Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo ($76M gross / $56M net revenue, bootstrapped for 14 years), joins Sam and Shaan to discuss his new book Million Dollar Weekend. The conversation covers the core idea of bias toward action over planning, Noah’s infamous firing from Facebook, the luck and variance inside Silicon Valley, AppSumo’s financial reality, and how the best founders focus relentlessly on one thing for a very long time.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Noah Kagan (guest, founder of AppSumo, author of Million Dollar Weekend)
Introduction and the “Act Now” Philosophy [00:00:00]
Noah: I was in the sauna this morning thinking about you guys. I was just thinking how grateful I am — there are so many cool people that have just crossed our paths throughout our whole lives. It made me kind of emotional, but also just happy.
Sam: We’re supposed to get touchy feely at the end, not at the beginning. YouTube stats show that touchy feely at the end works, but at the beginning people just bounce.
Sam: All right, Noah, we’re live. We’ve got Noah Kagan — one of my dearest friends, one of the OGs of internet marketing and entrepreneurship on the internet. One of my inspirations. You run this company called AppSumo that does about $80 million in revenue. You’re a YouTuber with what — one-point-something million subscribers. And you’re here to promote a book, which you’ve clearly placed right in front of you. Give us the wisdom bombs or insight bombs from the book. What are the key ideas or highlights you want people to take away?
Noah: All right, Shaan — I have a quote of yours in the book. I don’t know if you actually said this, though.
Shaan: Ask me. I’ll say yes either way. Don’t worry, I got your back.
Noah: So we made this book like a tech startup — we did surveys, beta testing, all that stuff. And one of Shaan’s quotes is: “Show me an experimenter and over the long run I’ll show you a future winner.”
Shaan: That’s true. I did say that. Thank God — I was going to have to reprint tens of thousands of books.
Noah: From the surveys we’ve done, the number one thing people got out of it is “now not how.” It just means: start right away. People get so stuck — especially people who listen to your show. They’re like, “I don’t know, I want to listen to more shows, I need to go listen to these fake YouTube gurus who don’t even run real businesses.” But they can actually do things right now. How do you get a dollar right now? Go get a dollar. Venmo Noah at Noah Kagan. Go get it from a friend, from your uncle. People are waiting to be ready, and they’re just never ready. People like yourselves and me, who’ve gotten somewhere with wealth, are just doing things.
Sam: You used to have this course called the Monthly 1K. I tell people there are two courses I paid for that changed my life — Neville’s copywriting course and then your Monthly 1K course. I bought it when I was 23. It was $300, which was a really big deal for me. I started a business based on it that was making thousands of dollars a month — and then I shut it down.
One of the first lessons in the book was to go to a coffee shop and ask for a discount. I was petrified. I remember being so afraid. But I did it. Then you talked about emailing or calling people and getting customers before you even build a thing. At the time, everyone talks about that now, but back then it kind of blew my mind.
During that period of my life it was all about action. I can’t show my feet here, I don’t think — I can’t move well enough — but I went and bought a sewing needle. You guys know what stick and poke is?
Shaan: Sounds like a jail cell tattoo.
Sam: It is. You get a sewing needle, wrap thread around the edge of a pencil so just the needle sticks out, buy India ink for five bucks, dip the needle in it, and you just put all these little dots. I’ve got the word “act” on my left foot and “now” on my right foot. This was when I was partying and drinking a lot, so I was a little inebriated when I did this. But I was like — every morning when I wake up and put my feet down at the edge of the bed, I’m going to see “act now.” That’s my mantra for business. And I remember thinking: it’s all about action. Business plans are stupid. Business cards are stupid. LLCs are stupid. It’s all about action.
Shaan: That’s the ROI, Sam. That’s the ROI right there. He made you get tatted up.
Shaan: I thought you were going to say his tattoo says “Noah.”
Sam: Dude, some people look at it and they’re like, “What’s act?” And I was like, “Yeah. I’ve got ‘sat’ on the other foot.”
