $750 an hour or whatever. And it's like, Such a level up. And then Neil's like, no, with no coaches, I'd rather just hire people that have been there, done that. But I think that it's like, there's like, you can do both, right?

Hiring the people that have been there, done that are generally overpriced and not available, right? And a lot of them actually haven't done it. They're just at the company. And so, what I found is the appsumo.com way is we hire people that are hungry and a little bit more younger or a little bit more available to get. And they're just excited to be a part of AppSumo. And then we pair them with one of these elite advisors. And, you know, there's a lot of different ways of eating at a restaurant. There's a lot of restaurants out there. My restaurant with AppSumo and how we like to operate is we can now pay $10,000 an hour people $1,000 an hour, $500 an hour, and we get cheat codes. So, we have elite advisors in all these different areas. Maybe it works for Neil without it, but like, I have a CEO coach from reboot.io.

Yeah. Wait, who do you have? Oh, yeah, Dan. I have Jerry.

Oh yeah, Jerry. Yeah. I mean, it's been a game changer because if you try to hire these people full time, I think Moody, who's a CMO advisor, I can't tell you his hourly, but I think it'd be about $1 million a year just to hire him. Wow. Like minimum, minimum. I mean, if you— this is a Silicon Valley elite person and so you can actually be able to get advice from him. He's been coaching me about how we're hiring people. Like he even had a great question last week. Someone was talking about different marketing strategies we can do and he asked the person, he said, hey, are you going to bet your career on this? I was like, what do you mean? He's like, yeah, will you bet your career on this idea? The person's like, no. He's like, well, we're not doing it. I was like, oh, that's a good question.

Wow.

And that was just one little question that he kind of said in passing. Yeah. And it's interesting, you know, maybe it works for Neil, but if you look at literally every business out there, if you look at every professional athlete out there, they all have coaches. It's really hard to see yourself without a mirror. Like even Zuckerberg, when I worked at Facebook, he was 24 years old. And we're all super cocky 24-year-olds. And I remember sitting, you know, I reported to him. He sat on his desk and he had this old lady next to him. I was like, Zuck, you're the man. You know everything. What do you need her for? He's like, oh, I need a coach. And I was his business coach. And it's kind of insane that you think about him too. He had all these, he had Peter Thiel. He had all the guys from, not Benchmark, I think Benchmark or one of these different, he had a lot of elite advisors around him.

Do you remember the trillion-dollar coach, what his name is?

Bill Campbell.

Bill Campbell, yeah. So he coached what, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Right.

So, yeah, Neil is the one outlier. You know, look, here's the thing. Even coming back to Hormozi or Neil, like, it can work for other people. Like, if you learn from them and it works for you, great. Do that.

Dude, that's what I learned as we get older. It's like, dude, we have our own way and it's like, whatever works for you. Yeah. Yeah. I do want to go a little more into the coaching piece because I think it's super smart. Like, you don't need $500 or $1,000 per hour. Like, you can start smaller too. But I guess for you, like, what's the framework right now? How many coaches do you have? How many coaches do you have for your team? How often are you meeting them?

Yeah. So I have a CEO coach, which is Dan Putt from reboot.io, and you can also listen to their podcast for free. And so I'll meet with Dan once a month, and then I also meet with him and my COO, 'cause we were having some relationship issues about how we were working together. And so having a coach there provided a space where like we've blown up at each other, and Dan's like, all right, let's bring it back. Let's try to get aligned. For instance, last week with them, It was interesting to say, all right, Alona, she's amazing. She's the CEO of AppSumo. It was like if I went away for a year, how would 2024 end? And we were both looking at each other like we have no idea. We have a goal and we have some objectives, but are we very clear that if I left for a year, you know what to do in the business? And so it was like, no, we don't. Okay, great, great opportunity that Dan created the framework for us to be able to talk about that. I have Ayman Al Abdullah. He's the former CEO. You know, he's a friend of yours. He's the former CEO of AppSumo. I meet with Eamon 3 times a month, and so Eamon provides a lot more structure, a lot more consistency, a lot more you know thoughtfulness. It's just in a very patient way. He's not a hypergrowth like we need a 10x tomorrow. It's like let's let's 10x over the next 10 years.

He he aims for the singles, not the home runs.

And dude, home these singles win games. Yeah. Like and that's so with Eamon a lot of times I'm coming. For instance, with AppSumo.com, we created AppSumo Originals, which is our, you know, our Amazon Basics. It's, it's low-priced alternative options for entrepreneurial tools. So Calendly's $20 a month, our TidyCal.com, $29 for life. Or there's Mailchimp, which is whatever a month. We have SendFox.com, which is $49 for life. And so went to Eamon and I said, all right, I'm gonna take the Originals team and we're gonna start a new project. We're gonna create a DocuSign alternative and we're gonna create a Loom alternative. He's like, all right, well hold on a second now. How's TidyCal doing? I'm like, dude, TidyCal's like, it's doing insane. It's going great. That's that's why we should like move on to a new thing because it's already doing great. We should move on to things like okay. So this is doing great and you want to move on to something else? I was like, oh, I see what you're doing there. And so that's coaching. That's you know sometimes you you do need another person to provide accountability or provide support or provide a different point of view that you're not seeing. So that was with Amon and we're meeting him three times a week. And then every single person on the leadership team has their own elite advisor. And so, the idea there is that it was nice to hire people that want to be a part of AppSumo. So, Sean, who's our head of revenue, he started as our junior salesperson, the most junior in the entire company 6 years ago. And now he runs an $80 million business. And so, for him to be able to do that, we invest. So, right now, he has— do you know Outdoorsy?

Yeah, we used to work with them.

Oh, wow. So, yeah, Colin Gardner, the CRO of Outdoorsy, is his advisor.

Nice.

We also hired the CRO of MindbodyOnline.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

So, we've hired these people for Sean. For our people team, so Anna runs our people team, we've hired the Chief People Officer of Duolingo.

Okay.

So, Christine, she's amazing.

And what's like the rough range for these hourly?

Almost every person is between $250 and $1,000 an hour.

Okay.

And so, taking a step back, people are like, well, I don't have lots of money. Okay. Can you get them for $100 an hour?

Yeah.

And the reality is, yeah, most people, even if you say, hey, this is the easy way to approach it, hey, can I pay you an hourly just to talk to you? And just even offering, more people will actually say yes to you. Like, I get messages literally, I don't know, 10, 15, 20, 100 a day sometimes. Hey, can I talk to you? And very few will do something different if it's money or if it's some effort. And so, and a lot of these people, I don't have some crazy network that I just like, hey, I know you because I worked at Mailchimp.

No.

I go on LinkedIn, I look for referrals and I email for referrals. It's almost never cold. And it's just working backwards from who did it, worked at a company that did the thing that I can learn from. So Moody, we saw that Zapier, which is a SaaS product, super big. We saw that he was their CMO. So we hit him up cold and we said, hey, can we pay you a lot of money to come and talk with us? And he said no. And then we persisted and they said yes. And now it's been a year of working with them and I would say our marketing is 180. Because of working with him.

Yeah. It seems like a lot of these people that are high performers, there aren't many people, like, it's like less than a percent that reach out to ask for coaching, probably a fraction of a percent.

Yeah.

And it's such a high leverage thing to do. And I think to your point, like people that reach out to you, what stands out more, them offering you money or them like making effort?

Either one. It doesn't really separate. It could be even a compliment. I think the easiest way to connect with anyone, one of my marketing strategies that I've used at mint.com, I use it at AppSumo.com. I'm using Million Dollar Weekend is connecting with prefluencers. So, so a prefluencer is someone who's going to be popular and they're available. They're all out there and no one's really talking to them because people are thinking, I need to talk to the people who have the attention, get the ones who have attention and great audiences. And you can kind of bet that there's a future for them. It's like Ali Abdaal we were talking about before. I connected with him 3 years ago when he was a pretty small channel, maybe a few hundred thousand, tens of thousands. And that, that created a relationship and friendship that we can work to today. So I would try to find people that are up and coming, 'cause it's a lot easier to get ahold of them.

You know, it, I think there's, um, you have to have a knack for seeing it and, and like, I guess how do you identify the pre-fluencers?

Yeah. So it depends on the specific context and it depends whatever your business is. So for, let's take Mint.com. I was looking at who, there wasn't as much, there wasn't Twitter. This is 2007. Yeah. Uh, there wasn't really much of a Twitter audience, but I was looking at whose blogs are in personal finance that I'm reading that are not CNBC, that are not Jim Cramer. And so, it was like Jim from Bargaineering.org. It was like this guy named Viet from Stop Buying Crap.

Yeah.

You know him?

No.

Okay. So, just different people. And what I'm looking for specifically is engagement. So now, with Million Dollar Weekend, I'm looking for people, basically 3 categories: entrepreneurship, real estate, personal finance. So, people that their audiences want to make money or get their own freedom.

Yeah.

And so I'm looking for people that generally have 10,000 subscribers. It could be plus or minus around that, but they have high engagement. So when you go to their videos, when you go to their tweets, when you go on Instagram, when you go on TikTok, when I go on Goodreads, when I go on LinkedIn, this is what our team has done. I'm looking for people that maybe aren't the most popular, but they have— there's a lot of comments, there's a lot of engagement with their content. So as I connect with them and I can help them out or they can help me out, there's a good relationship that happens in the future.

Right. And are you doing that? It sounds like you have a team reaching out to these people. Like, how does that setup look?

Yeah, so for let's take the million-dollar week in marketing, which has been it's been really fun. Yeah, I I like reaching out myself if I just like someone. I don't need a team or anyone to go do it. If I see someone doing something interesting, like Danny Miranda, this is a guy that's not popular in podcasts.

So you can that that's a good example of a guy that's rising.

I met Danny. I was his I think first podcast.

Really?

Yeah, one of his first podcasts, and it was just he had a lot of heart. He put an effort in his message, and I was like, okay, come over to my house. And let's do a show.

Was he Austin-based?

I think he flew to Austin.

Okay. Wow.

For that. And so, yeah, it's just identifying people that I find interesting. There's not necessarily even a secret to that. It's just, is there anybody that's doing something you're like, okay, that's interesting? For example, another guy on our team, this guy's named Jay Yang. Jay Yang is 17, lives at home with his parents. I thought he was in college. I was like, are you in the dorms? He's like, no, I'm in my room.

That's funny.

He's 17, but the guy is just crushing on Twitter. Like, he's just putting out really great content.

I just followed him. Yeah, he was 17. That's crazy.

He runs our social media now.

Wow.

And so, we're paying— yeah. And so, he runs my Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And that was because we saw him early. Jeremy on our YouTube team saw him and just connecting with interesting people. Like, just say thank you. Just say good content. It doesn't have to be a big like, well, I've got to message them because I'm doing some tricky transaction. No, just be like, I like what you're doing. And then that potentially could be something in the future.

Got it. So, I want to talk about the business to set us up for the book. So, we'll go business, then book. So, tell us for those that don't know about your business, because a lot of A lot of people now, you got a million subs on YouTube, they probably see you as a YouTuber. But to me, you're a business creator and you're more business than creator in my mind. And I think there's gonna be a lot more business creators coming. We can talk about that later. But tell us about the business and how it's doing today.

Yeah, I mean, I didn't come from I'm a creator trying to sell a book or trying to sell a course or I have a business and that pays for the content creation, which I just like doing. And I've done it for 23 years. I like Being public, I like putting myself out there. I like attention, like helping. And you know, you know the backstory is number thirty at Facebook, number four in helpstartmint.com. And then I've started and failed so many different businesses over the past fifteen years. A lot of different million-dollar businesses, a lot of different failures. And about thirteen years ago, I started appsumo.com for fifty bucks in a weekend, which the idea was: Can I promote software deals online? Very similar to Groupon. And it's evolved since then. And so, for $50 in a weekend, I was able to validate a business that today will do around $80 million this year. Got it.

What are— here's a funny story with AppSumo. Most people don't know this, but I shared this with you before. I was working at a company and we ran an AppSumo deal and it was the best deal ever. And I got in so much trouble.

Did you get fired for that?

No, no, no. I like— the CTO was like, you just ruined everyone's week. And then, 'cause I didn't tell anybody, right? But then Chamath reaches out to me. He's like, hey man, everyone makes mistakes, you know? It just matters that you keep moving forward or something like that.

Wow, that was you. I forgot about that.

Yeah, but it was good. It was good for you guys. It was good for us too.

It was the design website, the design coaching.

Yeah, we taught people how to do web design coding, and I think we did a couple hundred thousand dollars in sales.

That was a huge deal. That was so cool. I mean, for taking a backstory, AppSumo, the original, I think for people out there that want their own business, and I think everyone should be a millionaire. Everyone should be rich. It's awesome. With AppSumo, what I noticed is that all these different things I worked on, like I did marketing at Mint, I did product management at Facebook, I did payments for Facebook games, like I worked for, and Mark Pincus and FarmVille, all this stuff. And I just noticed that I enjoyed marketing, more people need customers, and there's gonna be more software in the world. And this was years ago. And so, I was like, how do I test that out? And so, that's what AppSumo is. It's like we go find awesome software deals, get offered awesome software products, get a deal, and then promote it. And our tools are specifically for solopreneurs. So, small businesses, 1 through 4, you can go to appsumo.com and get $30, $40, $50, like tools for life instead of paying monthly subscriptions.

Got it. Do you see— A path, or do you, do you see it being capped at the 80 or do you see like a path to like double, triple? I'm just curious as, as to how big it can become if you even want it to become big or—

So literally what's crazy is across the street, we're here in Wishful Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. Across the street, 14 years ago, I met with my mentor who's not my mentor anymore. And I was like, hey, I'm gonna start this deal site for software. And he is like, that's not gonna work. And there's only a few software products, so I don't even know why you're gonna do it. And that was literally across the street here.

Did you go to UCLA?

No, I went to Cal.

Okay.

UC Berkeley.

Got it.

And so, it was a good reminder for everyone out there that there's— it's not that he was trying to hate on me. He was just like, I don't know if this is gonna work. So, go do it. Start right now and see if people will buy these things. And it's been great. In Million Dollar Weekend, and we'll get to it, it's like, are you picking the right market?

Got it.

At the end of the day. And the market got so much bigger that We were just around and it's done well. And with AppSumo, I think one of the caveats is my goal is not to grow a bigger company. I know that sounds counterintuitive. My goal is I don't care to be a billionaire. I'm already rich enough. This is great. I'm already living an awesome life.

Yeah.

I don't care to just have more. And I think that's a Silicon Valley problem. I want more subs. I want more money. I want more. It's like, I've got enough and it's great already. And so, with AppSumo, right now, our main goal moving into the future is how do we promote more software tools? So there's a lot of software creators around the world. There's— I was talking with Amit Gupta, who created a writing tool. There's just all these amazing tools out there, but we can only promote someone who will do a lifetime deal on AppSumo.

Hmm.

