My Entrepreneurship Journey - 10 Years to My First Million

It took me 10 years of starting and failing to finally come up with the idea for AppSumo.com and then another 10 years to finally get that business to almost nine figures. In today's video, I'm going to walk you behind the scenes of the first 10 years of my entrepreneur journey so you can get a taste of what it's really like to be an entrepreneur. Let's go. So in 2000, the first business plan I ever wrote up is on okdork.com. You guys have maybe heard of my blog. And the idea behind this business plan, you'll see it on screen here, was kind of like an Uber. And the idea was there's a lot of high school students who have cars, but no money. And then there's all these rich Silicon Valley people. So maybe we can go do deliveries. And so we never ended up doing anything with it. But it was a fun exercise in actually creating a business plan. I think what's fascinating about this particular one is the lack of inexperience that we had and the lack of taking action. So there's a lot of business ideas. This is very similar business to Grubhub, DoorDash, a lot of multi-billion dollar companies. The ideas are easy. Now taking action is the hard part and what you've got to start doing today. So in 2001 was probably the first real business I ever started. And I was really excited and I'm still excited about import cars. So if you guys know about hot import nights of the Hondas, I've had a CRX. I've had a Del Sol, Honda Hatchback. I even still have my Miata to this day. I started a site called Everspeed.com. So for Everspeed, I literally sprung up HTML webpages and I would just start posting pictures of the cars of the women. I would start interviewing different people that are a part of the scene. I don't actually think I made any money from it. I just was genuinely interested in it. I loved working in it. Yeah, I just really liked to be a part of it. I think some of the best businesses you can do is what are you doing for free? Like what is bringing you joy that no one's asking you to do? The point here is just follow your curiosities. I love the tech and being a part of it. And I love the car stuff. It wasn't a business, but it got me in the habit of taking action and start building things. Taking action is priceless. These were the high school era. And as I moved into college, I didn't start making really any money, but I still was building a lot of projects. And I think there's a difference between projects, experiments, hobbies, and then businesses. So in college 2003, the college era, I started building just a lot of different websites that I was curious about. So the first one was a book exchange and it ended up being called Come Get Used, which is a little perverted. But again, this is a really interesting experiment. Like how do we get customers? So at Berkeley at the time, we put up flyers all across the place. And this is before the era of text messaging. We couldn't do that. There was no Facebook. And so it was like, was there email listservs that we could promote to? Was there certain classes that were really effective on? And so with Come Get Used, you're buying books. It's expensive. You sell them back to the bookstore, you get nothing for them. Maybe we can exchange them with other students. And I think what was fascinating about this specific experience, one, we actually did a merger. So me and my friend Sarthak built ours. There's another guy, Tim, who built this one and we merged. So that was a fun, just kind of like ego, exploring partnerships and such. With Come Get Used, we didn't make any money. It was free to actually use the site. It was free to do the exchanges. And our goal wasn't necessarily to make money. It was just, hey, this is really exciting to build something that's used on campus. And that was used, I think, for 10 years or so. So one of the things that I was doing at my junior college when I was an RA at Bowles was I was buying and selling laptops. There was a market inefficiency where on Craigslist, you could buy a laptop and then sell it on eBay or buy it on Amazon and then sell it on eBay. And so I enjoyed buying and fixing these laptops. And I would just be driving around Berkeley, buying and selling laptops. I got scammed and sent one to the Philippines. And so I ended up being like, all right, I'm done with this laptop business. But that led into my senior year where I started a thing called HFG Consulting. And it means hella frickin' good consulting. I was in college. Give me a break. And I noticed there's a lot of smart freshmen that want internships so they can get jobs or get accepted into the business school. And then there's these businesses who need to market to college students. So I was like, huh, that's a good mix. These people want to get internships and experience. These people want to market to those people. Why don't we just tell them how to do it? And I was able to combine that. So we'd go to local stores, ask them, hey, for $1,000, $500, $5,000, we could do your marketing to campus. I don't think we made a lot of money, but we made maybe like $10,000. So we were doing HFG Consulting, and this guy named Kenny came to me. And he said, hey, we're doing the consulting. It's working out pretty well. But why don't we do discount cards for all these businesses? Instead of going to market to them individually, what if we just took all their discounts or offered them a discount, and then we could take a card and sell it on campus? And that's what became NinjaCard.com. That was my first, to me, significant success in the entrepreneur journey. If you want more videos from Uncle Noah, I put out three juicy business videos to help you on your