CW 379: Internet Marketing with Noah Kagan Marketing Analyst at Intel & Mint - Employee #30 at Facebook & Founder of KickFlip & AppSumo

Noah is a UC Berkeley graduate with degrees in Business and Economics and began his career at Intel as a marketing analyst in 2004.

 

In late 2005, Kagan joined Facebook as employee #30, where he served as product manager for eight months. During his time, he is credited with pioneering the Facebook status update and its mobile application with Mark Slee. After leaving Facebook, he then became Mint software employee #4 as the director of marketing in December 2006. At Mint, Kagan developed the initial marketing strategy for the launch of the website which now has over 7 million users.

 

After Mint, in June 2007, Kagan founded his first major company, KickFlip, a payment company for social games. Kickflip was the #1 Facebook app company of its time and would eventually become Gambit, which served over 40 million users, had $18 million in revenue, and was the #2 payments company for Facebook games.

 

In March 2010 Kagan founded AppSumo, a daily deals website for digitally distributed goods. He started the company after seeing there were no product bundle or daily deal sites for the growing web applications category. The core vision was to help solve distribution for startups and eventually all digital goods. The website was originally created in one weekend using an outsourced team from Pakistan for $60. Kagan said he created the company after seeing opportunity to combine the popular daily deals model with the growing web applications field. Kagan described it as a solution for distribution problems faced by startups.

 

In contrast to deal sites such as (Groupon and LivingSocial), AppSumo deals exclusively with digitally distributed goods. Initially, the deals offered were for digital tools and software. The deals then transitioned primarily to learning based products, teaching customers skills such as programming languages, project management, and hiring practices.

 

Today, the website has over 700,000 active subscribers and is particularly popular among the startup community.

 

You can learn more about Noah at http://okdork.com/