Software deals aren’t my calling. The company is my responsibility.

Martin published Million Dollar Weekend in Poland, and a few weeks ago he sent me a note about this show. You don’t sound inspired. You’re already rich. You don’t have the same energy from years ago, there’s no excitement, joy, or fun. You don’t want to run AppSumo. You’re not seeing your own identity shift. You’re in the best season of your life and you’re spending it on this instead of going out and talking to people. Do you have other fathers around you?

I love unsolicited advice. Kind of. He cared enough to say something, and it was good enough to sit with for a few weeks.

He’s half right.

Twenty-year-old Noah slept on friends’ floors for a year. Even then I never woke up thinking I want to run software deals today, that’s my calling in life. My calling is promoting, business, and marketing. It still is.

But if you signed up for something, you see it through. AppSumo has had a challenging 18 months on top of an amazing overall run. With some money in the bank and a family to prioritize, it would be very easy to walk. I’m very aware of the trade-off between the stress of this work and the other things I could be doing. What I’ve landed on is that software deals may not be my calling today, but business is my calling, and the company is my responsibility. I want to do right by the people giving it their time. There are a lot of customers who still love AppSumo, and partners selling a million dollars of product through us who are stoked.

And yes, my identity has shifted. I’m more of a father. From 5 pm on I’m with the kids. I’m trying to be less on the computer, which I love, same as you probably do. It’s a good season, and I feel lucky to have the resources to make good choices.

Quit it, or see it through

I’ve been noticing how I start things, stop, and go to the side. Find something, see if it works, if not go find the next thing.

The podcast is the opposite. I’m not trying to grow it or shrink it. I promised one a month and I want to follow through, and it makes me feel good about myself. Same with Twitter: I committed to 52 posts this year and I’m proud of it, even though this week and last week I had nothing worth sharing.

YouTube is the other case. Pretty much the whole time I made videos, I can’t say I was excited for the next one. I don’t have a good answer for why I stopped, I have no motivation to start again, and that’s okay. It’s okay to quit stuff and it’s okay to continue stuff. The work is recognizing what you’re doing and whether it fits what you want now. Part of having kids is asking what lesson you want to teach them. I want them to see me show up for the things I said I’d do.

I over-adjusted

This was a disruptive year, and a lot of what I initiated inside the company was stop-start. Launch Outcomes, launch subscriptions, launch Five Taco (a review site), launch MeetFam. We felt like SaaS was going to die and vibe coding was going to kill us, so we adjusted. Go back to the episodes from January and it’s holy shit, we’re going out of business, AI is killing us, companies are closing. Some of that was true and some of it wasn’t.

I over-adjusted in a lot of areas, and we’re course correcting. Back to the core: can we find good products people made, promote them, and find people to buy them? People still need tools to run their businesses and they still want good deals on them. The phrase I keep coming back to is building up. As you get a customer, can you get a second one? As you build the business, can you make it better the next day?

Three bottlenecks. One, discoverability. There are 300 vetted products on the site and only a few get shown based on how our algorithm works. Two, predicting what sells. It takes a lot more people than you’d expect to get a deal on the site, and it can still not perform. How do we show customers things faster, find what they want sooner, then go harder on it? Three, treat our best customers better. I made choices around refunds for our Plus and VIP customers that pissed them off, and we didn’t course correct fast enough. I’m proud of making decisions with the information I had at the time. I did not check back on the outcomes and fix them. We’re doing that now.

Were they the wrong decisions at the time? No. In retrospect I could have run a lot of AppSumo differently. The team, partners, and customers are still giving us a chance to keep making it better. None of it is sexy. There’s no crazy new thing. It’s how do we do the basics better. Even TidyCal: the plan was build a standalone business and separate it from AppSumo. No. Is there a way to make it better for AppSumo? We brought it back in and now both are growing.

That’s the pattern. I went to the side in a lot of things instead of finding the thing and driving it.

Every transcript goes into Claude

The biggest personal change this year: I take every transcript from my conversations, with Paul in sales, Eric Fernandez in engineering, Sean and Ilona who help run marketing and revenue, put it into Claude, and ask for feedback. I’ve had business coaches and therapists, and I still work with Ayman, our former CEO. The Claude feedback has been the bigger change. It doesn’t give all the right answers. AI is like, what’s two plus two, three, and you paid $500 for the wrong answer. But if you’re open to feedback, it’s a great loop for improving as a leader.

I turned it into a Mac app called Meeting Coach. It listens live and coaches me during the meeting. This person just said something important and you’re not following up. What’s the clear action item here? I prep with Claude before, run the live coach during, review the transcript after. I can’t speak for the people on the other side of me, but I’m more consistent, more calm, more prepared.

Twenty-year-old Noah is not 40-year-old Noah. I threw my orange on the ground this morning and my daughter threw her blueberry. Why did you do that? Oh. She does what I do. So the question under Martin’s note is what example I want to set. Being there for my wife, being a better leader in the company, stopping things like YouTube that aren’t where I’m at, and continuing the things I committed to.

Martin was half right. Software deals still aren’t my calling. My meeting coach just told me to cut the monologue, so I’m going downstairs to the kids, and then I’m back on the deals anyway.

From episode 389 of my podcast, Noah Kagan Presents. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.