The Power of Asking [00:08:00]
Noah: So number one in the book: “now not how” — just what can you do today. I don’t think people realize how much more they can do in a day. The second thing is what you just described — the power of asking. The upside of asking is huge. I got on a private jet from asking. We teach it through the Coffee Challenge. You did it, Sam — you asked for a discount. I did a YouTube video last week where I tried the Coffee Challenge and got rejected. You know what? That’s okay. Let’s go forward.
Sam: This is such an immigrant mentality, and it’s why I love children of immigrants. Your father’s an immigrant, Shaan has an immigrant family, most of my best friends do. They all have this energy where they ask for things I was so embarrassed to do. Then I hang out with you for a bit, I hang out with Neville for a bit — it’s just this shameless ability to go ask for stuff. It totally changed my perspective.
I used to be so embarrassed. I’d go out to eat, you’d bring me the wrong order, and I’d be like, “Nah, whatever, just give it to me.” But then I started hanging out with these guys and it totally changed. And it 100% worked. I mean, that’s all business is — “Will you be my sponsor? Will you be my customer? Will you be my partner?” It’s an ask.
At Camp MFM, we had Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, give us an impromptu presentation off his phone. He found some old slides on his phone, started screen sharing onto the TV, and said, “This was our sales formula.” It was: SW + WC = MO. Some Will, Some Won’t, Who Cares, Move On. He said: once you realize that some will say yes, some won’t, who cares, move on — now you have the entrepreneurial sales formula.
Noah: Airbnb is actually a great example in the book of how to get started quickly. You guys know how they started on Craigslist? There was a designers conference in town, and they sent an email to the conference saying, “Hey, does anyone want to stay on our couch?” That was how they tested the business that’s now worth $100 billion. When you start realizing there are other ways to do this — you don’t have to do it the Silicon Valley funded way — you realize Facebook started that way, in a weekend. Airbnb did too.
AppSumo Financials: 14 Years, $76M Revenue, Bootstrapped [00:17:00]
Sam: So you’ve been talking about being quiet for a while — AppSumo’s kind of been off the radar. But you’ve just been quietly crushing it. How old is the company?
Noah: Almost 14 years. Going through puberty — some growing pains — but it’s been cool to see.
Sam: I think there’s a bunch of companies like this. Hey.com, Superhuman, Card — you hear about them for a little while, then they go quiet for five or ten years, and they’re just killing it. Card’s a good example. About seven to ten years ago it was really popular to create simple personal websites. Wix, Weebly, Squarespace were all hot. Card came out with super simple single-page sites and I still use it today — it’s still the fastest way for me to make a basic website.
Shaan: It’s really hard to use though.
Sam: Yeah, but they came out, were kind of hot on Product Hunt, then disappeared. Nobody talked about them for years. Then I met the founder and he told me the numbers — they were just crushing it. He said a really random thing happened: every political movement started using Card. During the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, thousands of websites got created on Card to promote causes. That drove a ton of growth. Then they bootstrapped for 10 years and just recently raised a small round because they couldn’t deny how big it had gotten. They had two people — AJ and one other guy — for 10 years. That’s it. Then they raised a little, now they’re going for it.
Noah: I think there’s something not talked about enough: longevity. Just doing it over and over for a very long time. The second thing is market selection. We’ve stuck with it for 15 years, but we also chose a good market. Software went from 10 deals our first year to over 100,000 products out there now.
Sam: Did you bootstrap it?
Noah: Yes, bootstrapped. So it’s been profitable. I don’t know how wildly profitable or just sort of profitable — I can share the numbers, I’m happy to talk about it. In terms of net revenue, we ended around $76.7M gross. Net revenue was $56M.
Sam: Wow, pretty good. And then profit?
Noah: $7.5M profit.
Sam: And what do you do with that? Is that Noah’s piggy bank or where does it go?
