Meet Noah Kagan, a former facebook staff who worked directly under Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of the company now known as Meta.
Noah Kagan is an American entrepreneur, marketer, and founder of AppSumo, a popular online platform that offers daily deals on software, e-books, and other digital products. Noah Kagan was born in 1981 in Berkeley, California. He grew up in a entrepreneurial family and was exposed to business from a young age. Kagan attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied business administration.
After college, Kagan worked at various startups, including Facebook, where he was the 30th employee. He played a crucial role in growing Facebook’s user base and was responsible for the company’s marketing efforts. However, he was fired from Facebook 9 months after in 2005 due to disagreements with Mark Zuckerberg over the direction of the company.
Kagan has spoken publicly about his departure from Facebook, citing disagreements with Mark Zuckerberg over the company’s direction. Specifically, Kagan wanted to focus on growing the user base through marketing efforts, while Zuckerberg prioritized product development. This philosophical difference led to Kagan’s departure from the company.
Starting AppSumo in 2010
In 2010, Kagan founded AppSumo, a daily deals website that offers discounts on software, e-books, and other digital products. The company quickly gained popularity, and by 2012, AppSumo had become one of the leading platforms for entrepreneurs and small businesses to discover new tools and resources.
Under Noah Kagan’s leadership, AppSumo achieved significant successes:
– Over 1 million subscribers
– Partnered with top brands like Microsoft, IBM, and LinkedIn
– Featured in major publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, and The Wall Street Journal
– Generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue
10 Business Lessons Noah Kagan Learnt From Working for Mark Zuckerberg
Through his experiences at Facebook, Noah Kagan has identified 10 business lessons he learnt from working directly under Mark Zuckerberg for your entrepreneurial success. The lessons he learnt from Mark and Facebook ended up helping him build AppSumo into a $100 million per year company.
1. Focus on a Single Goal
Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra was “GROWTH.” He prioritized a single goal: reaching 1 billion users. Every idea was measured against this goal. You don’t grow fast by doing many things, but by doing ONE thing extremely well.
“Mark, we’re not profitable. Let’s try selling tickets inside Facebook events,” Noah would suggest.
Mark would say no. Then he took a dry-erase marker and wrote on the board: GROWTH.
Every idea we’d bring, he’d ask, “Does this help growth or not?”
If it wasn’t driving toward that goal, we didn’t do it.
2. Move Fast and Break Things
At Facebook, it was normal to work 12+ hours a day.
Mark constantly pushed us to have a sense of urgency. One of his internal mantras was “Move fast and break things”.
“Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” he’d say.
The idea was that we would tolerate some amount of bugs and flaws in the service of moving faster and learning what our community wanted faster.
We shipped several updates to the site every day. In comparison, companies like Microsoft would take months to write out product details, discuss them in a lot of meetings, and finally build them.
As a startup, your biggest advantage against giant companies is speed.
3. Hire A-Plus Players
Mark would only hire people he would be happy to work for.
Even our customer support team was filled with Harvard PhD’s.
The people from Facebook have gone on to help found Asana, Quora, AppSumo, OpenAI, and more.
When you’re in a startup, the first ten people you hire are the most critical. Each makes up 10% of the company. If three are not great, that’s 30% of your company!
A startup depends on great people much more than a big company.
4. Treat Employees Well
Mark recognized that having a work environment you want to work in would appeal to potential employees and make the existing ones proud to be there (and stay later at night).
Facebook did a lot of things that are the norm now:
- A fancy office in one of the most expensive neighborhoods of Silicon Valley
- Hyper competitive salaries
- $1000 office chairs for everyone
- Comped PowerBook and BlackBerry
- Delicious breakfast, lunch, and dinner catered
- Fridge stocked with any drink you can imagine
- All expenses paid company trips to Las Vegas
- Free happy hours every Friday
- Free laundry/dry cleaning service
- Subsidized housing. $600/month if you lived within 1 mile of the office.
- Summer housing/Winter Cabin that anyone could use.
People want to feel acknowledged. Treating your employees well improves work and boosts morale.
5. Scratch Your Own Itch
Many people start businesses in a category they don’t know much about or have an interest in because they’re told it’s “hot” or “trending”.
They have a job as an accountant but try to start a business making software for Content Creators.
At the start, Mark never intended to build a company. He was just trying to help connect people at college.
I started AppSumo because I loved tech products and deals.
Many of the top companies didn’t set out to become companies. The founders solved a problem they faced themselves, and then shared the solution with others.
Build selfishly, share selflessly.
6. Attention to Detail
Mark Zuckerberg demanded perfection, from grammar to product quality. Set high standards and challenge your team to excel.
I remember Mark sent me an email at 3 am telling me that I missed a period in one of our documents. A period (!!)
Mark didn’t accept anything less than perfect. If he thought something was shit he would tell you and you’d have to start over.
He was meticulous about capitalizing the “F” in Facebook. Mark even gifted me the book Elements of Style (a grammar book) for Hanukkah.
Mark set a high standard of excellence for us. It was challenging, but also super rewarding.
7. Give Your Team Ownership
Give your team goals, boundaries, and coaching. Let them own their work and make decisions without needing approval.
Surprisingly, Mark wasn’t super involved in the day-to-day operations. He coded some of the time, but mostly was focused on the macro vision.
He was great about giving people a goal, some boundaries, and coaching them from the sidelines.
Engineers and product managers could come up with features and build them out without needing anyone’s approval.
Mark said he wanted Facebook mobile, and he let us figure out the details to make the very first version.
When your team feels like an owner, they will act as an owner.
8. People, Not Users
Humanize your customers; relate to their problems, not just numbers. Remember, there’s a person behind each username.
Mark would yell at us if we said “users”. Like literally yell.
“They’re human beings”, he’d scream.
Humanizing the people who use your products allows you to serve them better. You’re able to better relate to the problems they’re facing vs just looking at numbers.
On the other side of that username or email address is a fellow human!
9. Keep the Right People
Be ruthless about keeping top performers and removing those who hold you back. Ensure the right people are on the bus.
Noah Kagan’s boss was fired the day he started. His next boss was fired a month later. He got fired in 9 months.
Mark Zuckerberg was intense about keeping the right people on the bus.
He removed the people that were holding Facebook back immediately and he quickly promoted the ones that were helping Facebook achieve its goals
At AppSumo, we run paid trials with potential teammates before bringing them on full-time to ensure they’re the right fit.
10. Have a Big-Ass Vision
Inspire your team with a massive vision, like connecting the entire world. This motivates people to give their best and work towards a higher purpose.
We were all in our 20s when Mark Zuckerberg was offered $1B to sell Facebook. When he said no, he sent a message to all of us and the world.
His goal was to connect the ENTIRE world. That inspired the shit out of us.
“When I was at Facebook all I did was think/talk/dream about Facebook. Facebook was my girlfriend. It didn’t feel like a job, so I put in all my hours.”
A big vision is what motivates people to get up and come give their best at the office. It gives employees a sense of purpose beyond money.
Action Points
Noah Kagan’s remarkable journey from being fired at Facebook to building a multi-million dollar startup, AppSumo, is a testament to the power of resilience, innovation, and strategic thinking. Through his experiences, Kagan has distilled valuable lessons for entrepreneurs, including the importance of focus, speed, teamwork, and attention to detail.
In this article, we’ve explored Kagan’s background, his time at Facebook, and the success of AppSumo. We hope this will help you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Wishing you more success!