entrepreneur journey. Make sure to hit that subscribe button below. So why did I get a job at Intel for starting my own business? NinjaCard was doing well, but straight up, I followed the shoulda path. So when you're in college, you should do this thing, which is go be a banker, go be an accountant, or go be a consultant. That was what the majority of my friends did. I didn't really even consider starting my own company. I knew it was something I always wanted to do. I knew I always wanted to be rich. I thought you do it only from starting your own companies. You can actually get rich in many ways besides just starting your own company. We'll talk about that in another video. But I didn't know that I could actually do it my own way. And so I thought I'd have to go to this big company to learn before I could do it myself. A lot of times when you go to companies to learn, you really just learn how to work at that company. You don't actually learn skills that are applicable outside of it. So really be mindful about that, especially early in your career, about like, what am I actually learning? Or is there someone that's really going to be guiding me specifically? A lot of people are like, oh, I'm going to go work for that person. They're going to teach me a lot. Are they? Or are they just going to be underneath them and they're going to ignore you completely? During the time at Intel, I had all this free time. So I was still running the NinjaCard site that I talked about. I started a site called collegeup.org. And the idea behind that was a Craigslist for college students. So I thought Craigslist is great, but it's not targeted enough. It's not narrow enough. We just kind of built a bunch of features. And I always think about like putting more stickers on the car. I was like, oh, put that on, put that on. And it was like nothing ever worked. And so and then as well at Intel, I knew that this wasn't the life for me. I didn't want to go into cubicles. I didn't want to go to walls that are just gray. I felt that I should start connecting with other people like myself and either be the hub of it or just start meeting them. And so I started putting on like entrepreneur27.org, where I'd host meetups and I'd host conferences. Like I had a conference where like Blake Ross from Firefox and all these other interesting entrepreneurs came together. And so it was just starting to connect with other people that I was like, oh, you're kind of going down the path I'm more excited about. So how did I actually get the job at Facebook? I was at Intel. I was building all these side businesses. I was writing all these. I was running all these side hustles. I was doing entrepreneur events. And I was planning on quitting at the end of the year. And I saw that Facebook randomly was hiring. I didn't know anyone there. I didn't have any hookup. And I just submitted my resume just like anyone else. What's really interesting about this time in my career is that I was 100% focused on Facebook. And there really wasn't anything else in my life that mattered. Like I ended up living with a bunch of guys that worked at Facebook. The perks were insane in being there. The level of talent was just unbelievable. I think what it did really well for me and my entrepreneur journey is it set the bar of like what excellence can look like. Connecting the world, working on this product, using the product, specifically using the product was just so satisfying. And then being around elite talent was a game changer. I did end up getting fired by Facebook. I did not get my stock. I did not get rich from Facebook. I mean, getting fired by Facebook was still one of the most memorable days of my life. And I still think about how they called me a liability. And that's a story for another time. Let me know in the comments if you want to hear more about that journey. So from 2006 to 2007, I was unemployed. And it was a scary time. I like lived on my friend Johnny's couch. I moved back in with my parents. I didn't really know what I was going to be doing. I had a lot of embarrassment. On my blog, OkayDork, I was talking about Facebook all the time. And I would go to parties and I would, you know, be promoting. And I was so proud of it. It was very, I was very proud of working there. And I felt very lost, very confused, very sad. I felt embarrassed. And so for me, it was just kind of like grabbing whatever things were coming up. So I went and taught business in Korea. Some people were like, hey, come teach here for two weeks. You know, I took those little events, the Entrepreneur27.org, and I turned them into a bigger event, MintingNext.com. So I did that. Right after I left Facebook, I was still excited about social networks and all the things going on. So I was like, why don't we actually put on a conference about it? We have a video I'll put in the description below where you can see the details behind the scenes of how we created this conference. It ended up making money, which was cool. One of the smart people I got to meet was Dave McClure, who introduced me to Mint.com. So on my entrepreneur journey, we're about seven years in. And in 2007, I checked out the site called Mint.com. People are still using this day. I got invited to just check it out just to see what it's about. I was a blogger. They thought maybe I'd talk about it or something at the time. What was exciting about this is I had a really big chip on my shoulder from Facebook. I really wanted to prove them wrong. I love personal finance. I thought the category of money was huge, and I thought the approach that Aaron built out was just phenomenal. I was like, wow, this is such a revolutionary way of doing personal finances. And so Aaron