Noah: So what we do — we copy Amazon. If you look at our net profit over the past literally 14 years, it’s like zero to 0.5% net income margin. In Q4, we try to spend all the profit we have: take everyone on the team to Mexico, ads, servers, sponsorships, hiring, prepaying for things — whatever we can within tax rules — and pay the team distributions. Then whatever’s left after that, me and my partner get some distribution.
Sam: What’s confusing about that is — you’re including paying yourself out of it, right? But what’s the point of running this business for 14 years without keeping the profits?
Noah: You prepay ads for the next year. You try to invest as much as you can, so theoretically the next year is bigger. It’s pretty hard to actually spend $7M ahead of time. We distribute almost $2M back to the team in bonuses.
For the first five years I didn’t pay myself anything. I put everything back in, even though the business hit right away — which most businesses don’t. After year six I was like, “I’ve got nothing to show for this. I don’t think we’re going public, no one’s trying to buy us — I’d like to have some money in the bank.”
Sam: Were you cash poor? I mean, before this you’d run some other stuff — Kickflip, Gambit, you were with Mint, famously with Facebook…
Noah: I’ve never been broke. I had a million dollars at 30 from day jobs. I was super cheap — I lived on floors for a year, lived at my mom’s house, my aunt’s house. I got two paydays: one from Gambit, the payments company — I made around $350,000 from payments for Farmville and those games — and then from conferences. That plus just being really conservative with cash put me at about a million dollars liquid around 30.
The Facebook Story [00:28:00]
Sam: Can you tell the Facebook story? I know you’ve told it before, but a lot of this is buried in your blog and nobody reads blogs anymore. I don’t want the story to go untold. What happened at Facebook? How did you kind of blow a few-hundred-million-dollar payday?
Noah: Every year it gets bigger too. Thanks for rubbing it in. Do you know the word “schadenfreude”? Pleasure in other people’s pain. It’s one of my favorite words — like, they have a word for that.
I posted on Twitter some of these old Facebook memories — me and Zuck, Moskovitz, Bosworth, who’s now the CTO, Chris Cox, Charlie Cheever, Adam D’Angelo. It was a really special time.
So how I got there: I worked at Intel but was always building stuff on the side — built CollegeUp.org, gslist for college students (nobody used it), NinjaCard.com (discount cards for college students, that did really well). I was putting on conferences. At 27, I really wanted to get out of my day job and have my own business.
I sent in my resume cold, but the differentiator was that I sent mockups. I took Facebook and said, “Here’s what Facebook Maps would look like if you ever built that feature.” They were like, “You’ve got a bunch of businesses for college students, you’re showing us what you’d do here, and you’re not even a designer.”
Sam: Were you using Google Slides? Did you pay somebody?
Noah: That was myself. Google Slides or Microsoft Paint — super basic. It doesn’t have to be fancy.
Sam: What was your first impression walking in? What year was this?
Noah: This was 2005. If you want to get a job — and I think getting a job can be cool — just look at where you’re spending all your time. When I came in it was chaotic. I posted one of those photos — cables everywhere, desks all over the place. But it felt like something special was happening. Like, “Holy shit, we’re on a mission that no one else is part of and we know where this is going.” And there was this fearless leader who seemed like a savant — definitely awkward as hell, but I was really impressed by how big he was thinking.
Sam: What numbers was he throwing around?
Noah: So a few crazy things that people forget. He copied Connect U in a weekend — copied someone else, launched it, it worked, then kept going and changed his vision. At a very early time, he rejected a billion-dollar sale from Yahoo. Imagine: you’re 24 years old and somebody offers you a billion dollars. Most of us would take that in a heartbeat. I took a $100,000 job.
Shaan: I heard this crazy story where Yahoo’s making the offer, Zuck is sitting with the executives and Peter Thiel, and he asks the executives to leave the room. Everyone’s looking at Zuck like, “All right, so let’s take this.” And he goes, “I just wanted to sit here and pretend we’re talking about this — obviously we’re not taking this deal.”
Noah: By the way, you’re totally making that up. That’s not what happened.
