I’m back as AppSumo CEO. It sucked.

Three Sundays ago I did not want to go to work on Monday.

I’m back as CEO of AppSumo. My daughter was born last year, I took paternity leave, then asked the team if I could just stay on it. I checked in here and there, but I was more or less out for a year, and I finished it off in Spain. We got home at the end of August. I came back to work at the beginning of September, and holy schnikeys, it sucked.

Revenue is down. Our return buyers are telling us, through conversion rate and return buyer rate, that they don’t want to come back. September and October we’ll probably lose money, which is a first. There are market changes and team changes, and a lot of it is self-inflicted.

We’re making the same mistake. We get excited about revenue and targets and KPIs, and we lose track that the foundation of this business is trust: promoting products people get a great deal on. We stop being clear on what quality means, we put out stuff that’s debatable, and then it’s the cycle. This is the second or third time the company has done it. For me it feels like the 18th. Holy shit.

A year ago I emailed every AppSumo customer saying we were going to fix deal quality. I don’t think we did.

The listening tour

I came back with a lot of opinions about what’s wrong. Instead of acting on them I ran a listening tour. No set meetings. I posted on Reddit asking for all the feedback, then set up unstructured meetings across the company to validate or disprove what I believed. I’d recommend it for a company of one or a company of anything.

Two things came out of it.

We have a lot of smart people. A few dummies, but a lot of smart people. I just got off a meeting with Matt Bean, who started in operations and now helps run product management. That’s the ethos here: you get a chance. Caitlin Hempstead has been here a while, I only met her recently, and she is sharp.

And the company runs by committee. Nobody wants to be accountable and nobody wants to be wrong, so nothing has an owner. We build processes and systems, and nobody stops to ask whether it’s the right system, or realizes that systems have to get reviewed constantly. The outreach we did in 2020 to get meetings with partners just isn’t working in 2025. We’re still on lifetime deals, which is hard to make work when AI costs are this variable. Same deal pages, same business model.

Three things, three owners

The beachhead is deal quality. Deals are everything. So for October the entire business is working on three things: deal quality, the business model, and the deal page. One month cadence. Essentialism applied to a company.

Each one has a name on it. I own the deals. Oh shit, now I’m accountable. Garrett, the finance guy, owns the model. Caitlin owns fixing the process. Someone owns the deal page so the people who buy convert.

The v1 outcome, and you’re getting a sneak peek, is four tier one products and 20 tier two products a month, each tier with a revenue target, scheduled for December. Then we work backwards from there to the beginning. It’s pretty insane how bad we are in some areas. Some areas we’re good.

Being back as CEO comes down to three things anyway. Clarity: where are we going. A model or budget that gets us there. Ownership: who is in charge, what outcome are they responsible for, and by when. Founder mode adds urgency on top. This is my livelihood. If AppSumo goes out of business my daughter doesn’t get diapers. That’s an exaggeration, but I can take more risk and make some of the harder decisions because I founded the company. Not reckless risk. Get that in, Jason.

One of the old CEOs, every six months I’d ask what he was working on, and he’d say: foundation. Five years of foundation, and the business grew. Instead of scaling super fast to $100 million ARR, how do you keep doing the core better and better? We missed some of it. We’re going to catch up rapidly.

Three Sundays

First Sunday, depressed. So many problems, I didn’t know how to organize them, I didn’t know what we were going to do.

Second Sunday, I felt like these are problems I can actually work on. Then I started, and there was resistance. Resistance is good. It means people are smart and challenging you instead of blindly following. But I was still like, dude, we’re not going to make it through.

Third Sunday, this week: oh, it’s starting to happen.

When you’re losing weight you can watch the scale. In business it’s harder to see progress, so you need a metric. Ours is return buyer purchase rate. If they come back, they had a good experience.

So I’m writing three or four bullets for December 31st. I go to the site and it looks good. Lifetime deals, some non-lifetime deals, awesome products from awesome founders. I look at the business model and, man, we’re profitable again, dialed in for where the market is now. Come December, if you go to appsumo.com or Reddit or Twitter, you should be like, oh shit, AppSumo has awesome fucking deals again.

I can’t sustain this level of work. Be present for my daughter, work all day, come off work and be present for my daughter, then find a few minutes for fantasy football or a bike ride. I barely have any of that. And I’m enjoying it.

My word right now is leadership. We need fewer managers and more leaders. A leader takes initiative toward something and makes it better, a lot of times without permission. This is the problem, this is the priority, I’m going to make it better. Listen, get input, size it, then decide. If I’m wrong, I can fix that. Making no decision is usually worse.

If it’s Sunday and you’re not looking forward to Monday, that’s your opportunity. Pick your three things and put a name on each one.

From episode 380 of my podcast, Noah Kagan Presents. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.