So that's a limited amount of— that's literally of all the software tools for small business owners, which is the only thing we care about. That's like maybe 5% of the market. So how do we help tools that are getting started? And then how do we help tools that are getting going? Like you're already, you're already developed as a software tool for small businesses. So right now, in the next 3 years, we have a 3-year plan, how do we help the top of the funnel get started? Like, hey, get discovered. And then once you're already going, how do we help you distribute even more yourself? So do I think it's gonna grow a lot more? Yeah. But our growth, this is counterintuitive for people out there, we're trying to grow slower. So our growth goal next year is 7%. And most people are like, Silicon Valley's like, you're not 2x. It's like Andrew Chen, I love my buddy, I love him, but he's like, if you're not 2xing, you're failing, right? He's my type of guy.

Very Asian thing to say.

And I love Andrew, and he's one of the reasons we are where we are.

Yeah.

You know, he's coached me and been a great advisor and one of my best friends for many years. But what I've noticed in our success is longevity and sustainability is a superpower.

I think that's becoming more of a theme too, because Ali Abdaal, who we just talked about, he's got this whole— he's got his book coming out, Feel Good Productivity, right? It's like, does the business feel good too? It's like, it doesn't have to be all this. I mean, people in Silicon Valley, their incentives are to keep pushing double. Was it triple, triple, double, double, double or something? But you don't have venture backing, so you don't need to push like that, you know?

Yeah, I love my work. My, my, I literally, I gotta come to Los Angeles, I get to talk with you about business, I get to teach people how to do their own businesses, I promote software deals. Like, this is a dream and it's available to everyone.

Yep.

And I think there's some mentality like, oh, you gotta get more money, you gotta work more. It's like, no, you don't have to.

What's your definition of rich now?

Do you want to know when I felt rich?

Yeah.

$3 million cash in the bank. I felt rich. That felt like everything go to shit. I'm still pretty good. I can live in India for cheap for the rest of my life. I can live in any other country and even in America and be okay. But I felt very unstable and not rich until that point. And I think there's this thing that's not talked about because most people, I'd say 99% of people are trying to create the money. And the reality though is that even if you don't have a lot, and I think everyone should be a millionaire and it's available, how to enjoy money. I think that's being rich is like, how do you actually become a time millionaire? Or if you're making money, how do you actually enjoy it? And I don't think that's talked about because most people are still in the creation stage.

But I want to come back to that in a little bit. And so going back to, okay, you're running this $80 million a year business, right? You're like, you are the CEO, you're operating, you're in the trenches, right? And you're also, you have this YouTube YouTube channel where you have a million subs. How are you doing that right now?

And writing.

And you have a book coming and you're on this tour.

And writing a published book with a major, major publishing house. How do we do it? Mm-hmm.

How are you balancing all— because that's, that's like 3 full-time jobs right now.

It is. I mean, most people like James Clear, Tim Ferriss, they just focused on the book. And I remember when I talked to Tim about the book, he's like, it's hard. And it is really hard writing a book. And also, do you have YouTubers that are just focused on YouTube? And then you have software creators that are just focused on that.

I just—

there's no rules how we have to live life. Just to take a step back, like, I love that I get to make YouTube content, I get to write a book, I get to run a software company.

Yeah.

And I remember I talked with Charlie Hoehn and Charlie said, why don't you just do it the Noah Kagan way or the Eric Siu way or your way? Whatever way you think is best, you can live it that way. But taking a step back, how do I do it? Number one is scorecards. Everyone has a scorecard. And so, a scorecard is basically how do you have clarity and expectation on the outcomes of success for the people you work with? That's like the number one way I run the business. So, let's take appsumo.com, for instance. So, our goal this year, $80 million is gross revenue. Net revenue is $45 million. That was our target.

Yeah.

If you ask any single person in the company, they know our single goal. And that's what I learned from Zuckerberg, which is have one very singular goal to focus on. So, $45 million net revenue. And now, every single one of the team leads, Every single person in the executive leadership team has their own 3-thing scorecard, and we've agreed on what the scorecard is. They choose it, they know what our goals are, they know the priority, and they choose it like, oh, here's the 3. I'm like, okay, you do your scorecard. And ideally they do it. If they need help, my, I'm there to be their advisor. I'm there, there to be supporting them.

So these are like your OKRs. Your top OKR is like, you know, the, the $45 million in profit, right? And then everyone else has to live up to that.

Everyone has their own 3 things in their scorecard that aligns to it. So there's very clear expectations. So that's part one. Part two, I would say, is having kind of CEOs of the business. So at AppSumo.com, there's Ilona, who's the COO, and she runs the business day to day. So my job is to run the month to month. She runs day to day. So that's me stepping back and be like, you're running day to day. Is there a hire or fire? Is there an organizational shift? Is there a prioritization? And so she's making that decision. Same thing with the book. And this is available for everyone. I didn't— I'm I didn't go write a book because I'm a great writer. I'm a great tweeter or a great blogger. And so, I went out and found who can I have as the CEO of the book. Like, if you think about Amazon.com and their success, this is something that's fascinating. They have the most CEOs than any other business.

Yeah, for each division. Yeah.

And instead of just having one CEO, have a CEO for different parts. So, for the book, I went out and found literally the best business writer in the past decade, Tal Raz. He wrote 2 of the best-selling business books of all time. And it was, I cold emailed him just like anyone else can and convinced him, said, hey, I'm gonna do this book. I'm gonna promote it. It'll be the best in its class. There's nothing else like it. Will you help me lead this book? It's the same there. And then same with the YouTube channel. I have a GM, uh, who is Jeremy and who's now Dylan that basically run, they, they run the channel and I'm there to support them and be a part of it.

Are you kind of, uh, it's not even like you're a chairman or anything. It's more like you're jumping around and supporting where you need to. And that's probably where you're best placed is what I'm hearing.

Yeah, I like, I love making YouTube videos. Like the fact that I get to go and like talk to interesting people. Sometimes the challenge videos where I'm like asking to get on a jet, those are stressful. But I always feel proud. Should we talk about that? We can talk about that. I feel proud afterwards. My job though, it's like with AppSumo, it's like, how do I in a positive way help people grow? And I was doing it wrong for so many years where I was kind of chiding on them and like, oh, you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong, versus like, that's not exciting to work.

Yeah.

Versus like, hey, what do you— what's your dream? How do you want to accomplish things? Where do you want to go?

Yeah.

Okay, let's help you get there. And so within the different teams, so Kevin in finance, Sean in head of revenue, like, where do you want to go? How much do you want to make? You want to be a millionaire? All right, let's get you to a million.

Yeah.

And then supporting them in the things that they want to accomplish.

And holding them to that standard too, because it's like, if you say you want to do this, then I'm going to hold you to that standard, but not being a dick, not being a dick about it.

Yeah. I generally think the most successful people have the highest standards. This is what I've observed. They have high standards of themselves. And one of the AppSumo values is lead by example. So, you want to have a high standard, how high is your own standard?

You know, I was really annoyed over the weekend and I tweeted something about how like A-players don't complain about how busy they are or how overwhelmed they are. And like that kind of goes hand in hand with like having those high standards. Because it's like, you want to work with the best of the best. That's how you grow. And that, I mean, by the way, let's talk about Ayman for a second. Like Ayman was your CEO, he helped grow from what to what for AppSumo?

I think it was $5 million to around $60 million.

Okay. And then he moved on and then you were like biking in Spain or something, right? Like what happened there? And then like you were on a search for this new CEO to run things. And what changed your mind there?

Yeah, well, taking a step back for everyone out there, I think what's really critical and I think it was a great point that you highlighted is how can you just be around great people geographically, physically, virtually? Like how do you just be around excellence? Like I was very— I was Straight up born lucky, straight up. And I was lucky that I was born in Silicon Valley, went to the you know top public high school. My friends went to Google and they start they were early at Lyft and they sold companies to Zynga. They sold a company Cisco for a billion dollars when I got to my high school. So I I work you know for Zuckerberg. I got around Peter Thiel, Sean Parker.

Yeah.

I got to be around you know first round capital Aaron Patzer from all these elite people. And so how and how do you be around it. Because once you experience it, you're like, holy shit, like there's a different level to this. And it elevated me. I'm so grateful I got to do that in my 20s. And I'd love everyone else to be able to do that. And I would say with Ayman, you know, coming into Ayman, it's also noticing talent. Ayman came in, he— we were hiring for a CEO of AppSumo and he didn't just send a resume. He made a video. And this is like 10 years ago.

Yeah, that's when that was like a really forward-thinking thing.

Yeah. I mean, I think when people want something in life, When they get rejected or they're not getting what they want, it's a test of if they really want it. Like, rejection is a test if you really want something. And so most people get rejected once and give up. And the reality is, is like, how much are you coming back and coming back and coming back when it's not working out right away? And that, that's a hard part of what courage is. Courage is being afraid and going after it. And Eamon applied for something, we rejected him, and then he applied again for this thing and we're like, all right, we'll give you a shot.

For a CEO role?

It wasn't a CEO right away. It was a general manager role.

Okay, got it.

And his only directive was, don't fuck this up. Like, your job is to make $120,000 a month. He knows this number. You call him right now and say, I had to get $120,000 a month because we wanted to start a new business. And for 2 years it was just making that number for him. And so, yeah, being with Eamon and I think for others out there, a lot of businesses, business owners are like, I'd love to have a CEO. And I think a few things of it. One, it took a year to find him and it took about 2 years to train him. So it takes a long time to actually find someone who could be a CEO. And the second part that's interesting, fast forwarding today, I, I like being a CEO.

Mm-hmm.

It's great. I'm like, my job is to like set the vision, put parameters, what's our values and culture, and then make sure the player's in the right place. This is such a cool job.

Yeah. So, what does your day-to-day look like right now just as AppSumo CEO?

Oh man, it is a lot of work and I do like complaining.

Yeah? Who doesn't?

No, I mean, I think it's interesting to notice your complaints and sometimes it's like, yeah, it's hard. It's hard. And I think more of us, I think more people out there can do hard things than they realize. Everyone. And the things that we're all most proud of are the hardest things. We're never proud. You know, I didn't really do much of a workout and my body looks great. No one's proud about that.

Yeah.

No one says, hey, I did a video and I did half-ass and I'm really proud of it. No, you're like, that was so hard. I worked my ass off and I did it and I'm proud. And, you know, coming back to originally what we talked about, how do you just build more internal pride? Like, so my videos, I'm way less sensitive to if our videos get 1 million or 50,000 subs versus do I watch my video? I'm probably the biggest watcher of my own content.

Really?

Yeah, I love watching my videos. And the videos I don't watch, it's like, all right, well, I'm not that proud of that video.

Yeah.

And how do I keep improving? My most proud video is our least watched video. It's a fishing video.

I didn't even see that one.

No one did. It's the Millionaire Fisherman, this guy Nick Stasinski out of Key West, Florida. I'm proud of that video. So coming back to internal pride, where are we going with it?

Well, okay, here's where we're going with Eamon. So he moved on, right? He's doing his own thing now. But then now you've had the humility to hire him as a coach. And like a lot of people be like, oh man, he like left me, like, you know, screw that guy, whatever. But you're like, no, like I'd like love to still continue working with him in his new venture.

To quote one of the great sitcoms of our era, Ted Lasso, there's a great learning for— I like this guy over here, it's nice to see him. Thank you. Because I get some feedback. Ted Lasso had a great quote about mentorship and it was like, a good mentor wants you to do okay. A great mentor wants you to leave, and an excellent mentor wants you to leave and succeed.

This is in the context of a company.

That was an example also, but this is also just great for life. And so, you know, with people around me like Jeremy on our YouTube team, uh, just left. Our video editor Cam just left. Problems don't go away, they just get bigger or they change over time for everyone. And it's really, it was, it's been great seeing with Aman reflecting like, do I want these people to succeed and how can I then help them succeed? They're really, you know, I think it's a Zig Ziglar quote, the more you can help others get, the more you'll get yourself. And that, it's cliché, but there's a reason it's been around for such a long time and it's so true. And so with Eamon, I was frustrated the day he called me. I was biking across America and he called me. I was retired. I was like, it was 3, I didn't work for 3 years really. And I was making about $2 million a year. And I was probably the most unhappy I've ever been.

Why is that?

There's nothing to do. There's no purpose. There's no purpose. And it's not a boohoo thing. Trust me, being rich and it's way better to be rich and happy than poor and unhappy. If you can be one or the other, try to get rich and happy. And that is about what The Million Dollar Weekend is. At least get the money so you can make that choice. And what I found though, it's been the hardest work I've ever done coming back as a CEO. And it's the work I'm most proud of. And I remember when Eamon called, I was like, can you just wait till I finish my bike ride? You know, like kind of like a little boy. And I think for all of us, we all have a hero inside of us. We really do. And even this book, I was really afraid of this book. I'm not supposed to say that. I'm supposed to be like, oh, I've made a lot of million-dollar businesses, which I have. And I've worked for Zuckerberg, which I have. And I have a lot of money, which I do.

Yeah.

But I'm supposed to, you know, come across confident. It's like, no, I'm scared of the book too. And we're all scared of something. We're scared of being out in front of the camera. We're scared of maybe asking a person out. We're scared of maybe asking for a customer. And then realizing that we can actually do harder things and we can face these fears and overcome them is part of all of our journeys that's available for all of us to do. Like, where we are and where we can be is a lot closer than people realize.

I love that.

And so when Eamon called, I wanted to finish my bike ride because I was afraid of, of ruining this company that I started. And I thought only Eamon could do it. And that's true for all of us. Like, what's the thing we're afraid of and how do we go into it, not away from it? Like, the only way in is through. And my therapist used to say that all the time. I was like, can you just shut up, dude? I'm trying to go around. I'm trying to avoid. You know, I'm an avoidant attachment style. And he's like, if you want to get through it, you got to. If you want to get there, you have to go through it. And all of us can. And what is that? Is everyone's choosing? Like, what's the hard thing you're avoiding? How do I go into that? And so I basically, I called my advisor. So I called Andrew Chen and he yelled at me. He said, you know, Aman, da da da, you better get back to work. And then I called my buddy Adam Gilbert, mybodytutor.com. And I was here in LA on the bike ride. And he said, you know, who's paying for the bike ride? How are you paying for this trip? I said, well, AppSumo pays my my salary. He's like, so let's think about this. You're on a bike ride and the guy who's running the ship doesn't want to be there and you want to be on your bicycle. And so I flew home the next morning.

Wow.

And then I still tried to— I tried to find a CEO to run the business because I was afraid of running it and ruining it. And then after 3 to 6 months, I was like, all right, I need to face the thing I'm most afraid of.

You know what's weird? I like— maybe this is rah-rah stuff, but like when you were tweeting about looking for a CEO, I could feel that energy. Of, on like how you didn't want, like maybe there's apprehension going back into it. And then I felt like when you stepped back in, like I just felt like the happiness. It's weird how you can just sense those things kind of.

Yeah. I mean, to be clear, we can go through a lot of fuckups I made. I've made so many fucking bad decisions. Sorry, AppSumo team. Thank you for sticking around, man. You know, we're all learning and we're all going to make mistakes. And I think that's what all of business is like. Most of the successful people I've met, almost every single successful, I would probably say 100%, they're trying a lot of things. The least successful people are sitting and watching all this stuff. And they're like, well, I'm waiting, I'm researching, I'm preparing. It's like, no. If you think about it, name someone. It's like they've tried a lot of things that did not work out. And that is how they got to something that worked out.