Shaan: I read a blog post!
Noah: The actual story is they got the offer, then at the next board meeting — where Peter Thiel and others were — Zuck said, “Okay, bit of housekeeping, we’re supposed to discuss this offer, obviously not going to take it.” And they said, “Whoa, whoa — maybe we should mark this. That’s a lot of money, we should talk about this.”
Shaan: Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story. And there’s even more revisionist history — there’s another story where Zuck actually did accept an offer from Yahoo or Microsoft, and they reneged and tried to negotiate down. So none of these are congruent. Peter Thiel tells one story, then there’s this other one where he kind of said yes and wanted revenge because they lowballed him. I don’t really know what the truth is, but there’s a lot of BS in startup lore.
Noah: Someone asked me a few days ago, “Is Zuck good or bad?” I think he’s good. He’s ambitious, but he always — at least when I was there — had good intentions. It wasn’t like he needed to manipulate the media. He was probably like, “What are you talking about? It’s just an algorithm.”
Sam: Can I talk about the environment? When I lived in San Francisco, I was doing a startup — I thought this was it, we’re in the race, we’re in the hunt. Then I went to a friend’s office who actually had product-market fit. The market was pulling their product, they were growing faster than they could handle. I walked into that office — smaller, way less nice, people sitting on the floor, cables everywhere — and it was just a different vibe. I walked home thinking, “Oh shit, we’re just playing house.” That’s what it’s supposed to feel like when it’s working.
Noah: I felt it a few times — at Mint, at AppSumo, and inside Facebook. My boss got fired the day I started. I walked in and Zuck was like, “Your boss Doug — who ended up founding GoodRx — I just fired him because he tried to sell the company. It’s my company. Welcome to Facebook.” And I just grabbed a corner of a desk and thought, “All right, what should I work on?”
It was a stark contrast from Intel — everything regimented, eight meetings a day — and now this. The thing that was interesting was we saw the internal growth metrics. We knew something was happening that others didn’t see. I think we were at 10 million users the day I started; by the day I got fired it was about 50 million. The threats were serious — Google was a threat, Myspace was a huge threat. But we saw that growth and knew something was there.
Sam: What was the math in your head about what your stock might eventually be worth?
Noah: My whole thing was that the equity was going to be insanely valuable. I didn’t know the limit because Zuck’s vision was to connect the entire world. His quote was, “We want to be a toll booth for the internet.” That was inspiring.
He did a lot of clever things — paid for all our parking tickets, paid for our cleaning, paid for us to live close, paid for laundry — everything so all we had to do was focus on work. That wasn’t normal back then.
When we were hanging out with MrBeast, Jack Smith said something about him: “I like how he just has no regard for social norms.” We asked how he hires and trains people. He said, “They basically move in with me. They follow me everywhere. We work seven days a week. After six months they can start giving ideas, because now they’ve fully absorbed me.”
Shaan: I think that absolute disregard for social norms is a very positive attribute in highly successful people.
Noah: Zuck was kind of like that too. But there are negatives. I remember this guy Dan — a tree fell on him during a workday, he was biking and a tree killed him. And there was not even any acknowledgement. It was like, “Let’s just work.” I just thought that was insane.
Shaan: There’s a price to pay for being crazy like that.
Noah: It was special to be a part of. We had Harvard PhDs in customer support. People that wanted to be there so badly it didn’t matter what their degree was — just come work. Being in that environment, seeing all that amazing talent that went on to do really cool things.
Why Noah Got Fired [00:43:00]
Sam: Why did they fire you?
Noah: It was basically because of Coachella. I dipped out — I was drunk and high at Coachella. And I was blogging about Facebook because I was so excited about it. I think that’s a good approach: go find things you’re excited about and tell the world. I let Arrington at TechCrunch know, “Hey, Facebook is opening up to Microsoft and corporate emails in the morning — I think you should write about it.” He wrote about it that night. Then I emailed Zuck and some of the executive team and let them know what I’d done.
