Noah Kagan is the founder and CEO of AppSumo.com, an accomplished entrepreneur and writer who began his career at Intel before joining Facebook as its 30th employee. While at Facebook, he served as a product manager, a role from which he was ultimately fired. Despite this setback, Kagan leveraged his experiences to build a successful business and share his insights with the entrepreneurial community.

However, his company, AppSumo, is valued between $200M and $500M and generates about a hundred million dollars of revenue every year. This man was also the 4th employee at Mint.com, which is a personal finance and budget management application. 

In this article, we will discuss how Noah had such an exciting and successful career, how he helped grow three huge companies right from scratch, and what we can learn from him. So let’s get started. 

Noah Kagan’s First Job

It was 2004 when Noah completed his degree in Business Administration at Haas Business School Association, Berkeley, at the University of California. In the same year, he started his professional career with an internship at Intel as a Geography Marketing Analyst. 

In his own words, that was a job where he “used to sleep under the desk and attend mostly meetings.” Noah always wanted to be in tech and wasn’t happy with the job he had at Intel, so he decided to keep trying different businesses until he figured out what he wanted. 

To get started, he founded his venture, HFG Consulting, which helped businesses with marketing, sales, and strategy by finding college students to work with. 

Discovering Facebook

In between all of that hustle, while being at Intel, Noah came across a new startup called Facebook.com, which got him pretty excited. He leveraged his network and reached out to people in the tech community.

Kagan got connected with someone on Facebook through a friend. This connection helped him get an initial introduction to the company. Kagan was persistent in his efforts to join Facebook. 

He reached out multiple times and expressed his strong interest in the company’s mission and potential. He demonstrated his willingness to contribute to Facebook's growth, which caught the attention of the hiring team.

During the interview process, he was able to convey his enthusiasm and understanding of Facebook’s vision, which made him stand out as a candidate who was not just looking for a job but was genuinely passionate about the company. 

Eventually, Noah became the 30th employee that Facebook hired, and he was also hired as a product manager there. However, Kagan worked there for eight months, and he mentioned that he was not a good cultural fit for Facebook at the time. 

Tensions With Facebook and Lessons Learned

Facebook's work culture was highly intense and focused, and Kagan's personality and approach didn't align well with the company's evolving needs and environment. 

Things weren't working out between Kagan and the Facebook team, as he admitted that he was not performing at his best in the role. He was distracted and not fully dedicated to his responsibilities. 

He cherished his time on Facebook, but he also experienced a profound sense of boredom and struggle, which he details in his blog post. Despite his unwavering belief that Facebook would achieve great success, he faced significant challenges as the company expanded.

His priorities were not always in sync with those of the company, leading to friction and a lack of alignment on goals. Finally, after 8 months of working there, Facebook had to fire Kagan under the allegation of “leaking company information.”

In his blog, Kagan mentioned that his life, identity, and validation were tied to Facebook, and he went through a year of depression after things didn’t work out. This is what he’s mentioned in his blog: “I dealt with the chaos of a 30-person company extremely well. (Did I mention my boss got fired on my first day, and my next boss got fired 2 months after me?)

Most decisions were made by me walking over to Mark’s desk for approval, but at 150 people, it was a group meeting of 30 people, or I had to schedule time via Mark’s secretary.”

It is estimated that Noah Kagan’s equity and ESOP value from Facebook could have been worth $185M today if he stayed there. 

Like many of us, Kagan was on a learning journey and probably didn’t find the work environment to be the right fit for him. Finding the work and culture that fits is like marriage; it could take time to figure out, especially for unconventional personalities, that most entrepreneurs have. 

However, Noah Kagan today smartly leveraged this story to brand himself, narrate an interesting story, and teach about business. This is a great example of how you turn adversities into opportunities, but more on that later. 

Losing Potentially $1.7M at Mint.com

The following years brought a lot of ups and downs for Kagan. Despite his setback at Facebook, Kagan had built a reputation as someone with valuable experience in user growth and marketing. His early involvement in Facebook gave him credibility in the startup community.

He joined Mint.com as their 4th member, building their entire marketing strategy and planning from scratch and owning a 1% equity in the company. However, life came full circle for Noah Kagan. Mint.com was sold for $170M two years after it was founded, but Noah wasn’t rewarded for that. 

