A day in the life of a $96M/year CEO: what the job actually looks like

Executive overview

Most people imagine a CEO's day as wall-to-wall meetings and high-stakes decisions. At the stage where the business runs itself, the job shifts: set the vision, hire the right people, then stay out of the way.

Noah Kagan runs AppSumo at ~$96M/year annual revenue. His day involves sauna reflection, cooking breakfast, light inbox scanning, a town hall, and a partner meetup — not firefighting.

The real CEO job is removing yourself from daily operations so the business can run without you.

Morning: slow start by design

• Keeps mornings free until noon — no meetings, no Slack, no obligations
• Uses the space to ask: what do I actually want to do today?
• Journals; this session includes reflection on content, expenses, and family priorities
• Word of the year is "patience" — applied to business timelines and personal reactions
• Avoids guilt about not being at a computer working

Monitoring the business without micromanaging

• Uses a "Daily Pulse" in Slack: green/yellow/red check marks for key metrics
• Only intervenes if something is yellow or red — then talks directly to the number owner
• If you're anxious about day-to-day details, there's a structural problem to fix, not a monitoring problem
• At this scale, CEO focus is quarters and years, not days and months

Content and the chase trap

• Gets a podcast invite from Reid Hoffman (Masters of Scale) — a result of saying no to things he didn't want to do
• Asks himself: am I making this because I want to, or because I'm chasing views, money, or recognition?
• Rule of thumb: only make content you'd pay someone else to make
• Authenticity over optimisation — if the views come, great; if not, you still feel good about the work

Being a customer of your own business

• Reads AppSumo marketing emails himself to check if they hold attention
• "Are you tasting the soup?" — if you zone out reading your own content, your customers will too
• Staying close to the product prevents the disconnection that grows with company size

Town hall and team leadership

• Monthly all-hands with ~70 people; all meetings are optional
• COO hired two new roles without telling him — he paused, asked for context, and it made sense
• Lesson: if you react negatively to initiative, you train people to stop taking it
• Pride metric: many employees have been at AppSumo 5+ years — a signal the culture works
• Twice-weekly check-ins with business partner; no formal agenda, just two-way conversation

Real expenses at this stage

• Nanny: ~$50K/year; wife's Range Rover: ~$75K — total ~$120K in one day of decisions
• Feels "stage fright" about expenses despite the revenue
• Framework: spend money to buy time or make life easier — both apply here
• Worst case on the car: sell it and lose $10K, which won't be noticed

What the CEO role actually is

• Vision, hiring, and letting people execute — hard to understand until you've done it
• Not about working harder; about creating conditions where others can work well
• Defining success: are your people living the lives they want to live?
• Content creation and marketing are now his primary contributions to AppSumo's growth

On building over time

• AppSumo is 15 years old — "in high school, hating its daddy"
• Original goal was never $96M; it was making a few thousand dollars promoting software deals
• Businesses, bodies, and houses all require maintenance — patience is the operating principle
• Plant seeds today; the compounding takes longer than people expect