Indian summer: SendFox broke $200K ARR after 5 flat years

Two old guys stopped us on the beach in Santa Cruz. “Let us take a photo of you. I used to work for National Geographic.” They took the photo, then told us they walk that beach 365 days a year, never miss a day, and they love it. Man, one of them said, this is what an Indian summer is.

One of my favorite songs is “Indian Summer” by Pedro the Lion. I’ve loved it for years and never knew what the title meant. So I asked. An Indian summer is the stretch right between summer and fall. Warm, dry, calm, right before it cools off. The in-between.

That’s where I am. Twelve days in Santa Cruz with my wife and two daughters: cycling, giant redwoods, the ocean, tons of smart people, self-driving cars. We took our newer daughter out in the stroller and it was like, wow, you can take your daughter outside. Then back to Austin, a hundred degrees plus humidity, and I came home and started looking at moving back.

It’s not just me. AI has hit almost every company and person I know, and it changed how we approach almost everything. For AppSumo it has been a tailwind and a headwind at the same time. A lot of our business got hurt because people can use AI instead of buying a tool, or build their own. The same thing made our team faster and more self-serve than we’ve been since we went from 140 people to 40. Maybe this whole phase is the in-between.

Why is the CEO of AppSumo building his own apps?

Garrett on the AppSumo team asked me that. I met him almost 10 years ago because I bought his WordPress plugin. Fair question.

This summer I launched Rhino Voice, a Whisper Flow alternative. If Apple or Windows had better dictation you wouldn’t need it. Something like 5,000 downloads. Then Meeting Coach, maybe 3,000. I used to take my call transcripts, put them into Claude afterward, and ask how I did. It would tell me everything I did wrong. Can you just tell me during the call? So I built that. Both run local and private. Nothing uploads to a cloud.

The whole thing started because I wanted to win fantasy football. I spent the summer on Draft Coach, a Chrome extension to give me an edge on the other guys, and that led to Meeting Coach: if I can get coached on a draft, maybe I can get coached in my meetings. People liked it, so I started asking what else I use that I could make for low cost, good margin, no recurring cost. With open source LLMs, it works.

I also wanted to see if you can really Claude Code your own app. You can. If you’re making it for yourself, it works awesome. If you’re trying to sell it to others, it doesn’t. Even when I make something good, I still need exposure, and AppSumo still has something significant there.

The answer to Garrett’s question is that I like it. That’s literally how AppSumo started. I don’t like paying full price for things, I like good deals, so I tried getting deals on software and figured maybe I could promote them and get paid to do it. I make no money from these apps. It all goes to the company. I get feedback like “I want German” and “this button’s not working,” and there’s no point, I’m not trying to make more money off these people. I just enjoy it.

I do try to zoom out. What gives you joy in the four to six hours a day you sit at a computer? Building these does. And my best time is probably spent on how to grow AppSumo. That’s true for a lot of businesses. You’re fixated on something and it’s not even the thing. It’s the hobby, the experiment. Fine. Just be mindful of what pays the bills.

Five years flat

SendFox, which you probably haven’t heard me talk about in forever, sat at $150,000 ARR for five years. Austin and I spent the past few months fixing it and making it modern, and it finally broke $200,000 ARR. Fix the product, fix the pricing. And because of AI, we fixed the product with a part-time developer.

I’m sending emails again because it isn’t hard work anymore. I used to pay J, who I hired out of high school, $100k to help make them. Now I draft, edit, and send them myself. I also cleaned the list. I had about 400,000 contacts and something like 100,000 to 150,000 of them were unsubscribed, so who is my active audience? Four weeks building the structure with MCP (basically an API for an AI tool), then a schedule: two emails, a “can I remove your email” email, a last removal email, then the analysis. It did send an accidental email to 8,000 people. That wasn’t good. The final list is 114,000 people, which, holy shit, that’s a lot of people. No schedule. I send it when I have something worth sending.

TidyCal does about $35,000 a month in one-time sales on the basic version, and the Pro subscription is at almost $25,000 a year in ARR. Small, but recurring. We’re pushing it toward a consultant booking tool: get paid for meetings, subscriptions, your page, promoting it. In an AI world software is easy to create. So either you help people with distribution, or you make a recurring product valuable enough that leaving is a pain in the ass.

That’s enough

Sometimes I’m with the kids and I’d rather be working, then I’m working and I’d rather be with the kids. This year has been one or the other: too much work and not enough kids, or Santa Cruz, where I got a lot of park time and beach time and less work done than I wanted. Which is also okay. If you have a good wife, she’ll tell you what to do. You just have to listen.

I got to see my friend Laura Roeder. She runs Paperbell, which kind of competes with TidyCal, but not really. The last thing she said to me: yeah, I make over six figures in profit running this product, and that’s enough.

That was the most powerful thing she said the whole conversation. We’re all fixated on more. A nicer car, a nicer house, more trips. When is it enough? My wife has been saying the same thing, our lives are awesome, and it’s good to repeat that to yourself instead of I’m going to make more money and be happier, change jobs and be happier, buy this thing and be happier.

Two old guys walk the same beach every day and they love it. You have four months left in the year. Make them your way.

From episode 391 of my podcast, Noah Kagan Presents. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.