Similar to his experience at Facebook, Kagan struggled with aligning himself with Mint.com's culture. The company had specific ways of operating and expectations that Kagan found challenging to adapt to.

In Noah’s words, “When I started at Mint I learned a shit ton…It was all new. But towards the end it was less and less new things. You could say I became too comfortable and stopped growing. And then they hired someone above me. In hindsight, it was my ego that said I had nothing more to learn and I’d be a gopher for the new person. But I probably could have learned something from her too.”

Hence, Noah eventually also said goodbye to another promising company after working there for ten months as the Director of Marketing and lost what could have been potentially $1.7M. That must have had a heavy hit on Noah, for sure. 

Stepping Stones to Entrepreneurship & Success

By now, Noah has had a lot of hands-on exposure to growing startups and has had a lot of experience up his sleeve. Kagan also realized that he probably could be a better employer than an employee. 

Noah started his own venture, Gambit, in 2007, a platform that provided a payment engine for social games like Zynga, Gaia Online, etc. While the idea was promising and hopes were up, due to some mistakes like not having enough investment, not growing fast enough, and others, Gambit tanked in two years of time and had to shut down its operations. 

However, Noah didn’t lose hope and, in fact, utilized all the life and business lessons he learned to start his first successful venture, App Sumo. 

Finding AppSumo

In 2010, Kagan recognized a gap in the market for affordable software tools that could help small businesses and startups. He noticed that many entrepreneurs needed access to premium tools but often couldn't afford the full prices. 

So he founded AppSumo, an online marketplace where businesses can buy and sell applications and software. 

He began by reaching out to software companies to negotiate discounts on their products. The idea was to provide a win-win situation: software companies would gain exposure and new customers, while entrepreneurs could access tools at a fraction of the cost.

The first deal offered by AppSumo was for the Imgur Pro account. Kagan successfully negotiated a significant discount, which attracted a lot of attention and validated his business model.

With the initial success, Kagan continued to expand AppSumo by offering more deals on various software products. He focused on building relationships with software developers and continuously adding value for AppSumo’s users.

AppSumo, is quite successful now, achieved an impressive revenue of $80 million in 2023, and has served over 1 million businesses globally since its inception.

From this success, Noah Kagan quotes: “Get paying customers before you launch and then build what they want,” instead of building a working prototype first and then struggling to find users for it. 

Conclusion: Biggest Lessons One Can Learn From Noah Kagan

How to Leverage Personal Brand and Build Relationships 

Noah Kagan has been blogging about marketing and businesses since 2001, which is even before his career started. That slowly built a blog and gave him a good personal brand. 

Noah wasn’t a tech genius but he was smart enough and had enough hustle in him to reach out to different people to work at Facebook, and then leveraged his connections from Facebook, Intel, and Silicon Valley, to work at Mint.com, and kept building his reputation as a “marketing guy.”

He has documented every step of his journey on his blog and penned down some valuable lessons from each of his failures and successes that one can learn a lot from. 

Consistency

Noah clearly struggled to find his place as an employee but kept at it until he took the courage to start his own ventures and scaled them. After losing so much in equity from Facebook and Mint, Kagan showed resilience and kept going. 

He has also blogged about his depression, which itself is an inspiring story. He acknowledged his mistakes, learned from them, realized what worked best for him, accepted himself, and used all of that to build his business. 

Independence 

AppSumo is a bootstrapped company. Besides, Noah Kagan has built his personal brand to a good extent, which continues to grow, and also launched his book “Million Dollar Weekend,” which is another digital asset that he sells and receives royalties from. 

With valuable content, he’s gained 1.8M subscribers on YouTube and the trust of many through his blog. Noah has been invited as a guest in podcasts by Ali Abdaal, Tim Ferris, and Mark Manson, amongst others. He has a good community of online followers and teaches about business and entrepreneurship through different mediums. 

Noah Kagan is an exceptional entrepreneur who’s had a difficult yet inspiring career. He bounced back from many failures and kept building things through time, the fruits of which he’s bearing today. 

Hope you learned something new from this article. Thank you for reading.