I distracted myself from the hard thing. Claude called me out.

I’m gambling on the NBA playoffs.

It started at the Super Bowl. First I was betting on Bad Bunny songs, then on the game itself, and it’s a slippery slope. I’m talking two dollar bets. So far I’m down about ten bucks. Who am I?

Same month, I put a post on Twitter about my friend’s giant stock portfolio, how jealous I am, and how I’m now spending all this time on stocks. I’m spending a lot of time on TidyCal. A lot of time on SendFox. A lot of time complaining, probably.

Claude called it. I was talking through everything I’m working on and it said, more or less: you’re doing a bunch of things that feel like progress but don’t actually matter. I thought these AI robot workers were supposed to be nice and do what they’re told.

It was right. I’m avoiding the harder problem. I’m distracting myself from the main thing, which is AppSumo, because it’s been hard. It’s been a challenging year, and I’d love to blame everybody else, but a lot of it is our own decisions, my decisions, that didn’t go the way we thought they would.

You don’t have to eliminate every distraction. The question is what you’re distracting yourself from, and what the distraction is for. The hard thing isn’t moving as fast or as easy as you want. That’s the thing to solve, because that’s the thing that matters. It’s like having an argument in a relationship and saying, let’s go on a date. No. Keep making the relationship better.

The walk

The Claude habit came from a fight with my wife. We had a disagreement over something stupid that metastasized (I think that’s the word; I make up definitions). I got frustrated, went for a walk, and started explaining the situation to Claude out loud. I didn’t tell it to be on my side. It helped me understand what was going on and gave me two recommendations: don’t keep score, and don’t say certain words that trigger my partner. Then I turned around and walked home.

I’ve done that almost weekly since. Something in business where I’m frustrated with someone. Something in my life that isn’t happening. The distraction thing came out of one of those walks. It doesn’t solve the problem. It reflects back what I’m saying and picks out the parts that matter so I can solve it. I’ve gone to a lot of therapy in my life, and a lot of it is, tell me your problems. This is an isolated attack on one core problem. A very efficient advisor.

Return on time

Once I saw the distraction, the business question got simple. What’s the core of the business that, if I crank on it, I know the business gets better? For AppSumo, it’s software deals.

So I cut the time on everything else. On Twitter I blocked everything pulling me toward stocks or gambling. The people whose opinions I do want, I told Claude: on Fridays, summarize everything they said this week and give me a brief. Now I get a weekly newsletter for myself and I don’t get pulled during the day to go buy some bullshit stock.

Look at your time as an IRR. If I put $10k in a stock and it 10x’s, that’s $100k. If I get AppSumo improving, we make millions of dollars for the team, for our partners, for ourselves, and customers get great deals at the same time. That’s the greatest return I can have.

If we could only do one thing

When AI came out it was a tailwind for AppSumo. Then over the past six to nine months there was more fear, uncertainty, and doubt. How are lifetime deals going to work? Is software already dead? So we tried a lot of things: ads, building sudo.com, selling skills, selling user-generated video.

Coming into May I asked: if we only did one thing to move the business forward, what is it? This is stupid shit, y’all. We go looking for magical things and most of the magic is in the simplicity of the core. The answer was making it easier to get products on our site. After 16 years of building the product, that flow is insanely complicated. Picking the one thing got the team focused and it got me focused.

June, same question. If there’s one thing we know, guaranteed, moves the business forward? Better deals. What’s stopping us from getting better deals? You keep asking until the answer is very clear. So we’re launching a set number of deals against a target in June. If we miss, we figure out why so July is better.

Focus is hard because you have to say no to things. It’s also freeing. I’m saying no to this because I know that is the thing that matters, and the team appreciates knowing what they can deprioritize. Saying no is hardest when things aren’t working and you’re uncertain. That’s when you come back to what you’re certain about. What do I know works that I can do more of?

We also did the least magical thing possible and asked customers. Someone at the company sent a survey and it was like, oh yeah, you can just ask people what they want. SendFox first, then TidyCal, then AppSumo. TidyCal customers said the core reliability of the product is degrading. SendFox customers said I can’t actually just send emails, help me send emails. AppSumo customers said improve trust, so when I buy something I know I can trust the product. You don’t build everything they ask for. But they’re the ones paying you, using the product, and telling you what they want. If you’re stuck, or you’re trying to figure out what to sell, send a survey. Formrobin.com, Google Forms, Tally, whatever.

Put a plan down

Last night and this morning I felt relieved. Hopeful, confident. I asked myself why, because I’ve had a lot of emotional tie-up with the company this year. Its performance struggled and I tied that to how I feel about myself. And I’m sacrificing time with my newborn and my two-year-old to go to work and make this, and I want it to be worth it.

What made me feel better was that the team put a tight plan down for June to solve the core problem.

If you’re not feeling certain, and I’m talking to myself as much as to you, put together a plan and commit to it for some period of time. It’s great to take bets when you don’t know the answer. But say it: my plan is to take a bunch of bets and I’ll make a decision on this date. Then run the plan through Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and let a third party pick at it. Give it an end date and an outcome. How the June plan goes is the kind of thing I send to the 114,000 people on my newsletter, no schedule, only when there’s something worth sending.

I’m still down ten bucks. The bets are blocked, the stock talk comes in a Friday brief, and June is deals.

From episode 388 of my podcast, Noah Kagan Presents. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.