Right.

And so, with AppSumo, I came back because I couldn't find a CEO that we liked. And then I just started making a lot of bad decisions. For the next two years, and then it's fixing that. And finally, this year, I would say three years later, yeah, that the business finally we have the right team. We just took the whole team to Mexico last week, and the previous two years, I it's not something I'm supposed to say publicly, but like I would go to these retreats because we take everyone on a retreat, and I would drink, and I just didn't want to be there, and I didn't like really like the people. I didn't connect with the people, and this year I got there, and I just looked forward to it. I looked forward to it.

Yeah.

I was like, I'm so proud of each of you. I'm so proud of what we've done. I'm proud of these partners. We flew one of our partners from Poland to join us.

Nice.

Uh, Neuronwriter. I'm proud of our customers. We have a lot of great customers who buy these tools and use it for their own businesses. And that's taken time. And I think most of us are very impatient. I'm a very, you know, all of us are patient and impatient and I was impatient for it. And so just being a little bit more patient with this stuff, uh, it, it did work out and there's a lot of lessons learned in that.

Got it. I want to— I'm going to come back. I'm going to go to the book in a second, but I have one more question.

The business stuff is good.

All right, we'll stay on it. How many coaches do you have right now? So advisors, coaches, mentors, therapists?

Like, I just want to know. It varies because like right now I'm— I used to have a squash coach and boxing coach. I'm learning Spanish because my girlfriend's Venezuelan. So I'll do language coaches. I have a therapist I meet monthly. I have 2 business coaches. So Reboot, Amin, I guess the book, you know, a lot of different people like Hiring Tall and different people like that. I like getting coaches in almost every single aspect of my life.

How much do you think you're spending a month on coaching?

Oh, financial coaching?

Not financial, just overall.

No, no. I have these wealth coaches.

Oh, financial coaches too.

Yeah, of course. Of course. It's just they help me accountable and they kind of are like, hey, here's things you should be aware of. I think across AppSumo and our overall businesses, I don't know if it's $1 million a year.

Got it. That includes you as well?

Yeah, that includes me. But it's definitely in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think it's such a cheat code. Like, go find someone. So, like Adam Gilbert, mybodytutor.com, like I texted him 2 days ago about my eating and drinking while I'm out here on this podcast tour. And he's there coaching me about like, hey, how do we want to approach it? Like, you don't have to do it alone. And you also don't have to have a lot of money to do these things. You can find more affordable coaches. You can find coaches for free online or start actually hiring them with a little bit bit of money.

Right. Okay. So the pre-show, we're kind of talking about this and the pre-show was good. So I'll actually put this on the whole thing. But 2020, 2021, right? Zero interest rate environment. Everyone's tweeting about buying other companies, hiring CEOs and everything. And you kind of just alluded to it, like having to step back in. It's same, same thing for me. 3 years of like hell. And now it's getting to a place where it's like, okay, this feels good again. And so like the conclusion I'm coming to now is like, you know, I have this founders chat, all of us are talking about it. It's like most people have stepped back into the business because it's like, it's really hard to beat founder DNA because the founders are able to drive the vision and actually make things happen a lot faster. It's hard to just have someone like do it, right? So like, I'm like, okay, is hiring CEOs overrated now is the question.

Yes. No one's gonna care more than the founder.

Yeah.

That's— I love my work. And people, do you wanna sell? Do you wanna go public? No, I'm gonna try to do this till I die. And then I'm actually trying not to die, right? I'm gonna see if I can live forever.

Yeah.

And so, it's been interesting being a founder, just being a part of the company. Yeah, thinking about the future of it. I love AppSumo.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I did try to find other CEOs. I don't think anyone cares. It's the same thing with hiring people. What I've noticed is when you try to hire like really expensive people, they don't really care about the company. They care about their salary.

Yeah.

And so, with AppSumo, Sean, Ilona, Anna— oh my God, Anna, our chief of staff, and she's our head of people. She needs to chill. I'm like, Anna, you're working way too much for AppSumo. You need to make sure you have some balance in your own life. And I think if we try to hire like some, you know, Super expensive person. It wouldn't have worked out that way. It was just finding people who really wanted to be part of our entrepreneurship mission.

Yep. You said three years ago, or two three years ago, when you went to these retreats, you didn't enjoy them. How much of that those teams like have you cycled through now? Like what percent is like a new team now?

We were at at peak, I think 2021. We're at 133 people, and now we're at 75.

Got it.

Full-time teammates. I don't call them employees. And then we have. I think 25+ full-time contractors.

Yeah. And, but have you changed, like, like what percent are like net new people that you really enjoy now versus like people that you didn't enjoy in the past?

The net new is actually pretty small. It was more just, it is kind of crazy. So, we have this thing called MBR, Monthly Business Review, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of different things you're looking at to see from a high-level perspective, like how the business is operating. And one of the things you can look at is like revenue per teammate or profit per teammate. And then profit per department. So you can look at your return on capital across these different groups. And it's been crazy because our revenue is actually almost flat year over year, but our profitability went from like 2%, 1.5% to like 11%.

How are you?

So basically it was more just like efficiency about like who really do we need to actually run the business, which I think most companies are now looking at return on capital across their spending, across their hiring, across everything they're doing.

After what Elon did.

Yeah, yeah. With the Twitter thing.

Yeah.

We'll still see how that plays out.

Yeah, it's a better product now, in my opinion. But okay. And then, so how do you measure the profitability of like the finance team?

Yeah. So you can, the way that I like to think about it is like, how do we have contractors to see the value of something before we move people to full-time? So is there an agency? Is there a service? Is there software before you need to hire like a full-time person? So for instance, like payroll, like how many people do we need to have payroll? We had like a full-time person. I was like, could we just have the payroll company do that? And so, you can kind of look at ROI across every single role. So now, in the finance team, we have Kevin, who's VP of Finance. It's like, Kevin, go and do a financial analysis on like all the different teammates. Do it on how much we're doing on our marketing spend, and then come back and make recommendations around that. So, that is very easy. Kevin's salary, which I won't share, we can justify like how much extra money is Kevin generating for the business by the recommendations of the financial strategies.

Got it. And Kevin's responsible for bringing the strategies, right? He's not just waiting to be told what to do, obviously.

So taking a step back, the way we run AppSumo, we have a singular goal, then we have a budget, and we have a model. That's how we run the business. And so Kevin's job and his incentives, his salary is tied to the net operating income and the operating expenses of the business. And so his incentives are making sure that we hit our operating expenses within a certain range.

Hmm.

Got it. And so he can do things and, and if he can increase net operating income, he'll make more. If he can keep our expenses within a range, he'll do, he'll make more as part of his variable.

Got it. Okay, let's talk about the key lessons you learned from Zuck, Peter Thiel, and Sean Parker. So, Zuck, let's start with him. You actually shared the story, I think on Twitter, or maybe it was in a video on how you wanted to push something forward. Do you want to share that story?

Yeah, there was so— I was very lucky. I was very lucky. I didn't have an advantage. I didn't know anyone there. But what I did do was creating all these side businesses. And so, when I applied to Facebook, I said, hey, I'm doing all these side businesses. And I've done mockups of Facebook. So when I got there, they were like, wow, this guy's taking a lot of initiative. And so that is how I got the job. It wasn't something that was given. Same at Mint.com. I was rejected at Mint.com too before I got the job. And at Facebook, I'm more traditional. I think business is very straightforward. There's revenue, there's expenses, and then you have profit. And you just got to make sure that you have profit as you're operating the business. But Facebook was unprofitable. So I went to Zuck, we went to a meeting and I was like, Zach, we gotta make some money. We gotta make some money. And in an interesting way, his pri— the way he brought it to me was like, we only have one focus and that focus is growth. And so he went on the whiteboard and he wrote a billion and he is like, if it doesn't get us to a billion users, I don't wanna do it. And I remember thinking like, well, I wanted to sell ticket, uh, tickets on Facebook. And it was a really interesting lesson to just focus. And most people don't have a clear goal and they don't have a clear timeline. And he was like, I want to get this in the next few years and here's the number I want to get. And That was just something that was so interesting to see, especially at 24 years old, that level of singularity. And at a time, by the way, Yahoo offered him $1 billion personally. They're like, you're gonna be— he would've been a billionaire. I think after, you know, some other things, he would've been a billionaire at 24. That's crazy for him to reject that. And I think it was also part of him saying the billion was also just him having so much belief in what we're doing. Like, are you excited for what you're doing? And if you're not, how are you fixing that shit? That's available for everyone to change. And so, I remember him saying, no, I want to connect the entire world. And do you know how inspiring that is to show up to work when you're doing something you're excited about?

Yeah.

Like, I get to promote software deals and get paid for that. Like, my job is to find cool tools, get a deal, which I love deals, and promote it. This is cool. And there's a lot more ways we can help people in the future. That's inspiring to the team. And that was a lot. There's a lot in lessons from him, but definitely Singular focus, big-ass vision, and then being able to say no to a lot of different things like me trying to make some money in the short term.

I want to sit on the focus thing for a little bit because I don't know about you, but like earlier in my career, even up to the last couple of years or so, it's like every single shiny object, let's try all these things, right? And then as we get older, it's like the Warren Buffett and Bill Gates story is like, you know, what was the secret to your success? It's like they both wrote a word on a piece of paper, turned it around, it said focus. And How have you changed your opinion on focus in the last couple of years?

The best businesses are the ones that work. Most people start and it's actually working and they just quit too soon. For instance, last week there's a guy who went through the Million Dollar Weekend process and he has a business working. And I texted him.

What's working, by the way?

For him, he has 5 paying customers.

Okay.

In his first weekend.

Yep.

Great. In a weekend, which is crazy. He's been waiting 2 years to do a business. And in 48 hours, he changed his life. So I text him Friday. This is Tuesday. What day are we in?

Tuesday.

I text him this Friday. I said, hey, what's up, man? Jake, how's it going? He's like, oh, this meeting I'm doing soon. I've got 5 customers. I'm getting the cost laid out. I'm gonna ask them to pay the rest of the money for the experiences that he's setting up. But I'm gonna start an app. I was like, what do you mean you're starting an app? Like, you haven't even done the first thing. And he's like, yeah, yeah, but this guy has an app. And that was interesting because I can coach him from the outside saying, you have, like, the amount of things left in what you're currently doing has so much more than you realize. And that's actually probably the key thing for everybody there. It's if you're doing any business, service agency, content business, e-commerce business, if you just go back to what's already worked for you, there's so much more left in it. And so with him, he's doing experiences for people. I'm like, Jake, you haven't even done one. Let's get it to where you're maxed out on experiences.

And guess what?

You don't even have to do it. You can hire people to run the business for you. That's a very big thing people don't realize. Like, I don't wanna trade time for money. Great, trade someone else's time for money. And so, with Jake, it's focusing on like, this is working, let's just keep doing this until it stops working. And that's definitely some AppSumo values. We call it test and invest and then double down. And I think people hear that shit, but they don't actually do it. And I will say having our singular goal, so at AppSumo, it's $45 million net revenue this year.

Yep.

With YouTube, singular goal this year was 750,000 subs.

Blew it outta the water.

We did well with that. And again, unambitious goals. With the book, my goal is 1,000 reviews. That's my goal. And so the reality is like, just do you have a clear goal with a clear deadline? And if not, you could choose that and then stay focused towards that until you get there and then make that decision. The other thing that's been interesting is not quitting too soon. So one of the things I've learned is the law of 100, which is like sticking with things at least 100 times, 100 podcasts, 100 emails, 100 sales. 100 days, whatever it is, because we're quitting way too soon.

Yeah. 100 dates.

100 dates.

Yeah.

100 rejection, like rejection goals. Like when I do videos, I'm thinking, all right, man, I got to get at least 10 more rejections and making it a game, making it fun, making it something you stick with because then you're making a decision with at least accurate information versus quitting way too soon.

Yeah. And how do you decide, I guess, if a goal— I mean, look, 45 is pretty clear. The million or 750K subs is clear. Maybe the question here is, How do people set clear goals? Because sometimes people set goals that are— they find themselves needing to move the goalposts midway through the year.

Yeah. I think that's fine. That's fine to move the goalposts midway through the year. There's no problem with that. I think if you're moving it monthly, you're probably not choosing the right goal. I do think in the beginning, for instance, and I'm happy to share early, with appsumo.com, we want to— we're going to have a directory. So top of funnel for SaaS products, we don't know how it's gonna do. So if you're searching for something and you wanna find SaaS tools, we wanna have the number one directory for solopreneurs online. We don't know how it's gonna perform. So it, we can't say we wanna have like a million visitors a month or we wanna have, it's like we don't know. So get going a little bit and then make a more educated decision about what your goal should be.

Got it. Love it. All right, let's go into the book and I'm gonna come back to other lessons that you've learned from people. So the book, How Do People Make a Million Bucks in a Weekend? In 48 hours.

Yeah. Making money is easy, but— and making money is easy, but if there's so much information out there for Caelan, for Isaac, for all these people, if it's so available, how come not everyone's doing it? And the question really there is, and this is the surprising part of the book, is what's actually holding people back? So the book is in 3 sections, like start it, build it, grow it. Building and growing it is easy, and that's there's tons of Udemy things. There's tons of YouTube tons of shit out there. But what is actually holding people back? And there's just basically two things that I found through helping tens of thousands of people, and it's just two things that are but they're big. And so if you can do it in fun ways to overcome these two things, they can actually get to their million dollars. So the number one is the fear of starting, like actually starting today. So AppSumo started in a weekend for $48, but I started it. And that's available for everyone. Same with my YouTube channel, a million subs. It started, have you seen my video from 3 years ago? It's me shirtless at home doing this with the same—

I remember. No, 'cause we had around the same subs at the time. I was like, you're just gonna take off. I was just, I could feel it. Yeah.

You know, and it didn't work right away necessarily, but it was available to everyone. So how do you get to a million? You get $1. How do you get to a million subs? You get one sub. How do you get to a million customers? You get your first one. And so most people think about the million, but they stop with just getting one. And so how do we do things for fun That get people going. And so that things like Jake, where he's had this business idea for 2 years and in 48 hours it changed his life. So it's working through challenges and fun things to get started. And the second part, which is another— people don't think about it. They think, oh, I need more tactics.

Hmm.

I need more strategies. And I have that. I, I can help you with your business model. We have the 1 Minute Business Model. I help you figure out the right markets. I help you figure out the right ideas. Those parts are actually pretty easy. Second one though, which holds 'em back from even getting there is the fear of asking. It's the fear of rejection and of what other people are going to think. And so how do we in a fun way overcome that so that you're like, oh, huh, I can get pretty good at this asking thing. Maybe I'll ask for— I asked for an upgrade at my hotel this last night. I just walked in. I was like, can I have an upgrade? They're like, no. It's like, all right, thanks.

Right?

No big deal. Then you start asking for other things. You say, hey, will you come on my show on a podcast? Hey, will you be my customer? Hey, will you be my husband? Right? And the more that you can actually make asking a fun thing and a, an ability, you start asking, you start getting. Instead of getting what you get, you start getting what you want.

