The success of doing nothing

In the last four months at AppSumo, we tried a lot of new things:

• We tried creating our own skills.
• We tried selling UGC Automatic videos.
• We tried selling outcomes.
• We tried selling recurring subscriptions.
• We changed our entire sales process and updated quality standards.
• We pivoted TidyCal to be a Shopify for LinkedIn people.
• We started updating SendFox a lot more again.

Lots of action. Felt like progress.

The closet moment

One night I was sitting in my closet realizing I felt ungrounded. Unfocused. Nothing was actually moving. We were doing a lot of things and none of them felt like they were working.

The clarity came when I asked myself one question:

If we could only do ONE thing, what would actually help our customers, our partners, and our business?

The answer was the same thing it’s always been. Find great products. Get a deal on them. Promote them. That’s AppSumo.

Distraction dressed up as progress

All the new stuff was distraction dressed up as progress. Pennies of motion while the dollars sat still.

And the honest part is I knew I was doing it. I was adding things to feel busy, to feel like I was winning, instead of solving the hard, boring problem of making the core offering better.

So in May we’re going back to the core. The one thing. How do we unlock finding more great deals? That’s it. We are focused exclusively and aggressively on solving just that right now.

Saying no is the hard part

The counterintuitive part is how hard saying no actually is.

Now that we’re focused, the requests don’t stop:

• TidyCal needs this
• This part of the site is broken
• A customer is complaining
• A partner is asking for something

Yes is easy. No is hard. And no is what focus actually feels like.

I haven’t figured this out

I’m a little more bored these days. I have more space. I’m not chasing as many new things. Just trying to make one thing really good.

I don’t want to pretend I’ve figured this out. New idea shows up, partner asks for something, a metric dips, and I’m tempted back to adding instead of focusing.

Focus isn’t a decision I made once. It’s a decision I have to make every Monday.

But the weeks I get it right, the business actually moves.

Not more action. Less of it, pointed at the right thing.

Originally published as an article on X on 2026-05-18.