actually didn't even want to hire me, but I basically annoyed the hell out of him and worked my ass off to make it a no-brainer by presenting him the Mint marketing plan and then executing on it. And it ended up doing significantly well. And so still even there, just like I was doing at Facebook, at lunch, in the mornings, on weekends, at night, I was hosting Community Next. We put on more conferences. I was experimenting with different side hustles, and one of those side hustles actually hit. And so in 2007, while I was at Mint, I saw Amit Gupta, a good friend of mine, launch an app on Facebook. It's like the Facebook platform opened up. I worked at Facebook, so I knew that, holy crap, this is going to do really well. I had some inside advantage. And I started a company called Kickflip. Because of my inside information, I knew that Facebook was going to be big. I knew that these apps were going to do well. I was like, well, what apps can I actually make money on? So I thought, let me go to the category apps that has the least competition, which was in sports. And I thought, oh, well, I could build sports team logos you can put on your profile, and then I'll link it to an Amazon affiliate link to Amazon, because then you can go buy their sports merchandise. And it exploded. I became the number one Facebook app developer at that time. And my initial goal from that was literally to make $3,500 a month, give or take, and then go work remotely. And I ended up working in Argentina. It felt like I was chasing opportunity. I didn't like Facebook. I was really mad at Mark. I didn't like building these apps because I didn't use them at all. I thought they were annoying as hell. My team at the time was like, hey, you need to quit or we're going to quit. And I was scared. It sounds like embarrassing now to say it, but I was scared at the time. I didn't know what to do. So I went back. I moved into some random guy's house. Shout out, Phil. We were building these sports apps where you put your logos on. We took that and put it into Fantasy Sports Betting, which actually became BetArcade.com. And I just remember I was so excited when it was failing, which is not a great thing to do. But because it was failing and the company didn't seem like we're going to last as long, one of the things that we did, I think this is what kind of planted some seeds that still goes on this day, is like, hey, we're stuck at making all these games and these consumer-facing things. Maybe we can build a tools form. And so Andrew on our team was like, what if we did payments for the games? We actually powered the payment section where you can buy and sell virtual tokens. And that's what became Git Gambit, or the company we call Gambit. So Gambit did really well. And then one day I was in San Francisco with Andrew, and I wake up to a phone call, and it was from a lawyer. And he's like, hey, so who's representing you? I was like, what do you mean? So it turns out that OfferPal, the biggest competitor at the time, sued us. They said that we were copying some of their stuff. And then literally that same day, Facebook banned us. Now, what you're thinking is like, damn, that's a pretty shitty day, especially given how much money we were making and how successful we were doing. What I got to say is I was really happy. A guy named Simon offered me a consulting gig. He's like, hey, do you want to do some consulting? And I was like, yeah. And so I gave up the company to the other two business partners at the time. And I ended up going to do consulting for speeddate.com. Now, I've never quit jobs and then just try to go find something else, or unless I was fired. And so that thing. So from there, I was like, well, I have this consulting gig. I don't like this business. I don't like the partners. Let me just go do the consulting and I'll figure something else out. So the full-time entrepreneur part two, which is around 2010 to present day, I was doing consulting for speeddate.com. And I was just trying to explore what businesses from all the different ladder functions that I've been on could lead me to my next adventure. I knew from Gambit and the payments company days, I didn't want to be on the bottom of the totem pole. I wanted to be on the top. And I wanted to be a thing that people had to have. I wanted to be like oxygen to businesses. And the thing that every business needed and what I've done well in my career up to that point was helping people bring people customers or promotion. And I saw MacHeist.com do bundles of software for Mac products. And then lastly, I saw like Dropbox and LinkedIn come out. This is 2010. There wasn't as much software. I was like, oh, there's software is really interesting. Maybe I could do MacHeist like bundles of software, but not for Mac, but for every other web software product. Those are the three kind of pieces that came together to be able to experiment with AppSumo.com as a company. And it really quickly did really well. Chad, who came on as my business partner about a year in, he was on the reward level. It was like, all right, well, there's only two of us. And we could do reward level, AppSumo, or software taco. Which one has a 10X upside? And I was like, well, AppSumo, no brainer. We doubled down on AppSumo. And that's where, you know, the story really took off. Check out part two of the series right up here, where I talk about the next 10 years from on AppSumo day zero to AppSumo today, which is about 10 years. How it went from zero to almost $100 million revenue business. You can see that entire journey right up here in this video. And if you're not subscribed to the channel, you know what to do right down below. I love you. See you out there.