You have this one Starbucks exercise, and I think this Starbucks exercise is a good way for people to, to make that million bucks or start that million-dollar business over a 48-hour period. What is that exercise?

Yeah, so you asked how to make a million dollars in a weekend. No, you have to get started and you have to get good at asking, and then you have to make sure you're in a million-dollar market. And those are things we can talk about and get into in the book. But the coffee challenge, again, coming back, how do we do it for fun? Because if someone's nagging or it's so intense, right? Like one of the best ways of business is thinking like experiments. Like when experiment fails, you're not like, dude, I suck. You're like, no, it's an experiment. Okay, cool. What did I learn? Let me improve. So the experimentality is a big part of it. Now the coffee challenge is how do I practice asking in safe ways? So you go to any time that Starbucks, tea, restaurant, wherever you go next time, you ask for 10% off. And the whole intent is not to get a discount. People get really excited about the discount. I don't care about the discount. I want you to get rejected. I want you to realize that it's scary. I still get scared asking. I still fear fear. And that's courage. It's being a little afraid, asking, getting rejected, and being like, huh, this is not so bad. What else can I do? Now, as I'm starting my business, whether it's e-commerce, maybe it's freelance videography, Maybe it's a service business, whatever it is. It's like, hey, I think this is really good for you. Do you wanna be my customer? That's all business is. It's asking for a service in exchange for money.

Yep. It's how do customers happen and how do you serve 'em?

Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, people make it such a thing. I have to go sell and it's so intense. Like, no, you're literally just going to help people by putting out content, by doing a service for them, by making a product for them, whatever that is. And the more that you can get comfortable Approaching people that you know who wanna see you succeed, which is what most people do. Most people, which is the mistake, is they go like, I'm gonna post on Reddit, I'm gonna post on Twitter, I'm gonna try to do things where people don't know me, see if they'll buy my stuff, versus you have all these advantages here of people who wanna see you succeed that people don't take advantage of.

By the way, I have to ask, why do a book? Because a book is a giant pain in the ass when it comes to the promotion piece. And what's the goal of it? Well, you did say 1,000 reviews.

Yeah. So books are a lot harder than I imagined. And at the end of the day, the readers don't give a shit how much effort you put into something. They care about their own problems. Same as everything. Like customers don't care about your problems, they care about theirs. And 15 years ago I was on a bike ride and I thought, what's the book I wish I had? When I was starting these businesses that I don't have to spend a lot of time, didn't have to spend a lot of money, and I can actually get going so that I can be a millionaire. Being a millionaire is awesome. Being able to get what you want at the grocery store, being able to have— and maybe not everyone needs to be a millionaire, but at least having the ability. Everyone should be an entrepreneur. And I was like, there's just not the book. Like, I don't— there's some different ones out there, but there's not one book I can say, go read this because this is what's holding you back. And then here's the next strategies to actually get ideas and then here's how to scale it. And I've done it time and time again. And with this book, every weekend we have 5 people that go through the book from start to finish. So, I've tested it. Like, I was a little nervous, like, is this gonna work? Like, this is a big promise.

Yeah.

But I'm seeing it work. And the whole point to get to a million is you have to get a dollar and you have to get going so you can get to the million. And so, I'm seeing it work with these people.

Do you see— I mean, I can see this whole thing becoming like a community, like a big movement and all, 'cause it— just call it Million Dollar Weekend and then you have all these workshops. Like, what is the— is there an endgame with this?

No, no. It's kind of like AppSumo. Like, I've put out the best book. I'm not doing another book. This is all I got. Yeah, this is everything I have. And it's been tested, it's been validated, it's been worked on that in terms of the results I've seen the readers.

Yeah.

So my goal, you know, similar to our buddy Ramit, put out a really fucking great book that helps people get a business going, change their life in 48 hours.

Yeah. And still good today.

This, you know, this material is stuff I've worked on now for 10 years. It's stuff I've done and stuff I put out there. And now I can actually be like, this is the thing you need to go do. So it's something 20, 30, 40, 50 years. I'd like to see this be the same book that, hey, if you're actually trying to get a business going, this is the one that you need to read.

What do they call it? They call it the Lindy Effect, right? Like if it's going to last for 50 years, it'll last for another 50 years.

I have a plane that's 50 years old and that's not true.

I'll tell you that.

It's shit scary flying in a 50-year-old plane. You know what I'm talking about? But yes, it is something that a lot of this material is stuff I put out in 2000 12 was the original version of it. And then when I started working on the book for the past 3 years, it's like, holy shit, these are the principles.

There's actually game tape of you doing this. I remember Tim Ferriss had a show on Apple for a bit and you were actually out there coaching and it's the same concept. So you've done it literally like hundreds or thousands of times already.

I've done it myself and more with a lot of things. How do we build confidence? You build confidence through practice. Yeah, you build confidence through action. And so there's a guy who actually was featured on Tim Ferriss's site, Daniel Bliss. He's a postal worker in Canada and he went through The Million Dollar Weekend and he was able to go live in Thailand and be like a freelance diver, the freediver or whatever it is, to go in the water.

Yeah.

And that's through him following the process of the book.

Amazing. All right, well, tell us what the 1-minute business model is.

So with AppSumo.com, let me give you an example so that people can relate to it. There's 2 parts of once you've overcome your fears, like, okay, I've kind of— I can overcome my starting, you know? And the number one thing in starting is now, not how. I'll tell you, that's the number one takeaway in the book so far is that how do I just do something right fucking now? I want to be a videographer. Let me just go make a video. I want to be a content creator. Let me go post something on social media. I want to do a service business. Let me go call a customer right now. Do I have to go to Shopify?

I have to go.

No, just right now.

Yeah.

And that's been the big thing. Now, once you've overcome that, once you get better at asking, now how do we get to starting a business and growing it? Now, the biggest parts of starting a business, One, do you have a $1 million market? Most people are doing small-ass markets that no matter how much you do, you'll never make a million bucks. Now, the second part of that is, as you have a market that's big, what's the business model? So for instance, with AppSumo.com, I started as bundles. It was like, all right, we're gonna do these bundles. And then after we do a bundle, we, I made basically $5 per bundle. And Andrew Chen, and this is where it came from, uh, you know, super smart guy. Was like, let me just show you this 1-minute business model. That's like, if you change it from bundles to individual deals, you'll make $25 a product. And that transformed our business from $300,000 our first year to $3 million our second year, just changing the business model. And that's the same thing I've seen with other people where, are you understanding the economics? And I go in detail and we have tutorials in the Million Dollar Weekend that shows like, here's your business model today. If you can make some adjustments on revenue dials, like maybe it's your average order value, Maybe it's frequency, maybe it's an extra product, whatever that is. Can this actually generate the million dollars that you want it to? Got it.

That makes a lot of sense. And what do you think, I mean, based on what you've seen, because you've ran this, we'll call it this model so many times, what is a very simple business for people to get started where there's not a lot of capital upfront required?

Yeah, there's, it's unlimited ways of making money. So, one of my favorite businesses recently is Christmas lights. Do you have a house?

No.

Do you guys have houses? In LA, I guess I don't have houses. How many houses are just in America?

Tons. Yeah, tons. I can't even give a number.

Millions. Yeah, millions. And so you literally can start an annual recurring revenue business. You put up their lights for Christmas, you take them down, and then you store their lights, or you put up their lights for Halloween and you take them down and you charge them a few hundred bucks a year. Anyone can do that. That's a business you can start today. Second business is house cleaning. Most of the businesses that you wanna come— I'm, I'm, we didn't even get into tech. We can start talking, talk about tech too.

Yeah.

A lot of businesses go compete where the, that your advantage is showing up sober. Just show up. Like I'm trying to get, uh, you know, and I'm trying to get someone to come and, uh, do our lawn. I don't know when they show up and I'm paying, I think I pay like, I don't know, $100 a week or something like that. Yeah.

I've never experienced that before.

Do you have a lawn? Do you have a lawn? Yeah.

When, when I used to growing up, right, they showed up on time every single week. I don't know who you're working with. I don't know.

You know, taking a step back here in all these different businesses, and I'll just show you a quick example of how anyone can get a business. Let's just go through your day and we'll, we'll create a business right out of it. So let's walk through this morning. Like, what frustrated you or what happened to you this morning?

Nothing, because we started so early. Traffic. Traffic.

Okay, so there's traffic. What else?

That's it.

Nothing else. Okay, let's take a step back then. In your day, what are some things that have frustrated you? I like breaking down a Like breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

People problems.

Okay, go on. What's the people problem?

People problem would be like, hey, you know, I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'm too busy, da da da. So, it's like, you know, hearing that, you know, I think the broader thing is trying to make sure that we have more A players on the team is the main problem.

And what part of the team do you want an A player in?

I mean, you would wish for 100%, but—

No, no, but like what part of your business?

Oh, the leaders, right?

But what part? Which leadership? Like marketing?

Leadership for the marketing agency, right? It's the leadership team.

Okay.

So, it could be client services, could be finance, could be people, could be whatever.

Let's pick one. And so, what would— what's a role?

I'll just— I'll throw one out there. I think sales would be one. Okay.

And so, if I were to bring you a salesperson today, what would that do for your business?

Oh, you would relieve all my pain.

Tell me more about that.

Yeah. So, if you can bring someone that's been there, done that, and I could then focus my energy on higher leverage activities.

And then what would the— in terms of revenue, what would the salesperson be able to generate for you, you think?

I mean, should be tens of millions. Yeah, should be— we'll say like $10 million.

And what would this person look like today? Like, what would they be doing if I were to go literally bring them in the door right now?

It's funny that you say this because we're literally like, we're getting to reference checks. Right now. But so, this guy has been there, done that with an agency, employee 25, and then it went all the way up to employee 800. And then that agency, which I used to work at, by the way, you know, I think they sold for a couple hundred million dollars. So, like he's been there from the beginning to the end.

And so, a problem just to walk you back through what we're— you were asking how to come up with business ideas.

Yeah.

So, it sounds like if you were— if I were to bring you a salesperson today, they would generate $10 million for you. And that sounds like something that you're— how much do you pay this person?

This person would get paid, not to give exact numbers, but a couple hundred, like $400,000 or $500,000 a year if he's doing well.

So if I were to bring you a salesperson that you would love, blow your mind, it sounds like $50,000 might be a reasonable fee to pay me if I could bring you something today.

Yes.

Okay. So that is someone— would you want to sign?

Yeah, absolutely. Let's do a deal.

So taking a step back here, I asked you about your morning and you're like, I don't know. But then just 1, 2 other questions. You're like, oh man, leadership. Then you're like, well, actually sales. So the way I like to think of it is it's leader. It's basically listen, option, transition. So as you're talking to people, tell me about your day. What are you working on? What's the frustration? Yeah, nothing. My breakfast was good. Traffic. Okay. Well, what else? Well, actually, if we had leadership. What about your leadership? Oh, there's all these ones.

Okay.

Well, let's talk about sales. What happens in sales? How much is that worth to you? How much are you going to pay? What would they do? Oh, wow. So now options. Okay, so if I brought you someone, it would be worth maybe $400,000 is what you'd pay them and they would generate millions. Sounds like for $50,000 or something like that, that's a pretty good deal.

Yep.

And then transition someone to actually like, oh, let me go get you paid for that.

Yep. You're also, you're also value-based pricing it there.

Yeah.

Right? Like it's— and that's really important because that's how you can capture the most value when you're trying to get a deal done. Yeah.

And taking a step back, your original question is like, what is stuff that everyone can do? Everyone has people around them that have money. Doesn't matter what your economics are. You have a doctor, your doctor has money, your accountants have money, your lawyers have money, right? Your service providers have money. Your friend of a friend has money. And so can you talk to them and understand what's on their to-do list? What was their morning like? What's their work like? What are things around the weekend that they need help with? Like, those are ways that you can then listen, find some business ideas. Ideally, my favorite business problems are my own. My favorite business problems are my own. Like, free business idea, go start a DocuSign competitor. I hate it. I know it's, it's only like $20 a month, but it just pisses me off. Yeah. And so someone can create a DocuSign alternative, which is what we're gonna do, but someone else could do it. You can follow the process so you don't build it for 6 months and find out no one wants it. You can validate in a weekend. And then if that works great, you can scale it out, which is what we talk about in part 3 of the book.

What's your take, by the way? Um, I'm gonna flip back to the book in a second. Sure. 37signals. So like they have this once.com now where they're only trying to sell software where you pay For it once.

That sounds like you've been doing that for a while. We've been doing that model for 10 years.

Yeah.

We've been doing lifetime deals for a very long time at AppSumo.com.

Yeah. And they're, I think that's a movement that they're trying to sit on because they're trying to go like against the subscription model.

Uh, yeah, we've been doing that for a long time. I, taking a step back, no one hates subscriptions. They hate paying for things that are not valuable.

Right?

Like there's certain things I'm like, I don't ever question my like Netflix thing. I think it's like $10, $20. I don't know.

I think it's $20 though.

Yeah, I don't know. Or T-Mobile, I pay $85 a month. I love that bill. I'm like, dude, thank you, T-Mobile. Get like free texting internationally and free call. Oh, it's awesome. And so it's really just thinking about like, what are the things I hate? And that creates opportunities. And so in terms of lifetime deals, I don't mind subscriptions, but I mind paying Calendly $20 a month when there's not really any cost that's really getting incurred. So $29 for life. That's why TidyCal is going viral. I mean, TidyCal, uh, I think went from like 1,000 bookings a day to now we're doing about 5,000 bookings a day this year.

Okay.

And that's a 7-figure business that we created, David and his team created.

Yeah. I want to come back to that in a second too. You know, by the way, like, I just want to say this, like, I feel like you're more content now. I feel like you're more complete. And what do you think contributed to that? I mean, you have a girlfriend now, right? I feel like you were on the quest for a while. So, let's start with the girlfriend piece. So, I think you were looking for one. I'm still looking, right? And it's just like, how did you decide?

So do you remember what you asked me in the beginning about? Like you asked about coaches. I had dating coaches. I had relationship coaches. Stephanie Rig on Instagram. I love her. She has really great advice. I hired other dating coaches to work on things. Taking a step back though, when we stop looking is when we start finding. And I know that's some Zen Buddhist Jewish Christian. I don't know what it is, but it's. interesting reality where most people's lives, it's just looking at it from a different perspective. It's like, okay, your life is almost everyone's life if you zoom out. Caelan's, yours, mine, everyone watching. If you zoom out, most of our lives are awesome. We have running water. We have electricity. I'm a huge microwaver. That's how I cook most of my food.

Yeah, me too.

We have microwaves, dude. Microwaves are awesome. I don't know who invented that. Shout out to Mr. and Mrs. Microwave. Like, these lives are great, right? And I think when we can be more content with our life, which is already great. Almost all of our lives are great. Then all these other things just work out and it's not putting so much stress. And I think that's what a lot of us feel like. If I only find this thing, it'll work out. And the problem is the finding. It's just, it'll work out. And being a little bit more patient, a little bit more kind, I think is what led me to be able to be in a place where I'm feeling good about this stuff. So it's being kind to ourselves. And I know that's again cliché and kind of like, okay, I wanna be kind, but I'm poor. I wanna be kind, but I'm frustrated. I wanna be kind, but I hate my job. It's like, Be kind and be patient and start something right now that'll lead you in that direction. So for instance, with dating specifically, I held on to my ex. I think one of my biggest regrets is holding on to partners for too long because I was afraid of being alone. You know, my dad passed and I think I was like, oh, if you— I want to be with people who'll never abandon me.

