Noah Kagan

After 3 years of writing (and rewriting)

18 months of podcast tours and marketing prep

My book Million Dollar Weekend is officially LIVE🎉

If you’ve received ANY value from me in the past decade, it would mean the world if you grabbed a copy of my book: milliondollarweekend.com

I have a confession to make.

I've been building like a maniac with Claude. 738 pull requests since September. 😵

I was so proud of myself. 😁

So I asked Claude to grade it. Which of these actually significantly improved the business?

4.

Out of 67 things we actually shipped, 4 clearly moved a number.

Only 8% of it was even for AppSumo. The business that pays for all of it.

Then it went through my messages. 2,045 of them. I asked "did that work?" 25 times.

And the worst part. We ran 2 tests on AppSumo that found winners. They've been sitting there for 2 weeks because nobody made the call. Nobody = me. 🤦

Building used to be the hard part. Now it's basically free. So I was doing whatever felt productive instead of what moved things forward.

New rule: nothing ships unless I know what number it's supposed to move.

Prompt I used 👇

"Look at everything I shipped since [date] and every message I sent you. For each change: what number was it supposed to move, did it move, and what did I never check? Rank what I should stop, keep and finish."

Grok Bot just got me $59.91. For free. 🤑

You can have it check if you're owed any money in America. Turns out I was!

Prompt below. 👇

Grok Bot Prompt to use: "Search official U.S. unclaimed-property databases for me and my spouse. Use only free official sources like MissingMoney.com and each state's official claim site — no paid finders. Show every match with the amount, holder, last-known address, property ID, and the official claim link. Don't file anything until I confirm which records are actually ours, then help me submit those claims on the official sites."

I told Claude to work the weekend!

Copy this prompt:
"I'm not working this weekend. You are. Figure out what matters most at {your company}. Surprise me Monday with the results."

Its pick: our partner support inbox. That's the founders who sell their software on AppSumo. 🥁

1,298 tickets in 33 days.

What it found:

- 30% were partners replying to our own automated emails
- 117 were replies to ONE rejection email
- 16% weren't partners at all. Spam, newsletters, lost buyers.
- Our "Go to support" link pointed to the wrong page
- The FAQ was out of date and in no order

We were creating our own tickets. 🤦

The fixes:

1- Stop nudging partners about things they already did
2- Show them where their submission stands
3- Tell rejected partners they can reapply in 30 days
4- Move the noise out of the inbox

I spent a day updating its fixes.

Partner tickets: 60 a day → 15.

Ask Claude to work this weekend for you, let me know what it suggests!

October 2025 - 24
October 2026 - 74

Ideas that went from Slack to live at AppSumo. 📈

About 20 people. None of it was on the project list.

Everyone says AI isn't making teams more productive. Ayman on our team saw this chart and said one word: "Bullshit."

What changed:

1- One owner, start to finish.

78% of ideas now go from Slack thread to live with the same person. A year ago: 8%.

No more "oh, you should do this." Whoever posts the idea ships it.

2- About 1 day.

That's the typical time from Slack thread to live.

Ship it before the thread goes cold.

3- Fast reviews.

Two of our engineers cut the friction in code review and deploys, and kept things safe and stable.

Faster builders need faster reviewers.

4- No permission.

Nobody waits for a ticket or a planning meeting.
If you see it, ship it.

Steal the measurement. Paste this into Claude with Slack and GitHub connected:

"Find every idea posted in our Slack in the last 12 months. Match each one to the code change that shipped it. By month, show: ideas shipped, whether the person who posted it also shipped it, and days from thread to live. Show me where ideas die."

Props to the team. 3x in a year.