How To Find MILLION DOLLAR Business Ideas That WORK | Noah Kagan

January 25, 2024

AI Summary

5 min read

Noah Kagan, CEO of AppSumo and author of Million Dollar Weekend, has started and scaled multiple seven- and eight-figure businesses. In this conversation, he breaks down how he thinks about finding business ideas, testing them cheaply, and building a portfolio of companies without venture capital. The core of his approach is deceptively simple: start with a problem you have yourself, validate it before building, and then stick with what works for a long time.

The Cost of Ignoring the Basics

Kagan’s most expensive lesson came from a classic founder mistake: success bias. After AppSumo was doing well with about 600 products, he decided to 10X the catalog, pushing it to 13,000 products in six months. The result was a disaster. Revenue stayed flat, profit margins collapsed from 50% to 30%, and customers, the team, and partners were all unhappy. He lost a million dollars in cash alone, not counting salaries.

Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.

Read Full Summary →

Free • No credit card required

Listen to Audio Summary Open in App

Never miss an episode of The Startup Ideas Podcast

Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Success Bias & The 10X Trap** - Noah Kagan explains how past success can lead to overconfidence and bad decisions, using a costly mistake at AppSumo as a cautionary tale.
2 (02:26) **New Million Dollar Idea: Tools That Replace Teams** - Noah reveals a fresh business he just started and shares his framework for spotting opportunities.
3 (04:04) **State of SaaS: Customer First, Not Tech First** - Noah argues that most founders get it backwards by leading with technology instead of the customer's problem.
4 (05:48) **TidyCal Case Study: Lifetime Pricing That Works** - A concrete example of a simple, profitable product built for a specific audience.
5 (06:14) **Zapier Competitors & Integration Opportunities** - Noah identifies a gap in the market for making separate software products talk to each other.
6 (08:06) **AI: Empowerment vs. Replacement** - Noah discusses the tension between using AI to make teams more productive versus the fear of replacing people.
7 (10:06) **Uncool Jobs & Unsolved Problems** - Identifying business opportunities in areas people find boring or difficult, like accounting and hiring.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

I'm joined by Noah Kagan, CEO of AppSumo. We talk about how to build products people love, how he lost $1M for not listening to customers, how to find the best business ideas in 2024, and more.

📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free: https://www.gregisenberg.com/

70,000+ people are already subscribed.

🪄 The CastMagic team reached out to me and wanted to give you a free month of Castmagic with the code Greg100. You can check out https://get.castmagic.io/l953mvcu8yiv to learn more about how to automate your content with AI using CastMagic.

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND NOAH KAGAN ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/noahkagan

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahkagan/

Episode timestamps:

00:00 Why you should test your business ideas first

00:43 The importance of differentiating your brand

02:07 Best opportunities for entrepreneurs in 2024

06:41 Using content creators to grow your business

08:28 The impact of AI in the workplace

10:15 Platforms to streamline the hiring process

12:40 Why you don’t need to innovate everything

18:43 Tips for hiring A-players

22:55 How Noah lost $1M

27:08 How Greg built the largest real-time stock market

29:43 How to build million-dollar businesses in 2024

33:50 Dealing with rejection in business

37:55 How to decide if a project is worth pursuing

45:58 How to find the best business ideas