Hmm.

And, you know, we talked about asking for Million Dollar Weekend. I was getting what I got. I was not getting what I wanted. And I had to be happy with myself and content with myself before I could actually get what I really wanted. And so I'm not here to analyze or tell you things. So I went to these coaches. I worked with Stephanie Rigg for 6 months. And one of the final breakthroughs, besides just being feeling worthy of deserving a great partner, and that took time, that took time to be like, no, you're, you're pretty cool. I'm like, really? Yeah. It's like, you're great the way you are. I'm like, you sure about that? You know? And that takes time for us to feel good about who we are.

Yeah.

And coming back to the beginning of the conversation, not worrying about the external views, not worrying about someone else, but just being like, even by myself, I'm pretty damn great. Everyone is. And so starting that journey and then feeling closure on the past of saying, I finally had to tell my ex, like, hey, I can't talk to you anymore. Like, I wanna move forward. And it's interesting what we say our priorities are versus what we say our behavior is.

Your actions have to map to your ambitions.

Yeah. Yeah, and most people, if you actually say like, show me what you're doing, you show me your calendar, I'll show you what your priority is. Like, I was just trying to date a lot. I wasn't actually trying to take it seriously. And I have friends who are like, yeah, I want to find a partner. I'm like, well, how's your behavior? And so working with Stephanie, I finally sent a message to my ex and I was like, I'm not responding to you anymore. I cannot. This is— I'm— this is a regret of mine. One of my major regrets is not doing better with partner selection. I really wish I was more intentional with my— with partners. Specifically dating in my 20s. And I was just like focused on work. And I was like, oh, you'll date me? Sure, come on board.

Yeah.

And when I finally closed that door and was like, no, I'm gonna really try to find an equal partner, I just focused on dating. I focused on like, what is a great partner for me? And that takes time. And then it was pretty— once I closed the door and I was actually, all right, I'm gonna be focused on my dating, like it was pretty quick to actually find someone.

Interesting. And this was through a matchmaker or just sourced through like, you know, The organic channels. I've talked to—

yeah, I've talked to some of these, like, it's—

there's—

for rich people, I thought like rich people, you just get like, I don't know, groupies, which it's not true.

Yeah.

It's not. I don't know where these old guys are with these young girls. That's creepy, man.

Yeah. Well, dude, I'm happy to share a story. Continue.

Oh, wow. I think let's take a step back. Dating is very similar to business. And in business, when you create content, when you create a book, when you create AppSumo.com, You start with who is the who is the customer? What's their problem, and where are they? Now, when I was thinking about dating, I flew to New York to date. I flew to LA to date. I stayed in Austin to date, and I was like, what kind of woman? Who do I want, and where are they? And I was like, they're not fucking here. And so, when I went to Barcelona, which is where I've been going for the summers, I was like, oh my god! There's international women.

Yep.

Right. Attractive, educated, and there's I wouldn't say unlimited, but there's just a lot of them. And so go make it easier on yourself. And so being in Barcelona, there was just a lot more interesting women there. I ended up meeting my partner through Bumble, but I was meeting them, you know, I did talk to some of these like $25,000 matchmakers. I was trying the apps. I think you do have to try a lot of ways to find that person and be patient that they're out there. I would say that that probably is the biggest breakthrough In that, are we actually optimistic? And I don't—I think I felt at a point like there's just no one out there. Like I never thought I'd have a kid, which my my girlfriend's pregnant, which I'm excited about. Yeah, it is. It's awesome. I'm so excited. Yeah, and I never thought there'd be a great partner. And that's just a little thing that all of us can do right now. You can be optimistic. That's a choice. And so believing, and I had a friend two weeks ago, and he's like, "I don't know. I haven't dated. I haven't found." It's like. Okay, you have to believe they're there, and they are. I promise you, for you and for everyone out there, they're there. You have to have that optimism. And as you go through things, it's being— my priority is finding a partner. How's your behavior? Are you just hooking up? Are you going out partying? Like, is that what your partner's doing? Probably not. And through having that optimism and sticking with it, yeah, eventually we met and talked. And then, uh, it's, you know, I've— it's committing and showing up for that commitment. So flying— I've flown to Spain 4 times this year. I've spent 143 days there. It's an effort, but it's— I found a partner that who I'm committed to and showing up for that work.

So what's the deal? Like, she's going to move here, you're going to move to Spain?

Candidly, it's very complicated because now that she's pregnant, I can't really stay in Spain. She can't really stay in America. And so it's— but again, that's, that's solvable. Most of these things in life are solvable. All right. And so it's— I'm going to figure out a way to be there and then I'll figure out a way for her to be here.

And how long have you guys been together?

18 months.

Wow. I think— did— do you feel like, like, when you know, you just know type of thing?

Well, when we first— our first date sucked.

Okay, go on.

Our first date was like, I saw her on Bumble. I was like, oh yeah, she's a babe. Yeah, she's cool, you know. And we went on the first date, like, she sat super far away from me. I left her. I left— she thought I left because I didn't like her, but I went back to work. Well, I was working, you know, European time, so it was like 11 PM and I had a meeting in America. Yeah, and it wasn't—it wasn't like a you know fireworks and all this kind of crazy stuff that yeah, I think in my twenties I was looking for the firework.

Those are usually the craziest. Those like blow up, literally.

Oy vey, oy vey, my friend. And it was interesting. Just I think one of the easiest kind of tests is like you're gonna have a thousand dinners with this person. Like is this a person you want to have dinner with? That's really all you have to kind of understand. Like do you want to go out to a dinner and just sit with them? And it's sitting with yourself too. And so with her, we were chatting and I was just like, I really— at the end of the month, I was like, I really just like chatting with you. I really like chatting with her. And, you know, I was still afraid. I was still like, holy shit, is this going to be a partner? I don't know if I want to be going to Spain. She's Spanish. Do I want to be listening to reggaeton all the time? You know, like, do I want to hear Bad Bunny 24/7, which now I do? Do I want to learn Spanish? Do you like that? You know, like, and it took a little bit of patience, but you know, through committing and communicating with her, it was like, damn, this is, you know, I think if you had to boil down to one thing, this is someone I admire. Yeah, there's someone I admire, and I don't think I've ever been with someone before that that I was like, I just respect you as a person. Yeah, like, you're— she's my lead tigre. She's a little tiger. She's like, she doesn't tolerate my shit. She challenges me, and she also supports me. And yeah, it also doesn't happen You know, I thought I thought what happens is kind of like in business sometimes we think like it magically happens. Yeah, but it's effort. It's like showing up, communicating, working on these things. It doesn't just magically happen and continually working on it. I thought you get the person, you get the business. It's like yeah, it's over. No, it's it's continually like yeah. How are we communicating?

We go just like a business. It is.

It's still work and you know we go to relationship therapy. Gone to hers. We took a course, the connection course by Joe Hudson. Working on our connection. Just you know still working on this stuff.

You know, I got to share something with you at lunch but— You can't share that publicly? No, no. I'll just share it with you. But okay, so Mark Manson sat in that seat a couple months ago and here's what he said. He's been married, right? He's like, just like, dude, it's just like, you just sit there and the thing just compounds. It compounds and he's just like, damn, this is really good. And that's like what— I don't know how long he's been married for. It seems like a couple of years or so. But it sounds like that's what it is, compound interest. Applies also to relationships.

I think that's a very good perspective. There's a mindset that my buddy Tynan has taught me that life is great and it can get better. Because sometimes I'm like, dude, this can't get better. Like, I'm hanging out in LA with you guys, we're gonna go have some bomb sushi, hang out with other people, we're gonna go to Vegas and do other fun things. And it's like, okay, this is as good as it gets. Like, no, it can be even better. And that's just a cool kind of like, it's great and it can get better. And I would say that that applies to our relationship where I met her, I was like, yeah, you're attractive, you know, these things. But over time, now that she's even pregnant and how we're communicating, it's getting better. It's getting better and better. And that's something that it took me a long time to be able to accept that.

I love it. This is great. Okay, let's move back to the book for a second. Do you have a chapter here? You like how I'm going like personal business?

Dude, we can do your show.

Social is for growth, email is for profits. What do you mean by that?

You started your idea. You just, you overcome your fears, which most people don't think I'm afraid, but they've overcome it. They got better at starting right now. Not how they got going. Now they're practicing asking. They got that going. They have their ideas, but now it's like, how do you grow the business? Right? So you have an idea, maybe it's freelance videography, maybe it's gardening. Maybe like right now I need food delivery in Austin. So if someone wants to start a business doing food delivery, like I think that we, I do it in Barcelona, but there's nothing in Austin. Great opportunity. Now, how do you grow it? And so the way that I like to grow things is through social media, right? This is not a big shocker. I don't think this is— this is not revolutionary. But what most people miss out on is that they grow through social media. Maybe it's whatever platform that's going to— in the 5 years people watch this, that's going to change. But how do you actually monetize your audience? How do you communicate with your audience that you have control over? And most people miss out on this. I was even looking at Graham Stephan. I love Graham Stephan. His content's solid. The guy's really great. Huge, huge following. Yeah. His email list is like 40,000 people. Yeah. So I'm like, when the platform fucks you over, which they will always, they'll inevitably change because their incentives are for them, not for you. Do you have control over your outcome? And you know, AppSumo.com, this year, $80 million in top line revenue. About half of it comes from email.

How many subs do you guys have?

I don't know. That's what Chris and the email team do.

It's got to be millions.

Yeah, I don't, I don't really know that number. Yeah. I let Chris make those calls. I like— Chris has a revenue target. You go back to Scorecard. Chris, Chris Gruen, shout out to him. It's amazing. He has a revenue target for email. That's what I sync up with him about. Now, when you've grown these audiences, whatever— pick one platform to win. And there's— everyone can win in different platforms. It could be podcasts like you and Neil. It could be Twitter. It could be TikTok. It could be LinkedIn. But pick one. Most people, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Like when I started YouTube, Pardon me. When I started YouTube more actively, like, intently, 3 years ago, I did every platform at the same time. So I was like, well, I'm gonna do a Short on TikTok, and then I'm gonna do Instagram, I'm gonna do LinkedIn, I'm gonna do Twitter, I'm gonna blog. And it was like, okay, let's just try to do one really, really, really, really well, and just one. And you're like, wow, your YouTube's growing. It's like, that's all I do.

Mm-hmm.

I'm not trying to grow these other ones. And so pick the platform to actually win on that you enjoy and you're getting the results for your work. Like it could be podcasts, it could be anyone, I don't care, but pick one and stick with that. Do the law of 100, do 100 episodes, 100 posts, 100 videos. Now what you have to do though is use an email provider. So there's MailChimp, ConvertKit, we built sendfox.com. That's what I use so that you can actually control your destiny, right? If YouTube goes away and my Twitter goes away and all these go away, I have 100,000 people a week I can still communicate with so that if I have a new business or new products or just wanna chat with people, I have something literally I can communicate with right now. And so most people miss out on that second part. They're very dependent, like, hey, for instance, let's say that you wanna sell this water bottle. You now have to go make a video and pray. We'll go to the synagogue and church together. Please, Lord, let them show this video with the bottle. I can literally type up an email, hit send, the inbox of 100,000 people.

Money in the bank.

Today. And ideally, you build a relationship over time. It's not something— it's been interesting with this book in general that most of the people who are customers, I know. Most people think, oh, you just built this audience. No, I like chatting. I reply to most of the comments. There's not a team. It's not someone I outsource. I like doing it. And so I like with email and these other channels, like, all right, get their audience, get their attention, help them out, move them into email, and then communicate with these people on a regular basis.

It's the best. It's underrated. I mean, a lot more people are talking about newsletters now all of a sudden, but I think they're monetizing it, in my opinion, not efficiently because a lot of them like to— they want to start a newsletter, sell ads, right? But my opinion is you start a newsletter and you have like a higher LTV product or service down the funnel. That's probably how you make more money. What's your take on that? I mean, literally, that's what you guys do too. So—

Yeah. There's different business. There's a lot of business. There's a lot of ways of getting rich and everyone should try to get rich. It's just great to be rich. At least you have the option. If you get rich, you at least can always go down to poor. But if you're rich and you like it, you can stay rich. Right. And there's so many ways of everyone getting rich.

Yeah.

No matter what you're interested in. And so in terms of newsletters, there's different models. So with the appsumo.com model, it's an e-commerce model. And most e-commerce businesses, if you look at their playbooks, it's Twofold. One, they have trigger and autoresponders. So you join their list and they have all these automated emails. You can use different providers. And then secondly, they send regular emails. So we send, uh, 6 emails a week, sometimes more, sometimes a little less. Now with content stuff, there's another business model, which is the content creator model, which is you have an email and then every week you send an update about different links. And then maybe once a month or once a quarter, you launch a course. And that works for a ton of other people. My business model is AppSumo makes all this money doing what it does, so I don't have to monetize my newsletter. But when I have a book or I wanna promote something, I do have an audience that's available for me to send these things to.

Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You have your own audiences, you have email, plus you have SMS. Do you do anything around SMS?

No, we've done SMS pretty extensively. One, most people hate SMS. You know, oh, SMS, not touched. And we've tested it a lot at AppSumo. But one, you can send stop right away.

Yeah.

You know how you get in and you just hit stop, it automatically, because of how the rules are set up? And then some of the tracking is not hard, it's just not something that works. SMS works for like one-off instances, like this is our one annual sale you have to pay attention to, but people don't wanna get a weekly SMS.

That's a good way to think about it, 'cause there's not one SMS I think I've ever been excited about, whereas email, like I do get excited to look forward to the next email if it's a really good newsletter.

Yeah, exactly.

So, okay, you're— how are you promoting the book right now? More so, okay, look, podcast tour, that's part of, you know, the book game, right? But is there anything unique that you're doing to promote the book right now?

Yeah, I can't talk about it. No, I'll tell you about it. So take a step back. This is where everything comes back from is what's your goal? Yeah, everything. AppSumo, here's our goal. YouTube, 750,000 subs. The book, 1,000 reviews. And so everything works backwards from that. So basically we have a 5-part strategy for the book. And when you're doing any business, it's thinking about, okay, what do I have access to that I don't have to kiss someone's ass? I don't have to hope. Oh man, I can't tell you how many people are like, I hope I get this partnership. I'm like, oh, I hope you don't. I hope you have to figure out how you get control over what you're doing so you don't need someone else necessarily. So number one is like, what's my own audience? So my number one thing is the noahkagan.com, my brand, and like the audience I've built over years. The specific thing that's actually been really fascinating is building a launch team. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So in terms of now, not how, I want to get 1,000 reviews. That's my goal. So I was like, how do I literally— and this is going to sound silly, but a lot of times business is much more basic than people realize. How do I literally have a spreadsheet with 1,000 people's names that I can literally check off to leave an honest review about the book? That's it. So number one is building this launch team. Our goal is to get 1,000 people on it. That I know who they are. I've messaged them personally and getting them to when the book they've preordered the book. Yeah, and when the book comes out, I'm gonna ask them. You don't have to write. Hey, I love it. Just go and write some review. Now what's interesting about the launch team specifically is a few parts. One, I posted on. I was gonna like send an email like, hey, do you want to join my launch team? But I tried on Twitter, and it was really interesting. I posted on Twitter. Hey, I'm starting a launch team. Just DM me if you're interested. I was just like, all right, let me just see if that works right now. Yeah. So I posted right away. 300 people messaged me.

