AppSumo will do around $100 million in revenue this year.
Bootstrapped, no VC money. And the whole thing started in 48 hours with $50, a WordPress site, and a PayPal button.
I went through Brett Malinowski's two-hour interview with Noah Kagan so you don't have to, because the story of how Noah Kagan built AppSumo is the single best argument I know against waiting until you're "ready" to launch. Noah can barely code. He got fired from Facebook. His first startup's customers treated him like trash.
Thirteen years later he pays himself around $3 million a year in cash.
Here's the full story, with every number he shared.
Fired by Facebook, Employee #4 at Mint
Before AppSumo, Noah's resume looked incredible on paper and felt terrible in real life.
He was employee #30 at Facebook, working under Zuckerberg. Nine months in, they fired him. He spent years afterwards chasing success just to prove them wrong (his words: "I'm still mad that they did it").
Then he became employee #4 at Mint.com, running marketing. Mint sold to Intuit for $170 million in 2009. Noah had quit before the sale and walked away from roughly $1.7 million in equity.
So he started his own thing: Gambit, a payments company for Farmville-style games. It made money. He hated it.
Customers would string him along for months ("come back in four months"), squeeze him on rates, then treat him like trash anyway. His takeaway from that era is one I'd frame and hang on the wall:
→ Notice what you'd do for free. Noah didn't care about payments. But promoting a deal on software he loved? "Sign me up, I'll do it for free all day long."
That's the itch AppSumo scratched.
The 48-Hour, $50 Launch Playbook
The origin of AppSumo is not a grand vision. It's a copy job plus one clever email.
In 2010, MacHeist was doing bundle deals for Mac apps and Humble Bundle was doing it for games. Noah's entire insight: nobody was doing it for web tools.
He didn't write code for it. He set up a WordPress site with a PayPal button and spent about $50 to get live inside a weekend.
The smart part was how he found customers. He worked backwards:
- Who already has my customers? Lifehacker, the tech productivity blog of that era.
- What do those readers already want? He went through every single page of the blog and listed the five tools they mentioned most.
- The ask: he cold-emailed Lifehacker: "If I can get these tools at a discount, would you write about it?" They were already covering those tools. The answer was basically pre-loaded.
- Then the supply side: he went to the software companies and said "I'm putting together a bundle for this blog, want in?" Once one said yes, he asked them who else should be in it. MailChimp pointed him to FreshBooks. Referrals did the rest.
The order is the lesson. He validated demand (a blog that already promotes these tools), lined up distribution, and only then built the "product," which was a page with a buy button.
Most of us do the exact opposite. I've written before about founders who quit their job to build a startup and spend six months on the product before anyone can pay them. Noah's version cost $50 and one weekend.
The One Piece of Advice That Made It a Machine
Early AppSumo was bundles. And bundles were brutal.
Each one took about a month to assemble. It sold for $50. Margin: around $10. Noah was grinding a full month for what amounted to a bad hourly rate.
His adviser and close friend Andrew Chen (now a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz) looked at it and asked the obvious question: why bundle at all? Split them up. Do one deal a week.
That single reframe is the AppSumo you know today: a marketplace running software deals, one after another, forever. Over 13 years they've promoted Dropbox, Mailchimp, FreshBooks, Optimizely, and Udemy before those names were names.
The pitch to software partners is pure math. Noah breaks it down in the interview:
→ Getting a SaaS customer with ads costs you a few hundred dollars.
→ So charge your LTV. If a customer is worth $300 over their lifetime, a $300 lifetime deal on AppSumo gets you that customer's value upfront, plus exposure, with zero ad risk.
Deals went from one-year, to three-year, to five-year, to lifetime, because that's what buyers actually wanted. If you're thinking about running one for your own SaaS, I broke down the real revenue math in my piece on lifetime deal launches.
AppSumo even eats its own cooking. They built TidyCal, a $29 lifetime Calendly alternative, as a wedge against a subscription giant. Two months of Calendly, one payment, done.
The $1.5M Domain and the Worst Three Years
Not everything in this story compounds up and to the right.
Around 2014, AppSumo was printing money from email, so Noah built Sumo.com, an email capture tool. Tim Ferriss used it. Pat Flynn used it. The badge was everywhere.
