Noah Kagan: Notes From Meeting Peter Thiel and Books that Helped Him Make Millions

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. Talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's Podcast Network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Noah Kagan** (1:01)
No, it just started as a side hustle. I was in a basement in San Francisco that was like, yo, I have a theory about what I think will be big and I want to make 3000 bucks a month. Never was it like I want to make millions of dollars or I want to have a bunch of people or I want to have a bunch of customers.
How are you, Sam? How are you today?

**Sam Parr** (1:30)
I'm good. What are you doing?

**Noah Kagan** (1:32)
Well, I just got back from Albuquerque. I was hanging out with my family.
And then I just got home, and there's like back to back meetings before we go to the Trail of Lights tonight in Austin.

**Sam Parr** (1:43)
I know, Neville and Neil, I've heard all about you guys are gonna have some exciting times tonight. You weren't working today, like a normal schedule?

**Noah Kagan** (1:53)
I actually work really best in airplanes. So I got up, worked in the airplane, landed and just been kind of back to back meetings now until 6.30.

**Sam Parr** (2:02)
Do you enjoy having a normal schedule now? Ooh.

**Noah Kagan** (2:10)
I had some trauma, you know, by the way, like Silicon Valley tech worker trauma is like, my boss didn't give me a 20% raise, it was a 10% raise and I am traumatized. Like when I worked at Intel, all I did was meetings. And it was like, and I was like, this is the worst thing ever. And now I'm in, all I do is meetings.
But then, you know, I will say though, today I was in some meetings and I was interacting and I was like, man, I love you people.
There's some meetings where they suck and you have to figure out how to get rid of them or change the meeting. And there's some where it's like, wow, we're business forward. Like there's things that are happening that are making shit happen in the business.

**Sam Parr** (2:45)
So Noah, you, Noah Kagan's here, founder of this company called AppSumo, which we'll talk about in a second, but you basically, you kind of, I don't know, do you say you stepped away? You weren't like actively running the company day to day for like a couple of years. Now you're the CEO again. I, so I was active for a long time. Now I'm not active.
It's amazing. It's the best. I don't know. Like, I don't think I have it in me to, at least not right now, to go back and do that.
Do you think that you have it in you?

**Noah Kagan** (3:18)
It's hard. It's, I mean, I was not working. I mean, it sounds such like an ass stuff, but like, I wasn't really working. I was doing podcasts, which isn't really working.
And I was making a lot of money and now I'm working. I actually think I'll make the least I've made this year.

**Sam Parr** (3:35)
Wait, what does that mean? You're making a lot of money from what?

**Noah Kagan** (3:39)
Well, Aiman. So we hired this guy to run appsumo.com. He was running it and I was like, oh, well, let me make YouTube videos. I'll do podcasts. And I'll build SendFox and experimental stuff. And then I would get paid.