AppSumo Is at War

Noah Kagan Presents

Noah Kagan

Entrepreneurship, Business

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The past few months at AppSumo have been brutal. People are voting with their wallets and return buyers are down 40%. We lost some of the trust we spent years building and drifted from what made us great. But the fire in my belly is back and I'm going to war for what we do best.

I'm turning the battleship back towards curating high-quality tools that people actually love and I'm taking you inside the war room. In this episode, I share what's working, what's not and what I'm learning.

If you've ever run a company or have just gone through a tough season, you'll love this one

In this conversation, you'll enjoy 3 BIG things:

Why simplicity and focus is the best strategy when things get messy.
How direct conversations with customers and partners can rebuild trust
Why curating truly great products (not just more of them) is key to winning back customers

Enjoy these 3 things plus plenty of spicy behind-the-scenes stories along the way.

My book Million Dollar Weekend is for aspiring entrepreneurs who dream of starting their own business. I break down the process of starting into simple steps that you can do in just one weekend.

I have also been sharing emails on my brutally honest advice on a variety of topics. People have been loving it. Sign up at noahkagan.com and join 350k other people who get juicy insights every month.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What is up, you sexy bastards?
0:04.7	It's your boy, double daddy, aka Rabbi Can't Lose, aka Noah Kagan.
0:10.0	What's up, y'all?
0:11.5	Yeah, I'm having another kid.
0:13.3	Bam.
0:14.6	I like to double down.
0:17.4	So that's new.
0:18.7	How are you doing?
0:19.6	This last episode where I guess it was super vulnerable
0:22.5	slash depressed slash busy slash didn't have much time and I just talked off the cuff.
0:28.0	Why is it off the cuff? Just about how things are going. Y'all loved it. So shout out to my people,
0:33.8	Grant Baldwin. Damn, who else? There's a bunch of y'all sent me notes and and I loved it. And then I was like, I'm going to go listen to myself talk. Here's that episode again. You know, there's so many different podcasts out there. And I think what I'm going to start doing is just kind of these like 15, 20 minute app sumo at war, which maybe is what I'm going to brand it, which is just like, what's going on with
0:54.9	the business pretty transparently as much as possible. And I think it'll be spicy and
1:00.4	interesting. If y'all love it, maybe I'll record them on face and put it out on the
1:04.9	YouTube's of the world. But it's just kind of interesting to reflect on things going. So today,
1:09.3	I'm going to just talk about the last two weeks or so. We've been at war. It's literally the most I've ever thought we could go out of business or really challenge the livelihood of our company. I've never really even questioned it if this will exist. And I was like, holy shit, these are definitely some of the most intense trying times at the company. We're going to talk about Triple B, which is not diners, drive-ins, and dyes. If you all love that show, holler at me because I love it too. Just a lot of different things, urgency. So let me just jump right in. Yeah, we're at war, man. We've made a lot of our own mistakes. I think it's easy to blame the market or blame Joe Biden or blame Trump. I know. It's just
1:45.9	funny things are bad jokes. But it's just a lot of our own mistakes and things that we've seen over the years. And I think what you're supposed to say from leadership books is like, it's all my fault and da-da-da, but really it's really other people's faults. Come on, y'all, never take responsibility. take responsibility when it's good.
2:01.7	No, but what I mean by that is,
2:02.7	I think some of these things that we saw... Come on, y'all, never take responsibility. Take responsibility when it's good.
2:01.7	No, but what I mean by that is, I think some of these things that we saw, we identified
2:05.3	two years ago and then we were hesitant or timid and we didn't really make some of the
2:09.6	harder choices earlier, specifically around like how AI is evolved, how vibe coding is evolved,
	...

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