Insight
Kagan: Pair elite fractional advisors with hungry junior internal employees
“We go and look at who did the thing at this company that's ahead of us. And then we pay that person a lot of money per hour. And then we hire a more junior person who cares probably a little bit more about AppSumo. And then they, it's kind of a nice, nice merg…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kagan predicts Google Analytics will be disrupted and lose significant market share
“So one of the easy ones I think is going to easily get its ass kicked is Google Analytics.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Kagan bets his new DocuSign alternative will make $1M within a year
“And then I believe, I would bet, I'll bet a million dollars, it'll make a million dollars in a year.”
Insight
Kagan: The best compensation method is asking hires what they want to make
“I think the best way to pay people is ask them how much they want to make.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook to meet women, not for billions, says Kagan
“Like Mark didn't start Facebook. I'm going to be a billionaire. It's like, ah, let me see if I can meet some chicks online. If we're honest. Right. And I worked for him. So I know that stuff.”
Disclosure
AppSumo's TidyCal generates $3,000 per day in profit on lifetime pricing
“So we launched tidycal.com maybe two years ago, and that's doing 3000 dollars in profit a day at 29 dollars for life.”
Opinion
Kagan: Significant market opportunity remains for Zapier competitors and integration platforms
“I think there's still a lot of room around, like how do all these separate software products talk together?”
Insight
Kagan: Founders only need to innovate ten percent of a new project
“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.…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Scaling AppSumo to 13,000 products dropped gross margins from 50% to 30%
“And so we went from 600 to 13,000 products within six months on the site and our revenue stayed the same, but our profit went down, right? Because now we have different margins. So some products have Better margins than others. So we went from normally like a …”
Insight
Kagan: All my successful ventures gained initial traction within a weekend
“And I've noticed with all of my successes, they have started fast. Like that's what I, you know, weekend, if not sooner.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kagan reveals AppSumo reached $80M in annual revenue as a bootstrapped business
“Once they start working, you know, for AppSumo, it was like, we did some of you, it worked right away. It was like first year, 300,002nd year, three million, but then it was flat, you know, for a few years. Like 4,000,004 1,000,005 1,000,004. Then it started p…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kagan observes it takes an average of 20 years to become a billionaire
“These billionaires, they all took 20 years. I was looking at all of the ones I've interviewed and the ones I've worked for. It's about 20 years you ever take on average for them to make a bill.”
Disclosure
AppSumo collects payments upfront and pays software partners 60 days later
“We don't have to hold any inventory on anything, and we promote a thing you created, someone else created, and some software creator. We get the money up front, and then we pay them 60 days later.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
AppSumo has been profitable since day one without venture capital
“I think more with raising money, we never really had a good use for it because we did have capital and we were profitable from day one.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bootstrapped AppSumo generates annual revenues in the high eight figures
“Like, you know, our revenues are in the eight, you know, very high eight figures.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kagan: Publishers avoid green business book covers due to industry superstition
“What was really interesting, if you go look on Amazon or a bookstore, there's no green business books. Which is kind of funny given that a lot of business is about money. They think it's taboo or bad luck, but we tested it and I also like the color myself.”
Assertion Supported
Kagan: Castmagic reached $1M ARR in less than a year
“There's a tool on AppSumo called CastMagic. I think in less than a year, they had a million ARR.”
Disclosure
Kagan pre-sold $3,000 of a DocuSign alternative in 48 hours
“And so in 48 hours, I was able to sell 3000 dollars worth without using any social media or any of my email list. And in pre-sales to a DocuSign alternative for life, which will launch in 30 days on AppSumo.”
Disclosure
Kagan: AppSumo uses Howdy.com to hire vetted South American developers
“We use howdy.com. Have you seen them? So they give you, they hire South American developers and employees, but they do all the vetting and they just make it stupid easy for you to have full-time dedicated staff in an area. So we're on our absolute originals pr…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kagan: MaryMakery generated $50,000 in its first year selling greeting cards
“I just talked to someone who read million dollar weekend. Her name's Mackenzie. I got to give her a shout out. Mary makery.com. You know, if everyone's going one direction, so she's a greeting card business, 50,000 dollars her first year.”
Disclosure
Kagan reveals AppSumo's roster of fractional advisors from top tech companies
“Almost everyone in leadership gets a person. So Anna who runs people, we have Christine, who's the chief people officer from Duolingo. Moody Glasgow was the CMO of Zapier and Glassdoor. He does marketing. There's a guy named Colin Gardner. He does revenue. So …”
Disclosure
Kagan spent $1M in cash promoting AppSumo's expanded product catalog
“And then I decided to also spend a million dollars cash to promote that we have all these new products on AppSumo.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Only six of Kagan's 1,300 book launch team members made a referral
“Like, we tried for the book, I did a referral program. Like, hey, if you, I had a launch team for the book. And I was like, all right, bring one person. So there's a 1300 person launch team. And I said, if you could bring one person, I'm going to do a dedicate…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Kagan's early Facebook hockey app hit 1M users in a week
“So I copied the most popular app in, in one category that had the least competition, which was a soccer app. And I made a hockey app and I chased it and it went viral a million users in a week. And then I launched a bunch and then Naval wanted to fund me and o…”
Noah Kagan