Noah Kagan shares what he learned at Facebook: surround yourself with stronger people, obsess over details, and pick one clear goal for the year. Display it on a dashboard and break it into daily actions to simplify decisions and accelerate growth.
Hey, I'm Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo of AppSumo.com, also former employee of Facebook and Mint.com and writer of marketing@okdork.com so the.
Key takeaways for me, number one, I've always known you to be really curious. In fact, just a couple days ago we were hanging out and I mentioned something about my students and you said, why do you call them students? And that's an interesting thing because you're genuinely curious. You didn't ask it to be judgmental. You were like, why do you call them students? And you also go the second step, which is you're curious and then you actually ask the person whether they're in front of you or you email this company. And most people don't do that. It's like it's hard to be curious when you're not curious. So if you're curious, that's step one and then step two is to make that actionable. And in my experience when you do that, you tend to get more curious. Oh, this company told me this, why'd they say that? Let me email that company. And all of a sudden you start to get this fascinate. You're in the middle of everything. So, alright, at Facebook you work with Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, you were there in the early days. Tell us about that.
I mean it was insane, man. Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, Dustin Moskovitz, Billionaires now, all billionaires. Yeah, they have like bodyguards and all this kind of crap. They mansions and R8s. And one of them was complaining how he just got his boat, his like boat yacht area approved. I was like, you know, and you know, it's really interesting to reflect on that time period because it was so insane and I was the most insecure, I was the most self conscious on a daily basis because I'm around literally like Stanford people, Harvard people, Yale elite, like these people that went to Exeter, like top the top three boarding private schools for high schoolers. And you know, I think a lot of people, you know, most of your students, I would say just as well as yourself, we all feel smart. And so to be put in a place where every day I'm feeling retarded, like I'm actually feeling like, wow, I am definitely the dumbest shit here. Sucked. It sucked. And I was noticing and I think one of the things that's really powerful for people is awareness. And I was aware recently when I was thinking about it, that was my biggest growth period of my life. Why I'm gonna like chills it was the biggest growth period because I was challenged the most. It was the biggest growth period because I was around much better people. And you people always say you're the average of five people. Bullshit. Right? Everyone hears it. But until you experience it and feel it, do you not realize, like, how much better that actually makes you?
So, so give us an example.
I mean, tons of examples, right? So we would have. They'd literally have like an hour discussion about a font. They would have a discussion for maybe hour to a few hours about where to link the text. Mark would come over and remove things that we just spent two weeks building. And, you know, they would. The level of thought. Like one thing, it was a Stanford guy. I said, oh, we should hire dumber people so that we can really understand our users because our users are so dumb. And he's like, we should actually hire smarter people so we can understand what they don't even know they know. And I was like, God, you're smart. Stanford people are really good. And it was definitely an impressive time period where I got to be around people that are stronger in design that stronger in web product. And a lot of the things that I do today are from that time period. Like my attention to detail for a website or like, this is something very obtruse. I always look at the copyright on the bottom of websites to see if it's copyright 2014 now because a lot of people don't pay attention. And that was only through being a part of Facebook.
So it's a very formative time for you. Sounds like one of your biggest takeaways was just attention to detail, surrounding yourself with the best. Because they know things that the average person will never encounter.
Yeah.
Any other takeaways?
I'd say the biggest takeaway that's made me the most successful and the most money is one thing. And that one thing is when you are running your business, have one goal. That's it.
You are the master of this. I want to talk about this. So how did it manifest itself?
Well, specifically what it does. And there's probably one other thing which I would say, and its purpose. And we'll talk about that a little bit. But when I went to Mark, I would go with specific ideas and I'd say, mark. Oh, Mark, I'm Jewish. We gotta make money. Mark. Well, you're Jewish too. But like, we're not gonna be making any money. We don't like, where's our business model? Like, my mom wants to know, she wants you to be on Oprah. And Mark said no, does it help us grow? I said, an idea where we should sell tickets on the event pages or let's do these different ideas. And he's like, does it help us grow? And his clear focus on that goal united everyone to say, it helped us clarify every decision, hey, this feature does help us grow. You don't do it. Does it help us get to our goal? Yes, do it. And that just really united the team around what we're really trying to accomplish. And that's something that, you know, with OkayDoor.com what's our goal? 50,000 email subscribers this year. AppSumo.com, what was one of our major goals was half a million email subscribers. We had a course monthly, 1K that was 3,000, 333. Now with Sumome.com, it's our free marketing tool this year, our only goal. That's our only goal this year is to get to 1 billion people. And what we've done personally, and what I'd recommend for any of your students that's been very, very effective is that we have our major goal. I wouldn't pick longer than a year. I just think anything. It's too far out. I think 30 days is too short. One year for me has been the ample amount of time to accomplish it. And. And then what I actually do is break that down on a monthly and daily basis. So we have one dashboard, and it just shows a billion, and then it shows, what do we do today? And then I have it mapped out. I'm like, all right, this week, we needed to be hitting 600,000 people. And I see we're at 500,000. And only because I'm looking at the number and it's only one number, I could be like, well, what do I need to do this week to go from 500 to 600? What are the three things I could do this week? And just simplifying that decision down. It sounds so obvious, but so many people ask, what's their goal? Like, well, I kind of want retention.
I want more revenue.
I need it. I'm like, well, what's your one goal? And then it's actually, they can start picking that. Then they can start mapping that kind of process out.