How many did you pick off?

What's that?

How many did you pick up?

And so I personally replied to every single person.

Wow.

So I call it— we call it hand-to-hand marketing. Hand-to-hand, one by one, one by one. And I just messaged them like, hey, here's what's going on. I need your help pre-ordering the book. When you're going to get behind the scenes, I'm going to help you with the business. You're going to have access to other people. You'll have access to me. If you're interested, can you preorder the book right here at mdwbook.com? And out of the 300, probably like 200, 250. So that was a super interesting one where I did it via that. Then I've also done it with other emails. This has been a really interesting one. You'll appreciate this. In my, in my Noah Kagan, I send an email every week. I've sent an email every week for years. Yeah, I'll send an email that will have books, it'll have recommendations. And in some of the emails it'll say, hey, I'm doing a book tour. Where do you think I should go on my book tour? And about 100 people will give suggestions. And so then I used, then I would basically use a tool to email each of these people individually that suggested, saying, hey, thank you for your suggestion. So I call it survey to sale. So survey your customers to understand what they want. And if you can actually give 'em what they want, you can offer them that as an opportunity. And so I then took everyone who submitted a recommendation and I emailed them saying, hey, thank you for your suggestion about this city. I'd love for you to join my launch team. I like it because they are already raising their hand. Permission Marketing, Seth Godin. Yeah, they're already saying, hey, I would love for you to come to my city. I'm interested in your book. And so I'm trying to build a core group of launch team people that I emailed them. And then that was about an 80% open rate and about a 50% response rate to buying the preorder of the book, any version anywhere in the world, and being a part of the launch team. Now, as a part of the launch team as well, every single week we send updates. Every single week, 5 people get the book and I'll show you, I have a WhatsApp group with them that I message them. So this is December 8th, this is last weekend. Yeah. And then this is November 10th. These are different people, November 17th. So every week, 5 people join the launch team and I coach them for free about the book. And that gives me confidence in the book. It gets me, I think, people who are more excited about what the book is doing. So again, number one, coming back, it's building up what I have access to, which is an audience of the launch team towards my goal. Second team is AppSumo. So again, think about what you have access to. People make things so much more complicated than they have to. So with AppSumo, we have millions of customers a month. So we're giving out the— we're buying the book and giving it out for free to our best customers.

I like that. And how many people is that?

6,000. Okay. I love it. So we have AppSumo Plus, which is our premium membership where you get discounts and you get access to other people and other benefits. And so We are able to purchase it and then give it out to our best customers and then we'll subsidize it for some of our other customers.

Are you like gonna make it an AppSumo deal as well?

Yeah. So, for our Plus customers, they get it for free. For other people, they get it for half off. So, that's our second. So, taking a step back, goal, 1,000. Okay, I got that. Now, I can probably— I have my 1,000 confirmed. So now, I'm thinking launch week, let's sell 25,000 books because I've got my first goal completed. Second goal, 25,000 books. Now it's literally just working backwards. Like even this podcast, I didn't come unprepared. I went and looked up your most popular shows, looked at the comments, looked at the most watched sections, and then worked backwards from what are the things I need to talk about? It's not a surprise.

Oh, I love you. Wow.

Yeah, I went and researched it. So, and then I have it with the team as well for other shows. We just work backwards. Same thing with this. I wanna do 25,000 book sales. I think with OK Dork, noahkagan.com, we'll do 1,000, give or take. Plus I'm doing some bonuses. The other thing with this launch team, by the way, ask your customers. So, for instance, a lot of book launches have book bundles. Like, oh, if you buy 100 books, you get this. So, literally, I've gone to the people in our launch team. I'm like, here's the incentives, leave comments. Like when I wrote this book, The Launch Team, these people, I gave 20 of them each a chapter, 20 different people.

Yeah.

And that's how we kept revising the book based on what my customers were telling me. Don't make it so complicated. Go talk to your customers. So number one, Noah Kagan. Number two, AppSumo, because we have this AppSumo audience. Number three is this like top ten shows. So top ten shows, there's basically like what's my dream ten? So this is something we talk about in the book. It was inspired by Chet Holmes, which is like if I could only do ten, what are the ten that to me will make the most impact? Obviously Eric Su number one, but then there's these other shows: Lewis Howes, Jordan Harbinger, Tim Ferriss, Ramit Sethi, Ali Abdaal, Iced Coffee Hour. How I Built This, Diary of a CEO. And to be clear, just like everyone else out there, I'm getting rejected a lot. I sent a text message to Nat Eliason. He's like a pretty popular Twitter guy. He used to work at AppSumo. And I sent him, I was like, hey, man, I got this book. And I said, you said no. He just straight up rejected me. And I was like, dude, hell yeah. I was like, okay, rejection, as I said earlier, is a test if you really want something. And I believe this book works. I've seen it work. I know it works for me. It'll work for others. I was like, okay, he doesn't want it. That's okay. There's others who do. Let me keep moving forward. And it's a test. If I want it, I want it. So number 2 is our Dream 10, which is something we teach in the book and we give templates around it at milliondollarweekend.com. Yeah. Number 4 is pre-fluencers. So we made a list of, I think it's around 200 people from TikTok, Instagram, Goodreads, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter. And it's about 10 to 15 per category that are up and coming, either podcasters or influencers in those different spaces. And reaching out to them to either A, can we collaborate on something? Can I send you a book? Or can we potentially just like make content together?

The Goodreads one, that's interesting. So you're trying to find up-and-comers, like reviewers, almost like top Yelpers. Yeah, we already did.

Oh wow. Yeah. So I mean, work backwards. I want people who are already buying and reading books. Yeah. So we've gone on Goodreads one, we've done a Goodreads giveaway. Not many people are doing it. It's been interesting, dude. Goodreads giveaway, I think it's like a few hundred bucks, but also like who's, who's reviewing business books? That I like how they're reviewing it. I think they're thoughtful. They have a following on it, and then can I get them an early copy of our book of Million Dollar Weekend to them for them to leave review? And so that's been interesting to just connect. And most of these proof launchers, like there's a woman named Rose. She's actually pretty popular on YouTube. She's out here in LA, teaches personal finance. She's been huge. Like I sent her the book. She's like, "I love it." Can I post about it? I was like, "Okay, yeah." And these people are actually a little bit more easier to approach, and they're more excited to connect versus. You know, Diary of a CEO, I pitched them so many times and I've been rejected every time.

Yeah.

And that's okay. You know, Ryan Moran had a great quote, which was like, sometimes you ask for favors and then after you do well, people ask you for favors. And it's just keeping the attitude. You know, James Clear as well said, you can ask, but don't expect. So again, it's all part of— I believe in the book. I do think it's my job to go tell people about it that actually want to change their life in a weekend.

Because you're trying to help.

I think it's great. I think a book works if people want to have a business and do well, whether it's grocery money or Have nice dinners once a month or become a millionaire and beyond. Right. Works. So number 4 is prefluencers and number 5 is bulk buys. So there's this— there's a lot of trickery in the marketing of book sales. Yeah. And what most people do, there's these like shady guys and I get hit up.

Oh my God.

There's a few of these shady guys that'll hit you up and be like, I will for $100,000, I'll get you on a list. Wall Street Journal. Yeah. Wall Street Journal list is gone, by the way. You know, is it? Yeah, it's gone. No. Yeah, it's gone. They sunsetted a few months ago. Wow. Okay. So what they do though is they— there's independent bookstores. Pardon me. And at these independent bookstores, if you— you can buy them across the country through these shady people and they'll facilitate it, then it'll get ranked on BookScan, which is like the book tracking site, tracking web company. And then that reports to Wall Street Journal, and then you make a list. And then guess what? Literally the week after the list, you're— they're not even ranked in at all because no one's buying your actual book. And so with my number 5 in terms of company sales, it's Who should actually buy the book that will distribute the book to their teams? I don't want books going in closets. I don't want books going in storage. I talked to some guy, he bought 1,000 books and it was in a storage unit and then it got thrown away. I'm like, I don't need the money. Like, I don't make money on this book. I want people to read it, take action, and change their own lives. And so in terms of the bulk sales, uh, it's, you know, there's a company clickup.com, you know, ClickUp. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Chris Cunningham, he's like, we're buying books, we're gonna give it out to our team and our customers. And there's other people like that. that have sponsored me in the past. And I'm like, instead of sponsoring me to be on my YouTube channel, can you sponsor me and then get books and distribute it to your customers?

Yeah, probably like $10,000, $20,000 worth. $5,000.

Not even that much. I mean, I don't— no one needs 1,000 books. Like, no one needs 1,000 of my book. They need one. And so with some of these companies, with Chris and some of them, it's like, can you buy 100 books? Giving out 100 books is pretty hard. So it's just making sure it's the right fit. Like, you know, one of the ways is like coworking spaces. The thing about coworking spaces, they have a lot of individuals, solopreneurs, they wanna grow their businesses.

Oh, this is for them.

So there's coworking spaces like in Barcelona, One Cowork or Sputnik ATX or VUCA, where I'm hitting 'em up and saying, could we buy some books? You give 'em out, maybe I'll give a talk and so forth.

Yep. I will say like, um, I'm sure you get hit up to speak all the time. Like they, they are the ones that will pay you the 10, 20, 50 grand or whatever, and they'll just buy like a, a ton of books.

Um, yeah, I'm not, not as interested in it. Like I got hit up to go to, was it Panama? Yeah. Do you know where Panama is? It's like south of the East Coast somewhere.

No, Panama is like, I think it's down like south of East Coast.

Yeah. Like we'll pay you $30,000. And I think for one, it is a lot. And like for people that don't see $30,000, it's a lot of money, but it's like, okay, I could probably do a YouTube video. And are they actually going to give the books out to people who really make a difference? Probably not. And so it's just being mindful around that. Like making a list is not as interesting as making an impact. I like, I like that.

That's a good one. Um, Dire Versus CEO, did you see what he was— he did with his book launch? He had like a whole video on it. He has like the, um, he, he did like a couple of gold-wrapped ones, and then if you get it, you, you get— he like, you get to fly out to him and like spend the day with him or whatever. And that was like a big marketing thing.

Yeah, I mean, I, I look at the top 100 books on Amazon. I haven't seen his there. Uh, and I— interesting. Do you?

No, I didn't even look at it. You're, you're in it right now.

No, I bought his book.

Yeah.

I bought it. No comment. I thought it was fine. Not even hating on it. I'm not hating on it.

Yeah.

I thought it was interesting. It was like someone like him who has a sizable audience. I was expecting more. I was expecting, if you think this book is as impactful, which I think his book is good. It's not— I'm not hating on that.

Yeah.

But I was expecting like, let's go all out. Like, leave nothing behind. Like, stack the deck. Like, all the chips in every— like, any cliché line I could say, I'll say. Yeah. And I wanted to believe that for how much effort we've put into testing the book, and we should talk about that, 'cause I think there'll be some interesting things for others to learn there, like using Silicon Valley in writing a book, that the book works. Like, it is my job by January 30th when this show comes out that I've done everything I can where I feel proud. I can't control the views, I can't control the sales necessarily, but I can control everything that I can do. And so I wanna feel that I've done everything possible to make it succeed.

Got it. So yeah, let's talk about that. I mean, let's talk about the Silicon Valley strategies you used to, I guess, push this thing out.

Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things that I think are gonna get copied in future authors. So for instance, chapter titles. When people do chapter titles, you write a title and that's it. No, we do, we have, we're a YouTube team.

Yeah, every one of your titles is like a, it's a hook.

It's a hook. They've been tested. So we actually went out, proposed different types of titles. So for instance, One of our titles was The Power of Asking. Went out and tested it, didn't do well. Change it to The Unlimited Upside of Asking. The Validation Challenge. Pretty good. The 48-Hour Money Challenge. Better. The last chapter, it was like Starting Again. Pretty good. Tested it 52 chances this year, which is, you know, there's weekends. So you have 52 weekends to make it, to change your life. So that was just kind of a small thing where you start realizing When you do a book, it's three years to finally put out just one thing that you can't really change. And so, how do you validate along the way? And that's literally what the Million Dollar Weekend is about. How do you not hope your business does well? You guarantee it does well. So, even with writing the book, it came from a blog post that was viral. That blog post, it was on Tim Ferriss's site about how I created a million-dollar business in a weekend. I remember. Yeah, that that blog post went viral. That was the premise of the book. So it was like, okay, this is already. It's already validated that this content is what people want. Now, in each of the chapters, one of the things we did, every chapter, and I can show it, it's super interesting. Every chapter had 20 different beta readers highlight and then you give 'em prompts. So like highlight what you like, put what's confusing and then skip everything else or put what you're not certain of. And it was insane. And if, as you read the book, you'll see like, oh, there's a lot of bold here. What is bolded is what the customer said, this is the most bold. And then you see that there's like page quotes. I don't know if you saw in your version. That's because that was the most popular thing that people were commenting on. And if you look at, we went and studied basically the popular business books of the past decade, and I have book reports on every single one. So in every single category, sales, business, asking, fear, I looked up things. And so page quotes, so people can take a photo of it and post on social media was something I saw in one of the books that we then learned from. And then you look at different things. One of the books we, you know, again, don't make it a surprise. Go work backwards from what success already is. Success leaves clues. I think that's a Tony Robbins quote. Success leaves clues. Go copy it. And in morning pages from The Artist's Way, Artist's Way is one of the best books for everyone out there. After you get Million Dollar Weekend, get Artist's Way. She has a contract. So the book originally, we tested a version at the end of chapter 1. It was like, write a journal, go write some journal thing. And I gave it to beta readers and they're like, I'm not journaling. I was like, okay. And in The Artist's Way, there's a contract with yourself that you're gonna take yourself seriously. And I was like, ooh, that's spicy. Can we make our own version of it?

I saw that.

That you can actually have a contract that says, all right, I'm gonna commit to this and here's the dream I wanna have by the end of this book. Okay, that's kind of interesting. So there was a lot of little things that we kind of copied from other people with our own spice. We tested out. With beta readers, as well as with titles, and then even the COVID itself. This is something I got from James Clear. I knew it was going to be Million Dollar Weekend. I already knew that title. Just it was one of these things I felt it. But the subtitles go back on my Twitter. You'll see all the subtitles were tested on Twitter and then on my email list. I basically looked at what people pull. I pulled them on Twitter. I posted my email, and then I looked at what they clicked. And then if they clicked, then I emailed them as well to say, "Hey, do you want to preorder the book?" Yeah. And then the COVID itself, which was fascinating, I think we had maybe 30 or 40 variations.

Wow.