I also got frustrated. For me at 30, with a lot of people it was like, “Just figure things out.” I was like, “All right, I’m going to help build mobile with Slee, or help build ads, or help do the status update thing” — which they didn’t even want to do. There was a lot to do there. And I was also probably more immature.
As it grew, I didn’t want to be in meetings, I didn’t want to do Excel project management, I didn’t want to have long discussions with 30 people about basic ideas.
Sam: When did it become corporate?
Noah: At that point it was 150 people and it felt very corporate to me.
Shaan: What’s the last great thing Zuck has done since 2005 besides acquiring other people? Portal was a flop. He’s made good acquisition decisions — Instagram, WhatsApp — and the company just keeps getting bigger. I remember when my wife worked there — they were doing this thing in India, putting blimps or drones up to give people free internet. Why? Because the only people who aren’t on Facebook are the people in India who don’t have internet. So they were going to give them free internet so they could use Facebook. His relentless drive toward connecting everyone is what he’s done.
Noah: The thing people can think about in their own businesses: Facebook Marketplace or Facebook Events — I was excited about growing and monetizing those early on, and Zuck was completely against it. With AppSumo, our core is: find cool products, get a deal on them, promote them. That’s it. It gets exciting to think, “Could we do this other thing?” But really — can you do the core excellent first and then start adding later?
Billionaires and What Actually Makes Someone Rich [00:51:00]
Sam: You’ve had this video where you were on a plane with a commodities trader worth hundreds of millions. And you told me ahead of time that most billionaires you know are unhappy. Tell me more about what you’ve noticed hanging out with some of these uber-successful people.
Noah: Most of them didn’t set out to be billionaires. You hear people online saying, “I want to be a billionaire.” Almost every billionaire I know — and I’ve worked for them or known multi-multimillionaires — it was just like, “Here’s something I’m curious about or excited about.” Maybe in private equity or finance it’s different, but a lot of the entrepreneur ones — it was just stuff they were curious about. They all got rich by doing one thing.
I was just at FedEx this morning because I interviewed the guy from Kinko’s. He just focused on copiers. That’s it. But a lot of newer entrepreneurs, I’ve seen, are like, “I’m going to do five different solopreneur startups this weekend.” You can test five, but which one’s working? Let’s just do one. These billionaires just did one.
They tell us to diversify, but they do one thing. And they stuck with it for a very long period of time. Think about any billionaire you know — how long did it take?
Sam: Twenty years, thirty years, a lifetime.
Noah: A lifetime. And we’re trying to get crypto-rich in a month. The slow compounded growth over long periods of time is what doesn’t get recognized.
Focus: Shaan’s Camp MFM Takeaway [00:56:00]
Shaan: That was my major takeaway from Camp MFM. When I was talking to Jimmy I said, “The thing standing out to me most as I get out of my bubble and reassess — I’m spreading my energy too thin. I’m doing more and getting less.” I put it this way: “I think you have a thousand times more opportunity hitting you every day than I do, and you’ve said yes to half the things I have. Something’s wrong here.”
Horos said something nice about this that resonated. Let’s say you’re making $10,000 a month and somebody offers you something that’ll make you $1,000 — easy to say no. If you’re making $100,000 a month and somebody offers you $10,000 — easy to say no. The hard thing is when you’re making $100K and somebody comes with something that’ll make you $100K. You’re like, “That’s my rate.” But now you’ve split your focus and you’re doubling your work only to get one more unit.
The smartest people, when they’re at $100K, don’t say yes to the next thing that gets them another $100K or $200K. They only say yes to something that might get them 10x more. The people who really break out are the ones who can say no, stay focused, until they see something that is truly 10x better than what they have.
Noah: So how are you changing this year?
Shaan: I shut down two things I was working on that were working but were more in the 1x category. And every day now I start the first three hours on content. It’s the thing I love doing most, the thing I think I’m best at. But the problem was: a deal comes on the table and I’m spending the first eight hours that day on that deal. Now I carved out that the first three hours are only for content — I’m not going to say yes to anything else. As soon as you do the first three hours you have so much momentum, the natural thing is to just keep going.
