The Exchanges

Q Yeah. Can you talk a little more about like the first year of AppSumo? Cause I imagine like now it's must be easy. You know, you have this massive audience, people know AppSumo, um, but like the first year I can imagine.

A Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh dude, it gets harder. I thought it, you know, there's a, what's his name? Jim, Jim Roth, Jim Rome quote. It's like, yeah, it doesn't get, it doesn't get, uh, easier. You just get better. And I like that a lot cause it doesn't get easier. Just your, your problems get harder and you get better at it. Um, the first to be in, look, our narratives of our mind are all liars. Like our, like how we reminisce and things is total lies. Like we just totally changed the history to sue, sue whatever purpose and whatever moment we're in. Um, but the way I recall it to the best of my ability, and I looked at revenue of it recently and it's been 12 years. So our first year revenue is 300,000. And that was me truthfully, just by myself. I really wanted a business where I was like, I don't want to have a developer. I'll do it myself. Don't want to have support. I don't want to have anybody to fucking depend on initially. Now I can't do without these, the team. And it was just like kind of where I think one of the key things that, that people miss in business in general is they're not working backwards from their customer very specifically. So that's what I literally just once a month, I didn't do a lot of work. I probably worked about like, I don't know, 10:20 hours a month. I would be like, all right, I want to reach Y Combinator audience. What are the products that I c…

AI assessment note: “So our first year revenue is 300,000. And that was me truthfully, just by myself.”

Q Well, you have a good story around how you lost a million dollars not listening to customers. Can you, can you share a little bit about that?

A Yeah, there's, I heard Chris Williamson talk about this, where there's a success, success bias, where just cause you do something good, you think you know everything good, right? And you forget also maybe how the beginnings are and the beginnings are always the same, right? Find something people really want and you deliver it to them. And then you do that again and again and again and again. And, uh, you know, you hear, you go on Twitter and everyone's got this playbook they've shared and then you realize they're selling you a course. It's like, Hey, here's how I bought a real estate business. Here's how I did my marketing. Oh, by the way, in the bio, there's a, Link for life mastery course, two 97. And, um, you know, in the, I guess I'd say as an operator in the trenches, you know, running, uh, an e-commerce site at AppSumo, I stopped listening to the customer really well and listening to the team. And we, we had, we have about 600 products on AppSumo software deals at any time. And a lot of them are like the latest ones, like, as you said, cast magic. And so we thought, Hey, if you 10 X it, cause you see on Twitter that 10 X-ing is the way, uh, that we 10 X our business. And so I very quickly ran in the wrong direction. We went from, and so we had to hire more people on sales, on operations, on the marketing. And then we went from, and then the engineering team built all this…

AI assessment note: “we went from 600 to 13,000 products within six months on the site”

Q Um, and is that because you're one of those people? So you just find it easier to sell to one of those people?

A Yeah, because I know what's a good price for myself. You know, like there's Calendly for like 10 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month. You don't use it that often, and the text, like, frankly over bloated. So we launched tidycal.com maybe two years ago, and that's doing 3000 dollars in profit a day at 29 dollars for life. And the economics make sense, and we do have a team that keeps supporting it, but if we stopped, I'm pretty sure it would stay around the 3000, if not 2500 dollars a day in profit. And it's a great entry point into the AppSumo ecosystem, which is why we build our original products. Other, I'm looking at, the team pulled together other ideas, uh, This is interesting. So Zapier competitors. So integration platforms as a service. So I think there's, there's still a lot of room around, like how do all these separate software products talk together? Uh, again, for everyone out there, who do you already have access to or audience of that you can then easily try to sell these tools? Cause I think so many times people build it and they're like, well, I'm going to go on Twitter now and be like Greg and Noah, and then hope customers just magically come, or I'm going to spam DM them. And that just doesn't work. Or if it does, it's going to take a very long time.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, because I know what's a good price for myself.”

Q So what's your, like, where do you think, what is the state of SaaS right now? Like, where, where are the opportunities in SaaS? Is it to basically look at the DocuSigns of the world and be like, I'm gonna out-compete them in, in pricing? Or is it looking at Replacing teams and thinking about how do I use AI to create new, new SaaS using AI?

A It all starts with the customer. And that's where most people I see on Twitter getting wrong, like, and people, you know, and especially if you're an engineer, right? You think, all right, what's the solution now I can use with this new cool tech? And no one cares about your tech and no one cares about your solution. They care about their problems. And so that, that's not what I always come back to, which is what are the problems that people are either spending money or time on ideally yourself? And then what are, what's tech maybe that can assist with that? So, you know, you can go to AppSumo and it's a really interesting insight into what's popular in software, what's becoming popular. So I'm just looking at the website today as well. We're seeing a lot of no-code platforms still super popular. People are looking for more solutions around that. Chatbots that just do it for you. You see them now, and it's going to be exciting where, do you ever use these bots and they're so annoying? It's just like the bot is so annoying. It's like a, it's, I don't know, I don't want to make a joke here, but There's going to be bots of the future. And I definitely think we'll see where you're not sure who you're talking to. And that's just not obvious when people are going to think of, but again, with all these things, I would try to think about who do I have access to or who is it easy for me…

AI assessment note: “We're seeing a lot of no-code platforms still super popular... Chatbots that just do it”

Q I mean, you're writing a book, right? You decided to write a book when you could have written, like you have 10 chapters, whatever you couldn't, you could have written 10 blog posts. Like you went the opposite way.

A Well, I think that's what I think about books where you, I wrote in, you know, in your pre doc, which I thought was great in terms of opportunities or trends or niches. I don't know all some of the same to me, which is like there's everyone's going into podcasting and YouTubing, Twittering, but to write a unique book does take a long time, right? It does take a long time and there's not as many of them out there. So just something that, uh, I did that, thank God four years ago, which led me to where I'm at today with this book. But I think in general, I don't think everyone, Andrew Chen said so many years ago, he's like, you don't have to innovate a lot. You just have to do one thing. Cause I think we have to, we imagine like, well, I've got to innovate the book and then the marketing. It's like most of that stuff has been solved. Just find one part of the 10 to innovate. And I've really embraced that over the years.

AI assessment note: “everyone's going into podcasting and YouTubing, Twittering, but to write a unique book”