Two details from that era stuck with me.
First: the domain. Sumo.com was owned by the third largest newspaper in India. Noah followed up every single month for seven years until they sold it to him for $1.5 million. Seven years of monthly emails for a domain.
Second: the cost. Noah handed AppSumo to his teammate Chad with a "you run the company then" and left for about three years to do podcasting and build SendFox. He calls that stretch some of the worst years of his life. Not because the projects failed, but because he'd walked away from the thing that was actually working, chasing the next shiny startup story.
He came back as CEO. He's still there.
(There's a lesson in the gap between those two details: the follow-up persistence that got him sumo.com is exactly the persistence he almost didn't apply to AppSumo itself.)
How Noah Runs a $100M Company Now
The operating system Noah describes is almost suspiciously simple.
The company sets one goal per year, a habit he copied from his Facebook days under Zuckerberg. The year they launched the Monthly1K course, the entire company goal was one number: sell 3,333 courses at $300. Over 10,000 people have since taken that course.
Every person gets a scorecard with a maximum of three success metrics per quarter. They propose their own three, Noah gives input, and everything ladders up to net revenue.
Instead of hiring expensive executives, he pays experienced operators for advice. The CRO of Outdoorsy advises his revenue team, and Duolingo's chief people officer advises on hiring. His framing: $500 to borrow someone's 10,000 hours of experience is the best deal in business.
And he never pulls rank. In 13 years he says he's played the "because I'm the CEO" card exactly once, and he still regrets it.
One more thing worth sitting with. The course students who bought Monthly1K mostly did nothing with it, even with everything laid out. So AppSumo added accountability groups, and results changed. Everyone had the information. Almost nobody acted on it until someone was watching. (That finding is basically the reason Profitable Founder Club exists, but Noah got there a decade before me.)
What I'd Steal From Noah's Playbook
If you're a bootstrapped founder somewhere between $0 and $50K MRR, this is what transfers:
→ Start before you're ready. $50, 48 hours, WordPress, PayPal. Your excuse is officially dead.
→ Work backwards from who already has your customers. One blog, one cold email, one pre-validated offer beats six months of building.
→ Ask. Noah says the two things that hold people back are starting and asking. He asked Lifehacker. He asked MailChimp. He asked a newspaper in India, monthly, for seven years.
→ Charge upfront when the math works. LTV-priced deals funded a bootstrapped company to $100M a year.
→ Don't abandon the boring thing that works. The three years Noah spent away from AppSumo were his worst. The unsexy deal site was the goldmine the whole time.
Noah also spent three years writing Million Dollar Weekend with Tahl Raz (the co-writer behind Never Eat Alone and Never Split the Difference), after hiring James Clear's book-proposal writer to shape it. The whole book is the Lifehacker playbook, systematized: start this weekend, validate with real money, grow what works.
The two-hour interview above covers more ground than the book, and it costs you nothing.
FAQ
How did Noah Kagan start AppSumo?
Noah Kagan started AppSumo in 2010 over a single weekend with about $50, using a WordPress site and a PayPal button. He copied the bundle model from MacHeist and Humble Bundle, applied it to web software, and got his first customers by pitching Lifehacker a discount bundle of the five tools their blog already mentioned most.
How much revenue does AppSumo make?
In the interview, Noah says AppSumo was heading toward $80 million in annual revenue, and he has since described it as a $100 million business. It's fully bootstrapped, and Noah says he pays himself around $3 million in cash per year after taking almost nothing for the first several years.
Was Noah Kagan really fired from Facebook?
Yes. He was employee #30 at Facebook and was fired after roughly nine months. He was also employee #4 at Mint.com, which sold to Intuit for $170 million in 2009, but he'd already quit and missed out on about $1.7 million in equity.
How does AppSumo convince software companies to do lifetime deals?
The pitch is customer acquisition math. Acquiring a SaaS customer through ads typically costs a few hundred dollars. AppSumo tells partners to price the deal at their customer lifetime value, so they collect that value upfront, get exposure to a large buyer audience, and pay nothing in ad spend.
Noah's story is a 13-year overnight success built on one weekend of action.
Every week on the podcast I sit down with bootstrapped founders in the messy middle of that same journey, from first PayPal button to real revenue, and get them to share their actual numbers.