Sam: Where are you going to start? When you say content — text, blogging?
Shaan: All ideas are on the table. Right now I’m prototyping. Before this podcast I had recorded two other podcasts — one with my roommate and brother-in-law at home talking about sports, never released, only three listeners. Then one at my startup office — three episodes, probably up on YouTube somewhere, nobody ever watched. But doing those, even though they went nowhere, showed me: “Man, I really like doing this. How cool would it be if people actually listened?” So I’d prototyped it and felt it out.
When I say new content — I’ll dabble with short form, or write an outline to a book, try two chapters, and figure out: do I actually want to write a book? I don’t need to commit — I can prototype it first.
Writing the Book: The ROI Conversation [01:03:00]
Noah: You should definitely do the book.
Sam: The problem with the book route, Noah — it seems so hard. Everyone I know who writes a book describes it exactly how my friends who run marathons do. They complain constantly during training, say the race is miserable, and then two weeks after it’s done they’re like, “All right, I think I’m going to do the next one.”
You’ve been talking about wanting to write a book forever. I think it’s been way longer than four years. It took four years to do this thing. Do you think it’s going to be worth it? What’s the ROI?
Noah: I’m proud of it. First, the ROI is going to impact people. I’ve already seen it — I’ve seen people read it and I’m like, “Holy shit, really?” And with things like what you guys have done with your show, or what Shaan’s exploring — what’s something you’re excited to do? That’s kind of the hard question. Nobody’s ever proud of themselves just for doing the minimum. But if you run a marathon you’re like, “Damn, that was hard but I can actually do this.” For me, that was really the ultimate ROI of this book: can I face myself and work on something and actually help people?
Sam: What did you become so political for? Old Noah — I’ve got to tell this story. There was a co-worker I worked with who Shaan knows. We got on a meeting and Noah showed up shirtless. He’s on his couch. I’m like, “Noah, what the hell are you doing?” He was this crazy madman, and that’s what made him brilliant. He would do all this crazy stuff and execute really, really well. But now when I ask about the ROI you’re talking about changing people’s lives. It’s so funny to see this evolution.
Noah: Well, one — thank you. I think we should all want to change people’s lives, just in a different way. Back then too, just one nip at a time.
I was going to talk about my inverted nipples, which I’m very self-conscious about. But look — I’m maturing. Do I want to show up shirtless? Maybe if we’re hanging out in a real sauna. But as you get older you realize what kind of behavior you want to do.
The book — I think people have these ROI things like “I want to help a million people.” I don’t give a shit about that. But I am happy if one or two or five or 10,000 people read the book and do something for themselves.
Sam: Noah, we appreciate you doing this. I should have plugged this earlier — I’m buying 30 to 50 books. I’m doing my part. If you go to theantimba.com — between now and February 15th, anyone who gives me their email, I’ll randomly pick 50 of you and send you a link to get the book for free. I’m excited to see you do this. Hopefully you impact some people. And the ego side of me says hopefully you rank on some bestseller list.
What’s the book called and where do people find you?
Noah: It’s called Million Dollar Weekend. Noah Kagan on Twitter, appsumo.com, Noah Kagan on YouTube.
Shaan’s Testimonial: Making $1,000 in a Weekend [01:09:00]
Shaan: Before you go, Noah — I had an experience like this that shifted my life. I’m a testimonial for this even before your book came out.
I was working on a startup — we’d been at it for nine months trying to get everything right. We literally had a 300-page business plan. It was embarrassing looking back, but we thought that meant we were serious. Dotting all the T’s and crossing all the I’s. And at a certain point I looked at my co-founder — he’s my roommate, my friend — and said, “Dude, I feel like we just keep telling everyone we’re doing a business but we don’t actually do any business.”
He’s like, “What?”
