AI made my goals easier. It also killed the fun.

🎧 Episode 392, 15 minutes: Apple Podcasts · Spotify

I tried to record this yesterday and I was too frustrated to do it. Work stuff came in right as I was supposed to be downstairs with the kids, and you know that moment where you tell yourself don’t respond, don’t respond, and then you respond. That was me. We’re all still learning how to be AI human bots on this planet.

So here it is a day late. I used AI to go back through the last 12 months of this podcast and find what people actually listened to, and it was the goals and leadership stuff. Fine. Let’s do the Q3 review.

My word for the year is lead. Yesterday I was complaining. Venting to my wife, venting to Kovac, the whole thing. This morning I sat down and asked a different question about the same problem. What does this person actually want? How do I get them that and still make it work for the business? I wrote the answers down, went and had the conversations, and it felt like progress. Leadership is moving things forward. Complaining is having a strong opinion from the sideline.

Work. The goal was $40 million net revenue at AppSumo and we’re not on track. Six out of ten. It has been a slog. When people talk about burnout, what I notice is that it shows up when you’re not getting the reward for the work. You put in the energy, you put in the effort, and nothing comes back. That’s when it gets heavy. We made insane progress over the summer and we’ll probably get close to the number, but net revenue isn’t really the point when your COGS and your expenses eat it. That’s a lot of what happened this year. The sales team has clear goals now. Partners can get themselves onto the site without us holding their hand. We’re getting aggressive about marketing again. Two years ago it took 140 people to run this software promotion business. We’re much closer to a modern version of it, and next year should be strong.

TidyCal was supposed to hit $1 million GMV. We’re at $1.4 million. Ten out of ten. It has flattened out again, so now it’s back to marketing and to testing inside the product itself. Logos, flows, the new user experience, the stuff that makes people tell someone else about it. One thing I’d recommend to anyone with a web product: tell Claude or ChatGPT to go use your product as a brand new user, test the onboarding, and write a report of the top five things to fix. It was damn good.

SendFox went from $150,000 ARR to $220,000 in two months. Shout out to Austin. I wrote about that one when it broke $200K after five flat years.

Content was one thoughtful post a week and one podcast a month. Podcast is a ten out of ten, I’m recording this one with ten minutes to spare before lunch with a Twitter friend. The posts are a seven. AppSumo got busier and I want to be around in the mornings and at night, so sitting down to write a long one has been hard. Lately my focus has been getting to 500,000 verified Twitter views so I can requalify to get paid to tweet. Putting out a tweet and making a few bucks was more satisfying than I expected. The posts that work are the story-driven ones built on our own data and what I actually see. I’m writing one right now called software is dead.

I go back and forth on this. Build up a content team and make all the things, or just send emails and do a podcast once a month and think through business and life out loud. I’ve really enjoyed sending emails again. If you’re not on my mailing list, go to noahkagan.com and get on it, that’s where I put the stuff I don’t post anywhere else.

Workouts. Bike trip with my brother, done. We used Western Spirit and rode the White Rim Trail in Moab. That one deserves its own episode, or ask me in person. 3,650 push-ups, on track, ten a day at night, haven’t missed a day this year. Weight training twice a month, no. I did it once a month for a few months and then went back to cycling three times a week.

Which is where AI got its hooks in. I was on a group ride with a bunch of guys in spandex and they dropped me. That’s our word for when you can’t hang. So I took one of their Strava files, put it into AI, and asked how far apart our power numbers were and what I’d have to do to keep up with him in six weeks. It gave me three rides a week and my FTP has gone up. I do the same thing for nutrition now. I tell it what tomorrow’s ride is and ask what my water and electrolytes and sugar and snacks should be. Can’t say I’ve noticed a difference from that part.

Then I caught myself not wanting to get on the bike without a plan. Same with fantasy football, where I spent the entire summer building a draft coach and then turned it into a season coach. I’m doing well. And it took a little of the joy out of thinking, and out of failing, and out of figuring it out myself. I don’t have the answer on that one yet. It might be its own episode.

Personal. A hundred hours of Spanish, eight out of ten. I put on two Spanish YouTube videos while I’m on the trainer in the garage, ten to fifteen minutes each. Breakthrough Spanish is great, very clear, very slow, good intermediate stuff. But just consuming it has plateaued me. My wife speaks Spanish, the nanny speaks Spanish, the whole house does, and I still think it takes real classes or living there. We’ll probably be back in Spain sometime next year. One bottle of water a day, ten out of ten. Cook one new thing a month, I’ve done something every other month, so no.

Family. We did the babymoon in Mexico and it was a four out of ten because you couldn’t get in the water in Playa del Carmen. Finish work at five, no fun until seven, I’ll say five out of ten and my wife would probably say four. The best part of Moab besides reconnecting with my brother was a week of not touching my phone and not missing it once. I’m back to mornings and bathrooms and nights now. Twelve dates with Mafe, done, and we’re going to sushi tomorrow. In November I’m taking two pure weeks off. I never really took time off when my second daughter was born because I wanted to be around the company, and I’ve been more intentional about catching up with her since.

What I want by December isn’t the revenue number. It’s whether the company is set up right. Is the sales team set up. Is self-serve and the partner portal set up. Are recurring revenue and advertising inside AppSumo real. More software is getting created than ever, and we can still be the people who help it get found, run on a leaner business than we had. We’ve struggled to get there. We’re close.

One more AI thing, since it keeps coming up. I’ve been using MCP to draft and edit my own emails and it’s insane. I used to pay J. Ying around a hundred grand to help with email and he’s amazing at it. Now I can do a version in two or three minutes with the data in front of me.

If you wrote goals down in January, go read them this week. That’s really why this episode exists. Mine were sitting there last night, I looked at them, and this morning I was less annoyed and more useful. Episode 392 is up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts if you want it in my voice. I love you and I’ll see you out there.

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