24 business ideas over 20 years: lessons from building AppSumo

Executive overview

Most entrepreneurs expect a big break. Noah Kagan built 24 ventures over 20 years before AppSumo finally generated real wealth. The path was mostly failures, side projects, and pivots — not a single winning bet.

Persistence across many attempts, not talent on one, is what compounds into a $10M outcome.

The 24 ventures (condensed)

1. Okdork.com — personal blog, still running, never sold
2. Everspeed.com — photos and social posts about nightlife
3. Collegeup.org — helped land a job at Facebook
4. Comegetused.com — college book exchange; lesson: solve daily annoyances
5. HFG Consulting — freelance consulting ("hella fucking good")
6. NinjaCard.com — business cards; first dollar earned, momentum was real
7. Peoplereminder.com — early CRM, now offline
8. Entrepreneur27.org — events for young founders without an existing network
9. Community Next — 4 conferences, 300+ attendees each, ~$50K profit per event
10. Freecallsto.com — ad-based opportunity site; still earns $100–$200/day
11. Backcast — pre-YouTube video site, BitTorrent-backed
12. Kickflip / Gambit — Facebook game developer, became #1 at the time
13. Bettercade.com — online sports betting with virtual chips
14. [Payment platform] — $30M revenue in year one; noticed payment providers taking large cuts
15. AppSumo — launched with a basic site; now eight-figure revenue, significantly profitable
16. KingSumo.com — internal AppSumo tool spun into a standalone product
17. Monthly1k.com — course teaching people to earn their first $1K; hard work, proud of it
18. Sumo.com — email collection tools for site owners
19. Leo.io — Chrome extension acquired to drive Sumo traffic; did not work
20. Meetfam.com — six months and $6M spent; failed
21. [Shopify email tool] — automatic email for Shopify; earns ~$1K/month
22. Halldrop.com — Product Hunt-style site for e-commerce products
23. SendFox.com — affordable email marketing, built out of frustration with Mailchimp's pricing

Three takeaways

• Solve your own problems — build things you personally want to exist
• Consistency — sustained effort over years, not one big swing
• People — reaching the million-dollar level requires others; network compounds like capital