“How long have we been sitting here with this whiteboard and this plan? We have no revenue. We’ve never made a dollar. I can’t believe this.”
I had just read The Four-Hour Work Week. I said, “All right — this weekend we are going to make money. I don’t care how.” We set a goal of $1,000. I said, “We’re making it by Sunday night. Let’s go.”
Instantly, just by having that intention, things started to fall together. We made a website, found a product on Alibaba, got it drop shipped, made our first sale — sold basically a few hundred customized wristbands, like those Livestrong bands, to somebody whose parents were having an anniversary and needed 200 of them. We charged four or five bucks each. Made $1,000 in one weekend. I felt like the champion of the universe.
And I thought: this is what business is supposed to feel like. Taking action, going out there, trying to sell something, moving fast, not trying to perfect everything. You don’t need a 300-page plan. After that, literally, my whole game shifted. Just from that one experience.
I haven’t read your book yet — you sent it to me, I’m going to — but I already in my soul am on board with what you’re all about.
Noah: I did that wristband business too. That’s crazy!
Shaan: They were hot at the time. Every college kid was wearing them.
Noah: The thing you called out is interesting and awesome: you said “I’m going to do something and I have this limited time.” You’ve got 52 weekends a year — especially if you’ve got kids — you don’t have a lot of time. But you can make an hour or two on a weekend to do something. And look what you did in a weekend that you didn’t do in months.
Shaan: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly how it felt. I was like: I either can go back to the old way or I can go this new way, this action way. And the action way became the way.
Sam, it’s so funny you have that tatted on your feet. It’s been tatted in my brain. That’s the only thing I remember. I was at Duke — I thought when I was in high school I was the smart kid. Then you go to a college with all the smart kids from those high schools and realize, “Oh, you ain’t shit.” I was like, “Am I just going to be forgettably average? Because that’s where this is going.” And I was like: am I going to get smarter than these people? I don’t have any special talents nobody else has.
But I realized: a lot of smart people are overthinkers. They hesitate, they doubt, they overanalyze. I was like, “That’s my thing. I’m just going to immediately take action. That will be the difference. That will be my thing. I can build any kind of success on that foundation, rather than trying to be some special snowflake pre-destined to do great things.” That became my motto.
Noah: We can change that. We can tat it. Let’s tat it, Shaan.
Sam: But most people who listen to your show want to make a million dollars and they never make a dollar. They never make that first $1. And that’s where they’ve got to get off their ass.
Noah: That was bars, dude. That was great. Like good lyrics.
Shaan: Nice words, thank you.
Noah: Bro, you’re a 40-year-old YouTuber — how do you not know these things?
Shaan: I’m learning the vocab.
Closing: Act Now, What You See in the Morning [01:17:00]
Noah: I read this good book last night. It’s called The Art Thief. One of the things it said that stuck with me: what’s the first thing you look at when you wake up in the morning? I love that you — Sam — put it on your feet. What’s something you put where you’ll see it first thing when you wake up? Maybe it’s a photo, maybe it’s Million Dollar Weekend on your bedside table, maybe it’s something else. I love that idea.
Sam: I’m getting my whole legs done. I’ve got a kid now, so maybe her name. But I’ve got “bold, fast, fun” tattooed on my thighs — BFF. That’s kind of what I live for in business. I’ve got a pirate ship.
Noah: Is that live, laugh, love?
Sam: Yeah, I mean — I moved to Austin and I found myself.
Shaan: You did the work.
Sam: You know the reason I like homemade tattoos? When you go to a tattoo shop, you find an artist you like, tell them kind of what you want, and they’re like, “Yeah, I’m just going to do whatever I want.” And you’re too embarrassed to tell them exactly what you want because you want to impress this guy Hector. So I basically have a whole bunch of tattoos throughout my body that I got just trying to impress my tattoo artist.
Shaan: That’s pretty much how it works when it comes to tattoos.
Sam: All right, Noah — we appreciate you coming on. That’s the pod.