We had a calendar version, we had different squiggly lines, we had all these versions. And so we put everything through A/B tests on Facebook ads. And this version with the finger snap, you know, I guess quick, some people are like, what's it— what's the hand doing?

48 hours.

48 hours quick. It was the winner. That was the one that won. But what was interesting was then testing the color variations. So the 2 tests I thought were interesting was color variations on Facebook. So blue, green, yellow, red, all the colors of the rainbow. And basically green and yellow and blue were the top performers. And by the way, you can, for these ads, if people are trying to understand what happens, you go on Facebook and do it in countries where the clicks are cheap. So we did 'em generally in India and Southeast Asia. And so it was about maybe $100 to run the test. It's not that hard. And you run all these tests and just say, show me the winner. Look which one has the highest click-through rate. And so, from there then, we took those 3 covers and I can show you the mockups. It's really cool. We mocked them up on Amazon bestseller list and then we mocked them up in bookstores. And it was really fascinating, actually. If you go to a business bookstore, which most people don't go to bookstores anymore, or Amazon, if you look at the colors of business books, they're all yellow or blue. Most of the business books today are yellow or blue. Why is that? Because that stands out a little bit. But now, when you go look at all the books, they're all the same color.

Yep.

And so, I went to the publisher and I was like, I want to do green because one, it's my signature color and I I love green and none of the other books are green. And you could see the mockups, like none of 'em are green. And they're like, no, it's bad luck. And I was telling you, you're like, I don't know. I, and I was like, no, I like the green and let's do green. So I was using a lot of Silicon Valley stuff where you're interacting with your customers, which is kind of obvious for every business, testing things, not just kind of leaving things to chance.

Well, so you have your book launch team, which that's like a, you know, hundreds of people, right? Who's helping you run all these tests yourself?

Is it you? So we have a full-time, again, CEO. So I have a full-time book marketer. So I hired this guy, Tommy. We had applications and it was basically like from May. So just to give you context, like the book is coming out on January 30th. We started marketing in May, coming up with the plan. And to be clear, a lot of times when you do marketing, you have to figure out what works. Not everything marketing works for everybody. Like AppSumo's YouTube channel doesn't work. Noah Kagan YouTube channel does work. AppSumo paid ads works really well. noahkagan.com paid ads does not really work well. And so, every business has a different marketing channel that may or may not work. And so, it was also figuring out these different things like, okay, this one's working, this is not working, let's do more of this. And so, figuring out what is actually going to work. But having Tommy, his name is Tommy Dixon, helping facilitate the tests. He's facilitating, like, we're doing VIP book boxes. So, it's a business in a box.

Yep, yep.

So, you get a dollar, which is how every business starts with $1. You get your own dollar, you get a pen, you get a hat, And so we're sending out VIP boxes, but he's facilitating a lot of this stuff.

And I'm assuming you're sending these VIP boxes to like people of influence who can, like when they're unboxing it, they're posting it to social and all that, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's also leveraging what we have access to. So I found someone who designed boxes at AppSumo. They've done other boxes. I was like, can you recommend boxes for us? Then I got them to recommend it, the box ideas, and we present it again to the launch team. We go to the launch team a lot and I ask them, I'm like, I love your help. And this is something that you can use in all businesses. It's like, how do you involve your customers in the process when you're creating content right now? For another example, when we're creating our YouTube content, Dylan, who's the new GM of the channel, every video now he's testing a ton of variations on our community tab on YouTube, and then he deletes 'em. So every video now there's like 5 different tests of what topics we can do. He'll see which one's most popular, take that, delete the rest, and then he'll come back and test more against that one.

Yep. I think the trend I've seen too, like one, you're really good at identifying the people that are up and coming, but also you're really good at identifying talent. So, you've worked on your YouTube channel with Paddy Galloway. He's worked with MrBeast. I guess the question is, how do you go about identifying the best talent to hire? Because I mean, it's the same across the board. You got the book pros, you got the AppSumo pros and— Yeah.

I don't think, to be clear, with our YouTube team, I think we have great, they're smart, great, hungry people, but I think we've provided the investment for the talent.

What do you mean by that?

Jeremy, who was running our channel and helped me take it from maybe 30,000 subs to a million subs, Jeremy was doing Instagram for Tom Bilyeu. That was his expertise, doing the Instagram page for Tom Bilyeu of Impact Theory. Shut up, Tom.

So that's how he grew Tom Bilyeu's page. He grew— I thought it was Gary Vee's team that did it or something.

I don't know about that part, but he did that. And so he came and said, this is how he got the job, which was interesting. He's like, I'm going to run your Instagram for free. Let me do it for 2 weeks and I'll show you what I can do. Like, okay, here's a chance. He did it and he crushed. And then as I told you, we were doing a lot of different things. I was like, no, we just have to do YouTube. And so he's good at YouTube and he liked YouTube. But then we hired Patty again, coming back to the same strategy I always apply. Who's an expert that we can then have coach someone who's hungry and excited to get these things? And now Jeremy is an expert himself.

Got it. Makes sense. How do you— I mean, you know, some people move on. Go ahead.

No. And the same thing with the book, right? So one, I love marketing, I love promoting. So I have some— I have a lot of experience in doing that. But with the book, it was like, who else has promoted other books? Vanessa Van Edwards, Ryan Moran, Charlie Hoehn. So I'll pay to get a meeting with them, or I've known them to say, hey, can you come— like Charlie Hoehn, can you come review our marketing plan? And Charlie's like, don't do this, don't do this, do that. And so just finding these people who've had the experience and gone through it that can then coach us around it.

Got it. And how about for your best people? How do you incentivize them properly? Like, I know some people offer like a profit share of the AdSense from the YouTube channel. Like, what are you doing, if anything?

Yeah. The counterintuitive way I like to pay people is just ask them how much they want to make and then help them get that. Yeah. So with Eamon, he wanted to make— I mean, I don't know if I can say his number— a lot. Millions. Yeah, I was like, how much you make is a lot. I was like, okay, let's get you there. Yeah, same with Sean, who's now head of revenue. He had a big number. I was like, okay, let's get you there. With the YouTube team specifically, I wanted Jeremy to have upside besides his salary, so I gave him 25% of the AdSense revenue and sponsorship revenue. Nice. Was there also— I'm not trying to make money on the YouTube— our YouTube channel, I think this year and last year lost a quarter million dollars each. Because we're not selling courses and we're not doing all this stuff. It's really to build an audience to help as well as promote the book or other things into the AppSumo business.

Hormozi likes to call it his money-losing media team. Is that how you see it too?

I don't think it's money-losing. I think it's an investment. It's, okay, so I've invested half a million dollars in the past 2 years, but one, 30 to 40% of people who buy from AppSumo know who I am. So there's clearly external benefits that I'm not directly counting for, within that. And I think definitely it's an investment than a spend.

Got it. I like that. A couple more questions as we work towards, towards wrapping the— what I mean, you've been a marketer for— we've both been marketers for a very long time. Very long. What has been timeless?

Hmm. Things that come to mind that are timeless is having goals with timelines. Mint.com, give me 100,000 users in 6 months. AppSumo.com, get me 100,000 our first year, 100,000 emails in a year. So having a very clear goal with a timeline has never changed. Prefluencers never changed. Find people that aren't market value. Most marketing opportunities are when other people don't know about it. When it's known, there's no it's a market, so there's no opportunity. So you have to find things that are not market, and a lot of prefluencers you don't pay market rates to sponsor or interact with them, and they're also excited to work with you. So that's something I've done at Mint. We AppSumo are number one channel right now to grow is affiliates. And most of that is through pre-fluencers. So we're sponsoring a lot of up-and-coming video creators to create content around tools and things around entrepreneurship. So that has not changed. Other things have not changed in marketing. I would say that most people get it backwards. And what they do is they think they have a marketing problem when they have a business problem. Hmm. And what I've noticed in marketing is that most people are like, yeah, I don't know why it's not working. How would you market it? And I was like, no one wants it.

Like, no one's watching. Can't polish a turd.

What?

Can't polish a turd.

You can't polish a turd. Well, I guess, can't you polish like coal into diamonds? Isn't that how that shit works?

Uh, yeah, but coal is like not a turd.

I don't know. I, I think coming back though, what's timeless is, are you actually solving a problem that people are excited about? Are you creating content that actually someone wants to watch? Are you sending a newsletter that people actually wanna read? Like, we have Sylvie on our team helps write the newsletter. It's a, she's really, really good. And she spends a lot of time writing a newsletter. But it seems like it's just like 3 things. It's very simple at noakagan.com, but it's simple. But it's, are you creating something that actually people want? And most times people think they have a marketing problem when it's really a business problem.

Yeah. Dude, that video that you did where you got on the plane with the billionaire, can you talk about that one? Is he a billionaire?

He messaged me later and he said he's worth 9 figures. He's like, I'm not at a billion anymore.

Okay. At least he's honest.

Yeah. He's still worth a fuck ton of money. What was interesting about that experience in that people hear business advice and they don't, they don't actually absorb it. When you find something that works, so the way that AppSumo approaches things is test and invest and double down. Everyone's kind of heard these things now, but no one actually is living it. And so what that means is that if you find content that works, if you find a sales strategy that works, if you've done something in the past that worked, how much are you doing of that? If you've done something in the past that got you customers, how much are you still doing that? And with our YouTube channel, we were desperate to get to our goal one year. We were at 170,000 subs and we had about 40 days left to get to 250,000. So I knocked on— we were basically like, we had nothing to do. We have to go something crazy. Let's try knocking on people's doors. 'Cause we were always curious what these rich people did in these houses.

Yep.

And that video went to a million and it helped us hit our goal. And so the whole point of what I was saying is, When we found that doing these kind of challenge videos, knocking on doors, going in the streets, going up to yachts, it's like, okay, these are working. Let's keep upping the game. Let's keep improving. Law of 100. Stick with it. Keep improving. So we kept doubling down on these videos and then we saw someone else do a private jet video, but they didn't get on. And we're like, dude, let's go find the next— like, how did someone get a private jet? What did they do? So let's go outside a private airport and see if we can get on a private jet. And I'll tell you the thing that's fascinating about these kind of videos is that it's not exclusive. Like, anyone could do that video. I didn't have some special ability or anything that not everyone out here can do themselves. And I was afraid. It's not that I'm— for literally about a month, I have anxiety.

Yeah.

Like, I don't want to do this. Why am I doing this? Aren't I already rich? Like, who— what am I doing this for?

Yeah.

Again, and every time I do it afterwards, I'm proud. And that's for someone to think about out there. It's like, what's a little bit of a thing you're afraid of that you can go face and be proud of for yourself?

Yeah.

Like, what is it? What do you think it is for you in dating, by the way?

What?

What is holding you back from dating? What's the hard thing that you're afraid of?

I think it's not wanting to be hurt anymore, but it's like, no, that's guaranteed no matter what. Even if you get with someone, if you die first or like they die, like you're still gonna get hurt, right? It's like I know already, but it just sits. Yeah.

How do you think you can face that?

Well, I think the answer is in front of me right now, which we'll talk about at lunch. It's already— I think it's there. It's always been a me problem, not necessarily anything wrong with them. I think it comes like, by the way, working with Jerry from Reboot, after the first year, I was like, dude, like I've written about my mom, I've talked about my mom 50% of the time. Like you realize everything comes from your childhood. And I think it's just like, you work to try to at least understand it or try to undo some of it. Yeah, so I think it all ties in with that.

Yeah, and it's facing these things and realizing we can overcome them, which you will. And the plane was no different. I was very afraid of doing it. I spent a month dreading it. And when you actually go face most of the fears, they're never as bad as you think. And so, crazy enough, it was me and Isaac, who's here helping film. We went outside the airport and we did plan. So when people see our videos, they don't realize that it's a month of also planning which airport, what time, what questions are we going to ask? Let's practice these questions so that if I go up to someone and I say, hey, can I come on your private jet? Probably not going to work.

Yeah.

But if I say, hey, my dream this year is to get a tour of a jet, do you think— is there any chance we could just take a view of your jet?

Yeah.

That's kind of an easier ask, right? And again, power of asking.

Yeah.

The unlimited upside. So if by thinking about it, preparing it, when I got outside, this is the craziest part. Definitely was dreading it, but I have rejection goals. I was like, all right, well, I'm gonna get rejected at least 10 times, make it a game. And I kid you not, within 5 minutes that guy pulled up.

Yep. Wow. So you didn't get a rejection yet?

We had 2 people before that said, no thank you, we're busy, but they were friendly. And I just stood outside just selling regular clothes. Again, I think what is missed out on, and they think Most people out there think that Hormozi or some of these guys have some secrets, and there's no secret. Where you are and where you're gonna be is closer than you think. And there's not some guru or something that's holding you back from where you can be. It's actually all inside of everyone and everyone can do it. And this video is, it shows that like I just stood outside the airport like anyone can do, or anyone can start an e-commerce business or start a service business or start a content business. And with James, I just said, hey, can I, can I come on your, can I, we're YouTubers. We'd love to come and get a tour from you. He said no. And then I chased him down a little bit. I was like, hey, are you sure? Is there— 'cause he kind of hesitated. I was like, is there any chance we could see the plane? And he said, sure. And that's been one of the most impressive things about asking is that the upside really is unlimited. We gotta go on a $100,000+ experience just by asking. And you also get to learn.

I remember that in that video. So he was driving and then you asked, he said no. And then he like stopped.

He kind of stopped. We were walking after him and he stopped and we're like, hey, you sure? He's like, Come on, I got to go, but come on. Yeah. And it was also interesting. There's so many interesting things about these kind of videos where if you saw him on the street, he was wearing a Miller High Life shirt. No way you could tell. You would never guess this guy's worth 9, maybe 10 figures at some point. Yeah. And so it's interesting about how much prejudice we have. And when you're doing sales, you're like, there's no way that person will buy from me. Says who? Go ask them. If you believe it's helpful, you're not selling them, you're helping them. And I thought, hey, can I ask if you'll share this experience with us? And he was excited to. And I actually still texted with text them to this day. Yeah. And it was definitely— this is probably the craziest part of the whole— not crazy, one of the craziest parts of the whole experience is that we get to Boston, me and Isaac, it's raining, and then we have to get our own, you know, commercial flights home. It was like $2,000. And the irony in the whole situation is I go back to Jeremy, the producer, and this is the cool thing about stand-up, like, Jeremy, we did it. We thought 50/50 we'd get on a plane. Yeah. We thought 10-25% we'd fly. And I tell Jeremy we did it, and he's like, okay, cool, we don't have enough content, so you have to go back tomorrow and do it again.

That's where all the other content came from. So that was after the fact.

Yeah.

Wow.

So I had to go back with Isaac. I got to, you know, do you have to or you get to? I got to go back, and we spent another 8 hours staying outside the airport, getting rejected and asking, and a few people were very generous and kind, uh, to show us their planes and let us, uh, make enough content to have the video.

Do they look at you like a bum sometimes? Because it's like, it's, it's, by the way, it's not like, it's not like you're like, I'm dressed normal, you're dressed normal, right? But it's like, we're not dressed in suits or anything. So when they look at you, do they sometimes like try to run away from you? Or like, what happens?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times, you know, when we do knocking on doors videos and people don't want to answer the door, and I don't, I don't blame them. I don't— it's a lot to ask someone else for coming on their plane or opening their door and then sharing a story.

