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.

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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

Guests on this episode

Noah Kagan

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.

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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