AppSumo's First Deal
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A story about how Noah Kagan started AppSumo with just a simple email to Imgur's founder.
"AppSumo started when Noah emailed the founder of Imgur and basically said 'Hey, you guys charge $10 a month. If I give you a bunch of new customers at $6 a month, can I get a little cut of the pie?' That's how he started - he made $10 doing that by emailing a bunch of friends.
It eventually evolved but still operates similarly. For the last 10 years, it's basically been an email list with only 300,000 people. They email out a few deals a week where they find companies and say 'give us a discount and give us a cut of the revenue.'
It was doing okay for years, sometimes not doing better than the year before. Now after close to 10 years, their goal this year was $100 million in revenue. They're going to miss it by a little bit but will get north of $80 million. They pay out 30% to their partners and keep around 60-70% of the actual revenue. Noah owns most of the company, has never taken any outside money, and they have about 150 employees."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.