Yeah.

But what we realized is that for every 8 rejections, you're one away from someone saying yes.

Yeah.

You're one away from someone— like, we, you know, when we did California, Newport Beach, getting house tours, making friends. Like, one of the guys I asked on the street, Michael Hudner, he owns ships and tankers. He did buying some of those. He took us for a sailing boat ride. We flew out to Rhode Island, and now he's a friend of mine. Yeah. And that's just because I asked him on the street, you know, what do you do for a living?

It's every no brings you closer to a yes. And you know what? I mean, let's go to the Newport one for a second. I remember watching that video. These videos are all entertaining. That's the thing.

Thanks.

And so, the— and you'll find that you would think maybe people watching, it's like most of these people are entrepreneurs, but that's not the case, right? Like a lot of people, they are entrepreneurs, but some people like they had a really good job and like, you know, they saved up money. Like what is it? What's the pattern that you've seen with these people with big houses?

The richest people are entrepreneurs. Yeah. Well, yeah, that goes without saying. No, I'm saying this is something to think about and this is something I've been— everyone should be an entrepreneur. If you take a step back and look, you can be an entrepreneur to make $1,000 or to make grocery money or make weekend money or make date night money. It doesn't have to be millions, but being an entrepreneur gives you control. The other thing with entrepreneurship that people miss out on besides control and creativity and fun is the upside is unlimited of entrepreneurship. The upside of your day job is a 6% raise a year. That's a good raise. The upside of the S&P market. Oh, wow. 12%. Crypto. Maybe you double. Yeah, maybe you go down double. Yeah. Entrepreneurship, literally fucking unlimited. Yeah. And so if you—

And you're betting on yourself.

You have control over it. Yeah. You have the ability, which everyone does. It's not exclusive to someone on YouTube that tells you about dropshipping or their content creation strategies or whatever it is. It's something that everyone has inside of them. And that's been really inspiring to me in entrepreneurship, where it doesn't have to be— I come from tech. It doesn't have to be tech. Larry Janesky, basements, rich. Michael Hudner, shipping, rich. Jan in Newport Beach, strawberries, rich. The other woman on the street, she opened veterinary clinics, rich.

There's a lot. They all have one thing.

Yeah. But continue. No, there's just so many different varieties. Of how people can get rich, that is all created from entrepreneurship. And then from them, we come back to the book from getting started. I am so grateful I started AppSumo 14 years ago, and I just got my first sale is $12. That's it. And that's all it takes is just getting the first dollar today, where today now I make millions of dollars a year. But that's because I just had one $12 sale, and all these other people did the same in so many other varieties. Like one of my my dream guest right now, people ask who I want to meet. I want to meet the urinal guy. You know, when you pee in urinals, there's these, like, urinal circles.

And the little bumblebee.

There's one of the companies called Ecos.

Yeah.

And I'm just like, how did you get into urinals? Like, there's so many cool ways to get rich. It's just finding the thing you're interested in doing, validating it, following a process, and then sticking with it over a period of time and using, you know, certain marketing things to be able to grow that.

You know, there's the Bill Gates quote. I think it's like, think in decades, not years. But now as I get a little older, it's just like, you know what? Like, forget about thinking in like one decade. It takes like multiple decades to build something generational.

Yeah, Larry Janesky, the guy, he does $650 million a year with basements and he's like, I'll just never quit. And it's very hard to lose if you never quit and he just stuck with it.

That's the guy that started the basements like when he was in college, right?

19 years old. No, didn't grow up wealthy, anything like that. Just started building houses and he failed at that and tried to figure it out and eventually tried the basement thing. He was like, oh, this is working. But again, coming back to like Sam Parr, to you, to me, to a lot of these other people that are successful, They're in the arena swinging. They're experimenting. They're trying. Doesn't mean it works out that weekend, but you have 52 weekends to make a difference, which especially now having a kid, I will say I'm noticing my time is much more limited. I'm like, holy shit, I want to be done by 6 to be with my girl and my baby. Isn't that weird?

Okay, so I feel that now without being in a committed relationship and having a kid, but it's like, I'm going to stop at 6. It's weird, right?

Yeah, I think what I pray and hope for everyone is finding work that you look forward to on Mondays. I've had that opposite. I had an Intel job where I hated, basically I hated 7 days a week, but I really hated Sundays and I really hated Mondays. And it was only through nights and weekends specifically that I was starting conference businesses. I've never done a conference. I didn't know anyone. It was starting networking events. It was building collegeup.org, which totally failed. It was building all these different things that failed that eventually led me, you know, years later to find something that succeeded.

Yep. I love that. Couple more questions.

Yeah, man.

Your content team right now, what are you— so I usually ask this question like, so, you know, the Codys, the Alex, the Laylas, they're spending anywhere from $100,000 to $200,000 a month on their content team. What does that look like for you? How's it structured?

Yeah, I don't know. How much are we spending on a team? I think our budget for salaries is about half a million a year. Do you wanna just break down the team? Yeah, sure. So my number one priority is YouTube. So we have a thumbnail designer, we have Patty who's like a YouTube consultant. Jeremy's now a YouTube consultant. We have a full-time video editor, we have a full-time, part-time Shorts editor. Then we have Dylan who's kind of the channel general manager. Then there's Sylvie who's our director of operations. So she's kind of keeping everything together. She's like, hey, you need to do this. Hey, we need to do that. Then there's Jay, the 17-year-old who lives with his mom and dad. I think I have to get him like a chaperone permission slip when he comes on the team retreat.

Like entry.

Yeah. Jay is running our Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. And that, that's the team right now. Yeah. So maybe it's like 7 or 8 people, about half a million dollars a year that it takes to run all these different things.

Yeah. And continuing to, I guess the other question would be like, it's scaling really well right now. How much time are you spending on YouTube per month right now, you think?

It varies a lot. The way that we've approached it is how do we batch it? So for instance, that California knocking on doors video was basically a 3-day intense shooting session that got us basically like 3 or 4 films. So we went to San Diego, did an Airbnb one, then we came here to do Manny and David Lee, and then I knocked on doors, and that was basically all within 3 days that created 2 months of content. The reality is I'm not a full-time content creator. Like, my number one thing— well, number one thing is my girlfriend and my baby.

Yeah.

But number 2 is AppSumo.

Yeah.

And so, AppSumo pays my bills. That's my business model, which is this— the store for software deals. And so, I can't prioritize content over that.

Do you think it's 80/20?

It's even less than that. I think it's probably like 90/10.

Yeah.

But it's being— you know, the thing I would say that's interesting for others out there is figure out what's the model that works for you. So, for instance, when I started YouTube, Our strategy was 3 videos a week, every week. And we put out 150 videos our first year, and one of those videos went viral, which was knocking on doors. And so the strategy that works for us this year is we put out 2 videos a month, but those videos are really solid videos. Like when you watch it, you're like, oh, these are really good. It's like, yeah, there's only 2.

Yeah.

And each video, if you look at it from a salary perspective, like each video is maybe $30,000, $40,000 to make. Not including my salary. Like the videographer, the editor, the thumbnail designer, the channel manager.

Do you think, I mean, the challenges are what works and then also the interviews, that seems to be kind of the sweet spot for you now.

Yeah, so our 2 content buckets, and this is something that everyone needs to think about, is like, what's your content strategy? Like on Twitter, on whatever, try to basically have 1 or 2 things you're known for. So for me, it's asking old rich people really, like their regrets and how they got there. So, and specifically billionaires. So we have the, Do you know how many billionaires are in the world? 3,000? Yeah, 3,000. So we have the list. Here's the 3,000. How do we get them? Work backwards. And so because a lot of people now can copy the millionaire level, let's do billionaires. So a lot of our content, like we have the inventor of the Ethernet, he sold his company for billions. So he's coming out and then we're going after other billionaires. And then these challenge videos are another bucket for us, which is like jets, first-class passengers. Those videos are getting copied a lot more. Because anyone can do it, and so it's figuring out the next bucket, which is most likely going to be how we like everyone should think about what's your unfair advantage. Yes. What is it that you can create content around? Maybe it's in your country, maybe it's in your language, maybe it's because who you know that no one else can copy. No one else can copy AppSumo. No one else can copy Million Dollar Weekend. And so we're creating content that's more how do we run the business? We just did some videos doing Million Dollar Weekend where the guy came and lived with me. So, it's a little bit like our challenge videos, but it's trying more branded, like educational videos that only we can really be doing because no one else has access to AppSumo and the businesses we have.

Yeah. The only thing I think I would challenge is that you, like for example, the billionaire, the jet video that you were in, right? Like because of the scar tissue you have, the experience that you have, you're able to ask questions at another level, whereas other people can't. And I think that's a unique advantage.

It is. Yeah, and you should take advantage of that. Like, I run literally an $80 million a year, almost $100 million a year business. Like, we've done a quarter billion dollars in sales in the past few years, which is crazy. No one else has that, right? Like, or they're not making videos about it. And so think about what your advantages are. The other thing that's really important for everyone to really take away for themselves is now, not how. I started with my phone, just a phone that everyone has. Everyone, every single person watching has some phone or iPad or tablet. You can go make the same kind of video and build up to that, but you have to start. Like, my first video was knocking on doors, which was just like knocking on— hey, do you mind coming? And yes, over time then we notice what stuff is working. We get better cameras, we get better lighting, we get maybe 2 videographers. But that's because we started with me shirtless in my house just getting going. And that leads up to these things. But everyone has to get going. Like, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is how do we thank ourselves for the future? I thank my past self. Like, thank your future self. Like, what are you gonna do today that 5 years from now Eric will say, thank God I got the girl?

Yeah.

For you, it's gonna be a girl. Like, thank God I took my dating seriously. For me, thank God I was an entrepreneur so that I can now have time to be a good father. That's what I'm thinking. I'm gonna thank myself now for in 5 years that I'm getting healthy. Like, I'm making time with my schedule. So in 5 years, my child, maybe I have 2, who knows? As my, you know, as you're gonna be babysitting a lot. It's like, hey, you did a great job prioritizing, but it's starting now to be able to thank me later. So, I think for everyone out there, what will you thank yourself for doing today? Future gratitude. Yeah.

I like that. Dude, I'm just looking at the math now. Like it's— so, you're spending 90/10. Maybe it's like 5% to 10% of your time on content. For me, it's more like 2.5% to 5% of my time. But I mean, just to double down on what you're saying, like you do have to understand like your content box. Or what you're unique— like, I've done hundreds of these interviews. I'm just like, why don't I just go back to doing that? And like, you know, what I'm trying to get at now is like, YouTube is interesting to me because I was talking to another YouTuber and he's like, there's this concept of YouTube jail, right? And I don't know if you agree or disagree with this, but he's like, look, you got to think of yourself as an employee of YouTube. Like, if you're not consistent, you keep talking about different things, like, you're not a reliable employee and therefore you don't deserve the reach. How do you feel about that? Do you feel like you're in jail? For any period of time. Take—

zoom out though. So you know who wins? Who wins really with YouTube?

Go with MrBeast.

No, YouTube.

Well, yeah, YouTube's winning.

Yeah. So what's the takeaway there for all of us to think about?

How YouTube's incentivized.

Even beyond that, how do you create the platform that others try to win on?

By—

Think about creating platform businesses. That's the winner. Okay, we're all like fighting for some nickels and pennies while they're getting billions.

Yep.

AppSumo. I'm not trying to create software. I'm creating the platform for software creators to promote their products to solopreneurs. So, for others out there, like, what other platforms can you be creating? Maybe it's for lawn care, maybe it's for agencies, maybe it's for other things. Because now it's like, oh, I got some dollars, I get some audience. Yeah, and that's great. And there's all these businesses that are coming out of it, but the real winner is YouTube. So, go buy Google stock. That's how you're actually gonna approach it. Now, in terms of your question on like getting into it, Yeah, we're fighting over scraps, I would say. And how do you get off the treadmill? How do you get off the treadmill? And for us, it's doing it sustainably. Our goal is 10 years. So I wanna do content for 10 years. And what I've realized by that is I have to make content I want and what the audience wants over a very long period of time. Like if I only do these jet videos, like that feels like jail. 'Cause it's like—

You get bored.

Boring is success, by the way. The more bored your business is, the more money you're making.

With business, definitely.

And so, it's how do I do it, the boring stuff and enjoy it over a very long period of time? And that's a balance in these videos because I don't, you know, I want to be home for my family. I can't, I don't want to go fly to places to make a video all the time. And so, it is balancing that and figuring out how do I do the 10-year approach of it.

Got it. How about, you've interviewed a handful of these billionaires now. So, everything in life is pattern recognition, right? So, What are the patterns that you've seen? Billionaire patterns.

A lot of them don't seem happy. A lot of them don't actually seem happy. Only I could speak, I would speak for John Paul DeJoria, the founder of Paul Mitchell. He seemed really content. And I believe he's content from a few reasons. And this is the billionaire that that I aspire to be. He's not only working so much that he has no family. A lot of the guys do say like, I work so much, I didn't get to be there for my kids and I don't want that. So one, he balances time. Number 2, this is really fascinating. He picked, he actually only has like one shampoo and tequila. It's actually, what he said was just get something you really believe in and that is the best and make sure it's a product that people need to buy time and time again. that they need every day or every week or every month and be in the reorder business.

Yeah.

And I love the simplicity that's available for everyone as well, that he found something he truly wanted and believed was the best. And then that is what he went after. And the last thing I would say from him, that's a billionaire secret, that this is something that is kind of like a subtlety. And John Paul DeJoria was exceptional at it, is get good at sales, get exceptionally good at asking. Really is what he's saying. And when I met with him, and I think it's in the video, I'm bald. You know, he took his his hair softener product. It's like, let me just put it on your head. Let's put it on your head. Rub it in your hands. You feel that in your hands? How's it feeling? Oh, that feels. Oh, that feels. Smell it. Rub that on your head. How's your head feel? Great. You interested in some bottles? Yeah. I literally went home and bought bottles for my girlfriend. She loves her Paul Mitchell. And so, I think a billionaire thing from him was how do we get better at asking and selling in general?

Because that's what you're doing no matter what your business.

And then I'd say the last thing, the last thing I'd say from him in terms of billionaire patterns is how are you being actually kind? Like, he sold Patron for $3.5 billion and he's like, the first thing I did was write a $50 million check. And, you know, coming back to dating and all this stuff, he didn't seem like he was chasing more money or more attention. He's like, I got all this money, this is great, and I'm just content with it. And I'm gonna figure out how to be kind and generous with what I already have.

Yep. Dude, I think that's a great place to wrap. We can go on forever, but Noah, thanks for— I mean, this has been an amazing one. This is probably the longest one we've had so far. So well done. What's the best way for people to learn more about what it is that you're up to?

milliondollarweekend.com. There's going to be templates, walkthroughs, videos from how do you find your ideas? How do you actually make sure that the business model, the market's a million-dollar market? How do you do your own 1-minute business model and more at milliondollarweekend.com?

Cool. No, thanks so much for doing this.

Namaste.