I run AppSumo Originals as my full-time job. We have eight different products, things like SendFox, TidyCal and KingSumo, that roughly 500,000 people use. Over the past five years we've grown from zero to around five million a year.

That's the work that taught me the game. The zero to one part is hard, and the one to five part is hard, in different ways. I joined GrowthMentor back in 2018 or 2019 because I wanted to start growing a coaching business on the side. I'd built and grown a team building SaaS for entrepreneurs, and I wanted to teach people what I'd learned so they could skip some of the pain I went through. I joined, immediately started meeting really cool people, and it cascaded into a lot of fun coaching relationships and even friendships.

Everyone wants to know what the best marketing channel is, or more specifically, what channel should I do. I get that question more than anything else by a significant margin. People want the magic bullet.

Here's what running eight products taught me. Same team, similar creation process, similar PMF process, similar user bases to a degree, and different marketing channels work differently for every single one of them. So the channel was never the answer. What actually matters is the strategic process: define a marketing experiment, run it as fast as you can, judge traction or failure honestly, and act accordingly. There's no perfect channel, but there are effective and ineffective processes for testing channels.

The advice I give is concrete. Go find a list of 15 to 20 marketing channels, and I'll hand you some if you need them, then let's figure out how to test them systematically so we can measure traction instead of guessing. People come to me with three channels they picked out of a hat. The work is replacing the hat with a process.

A lot of what I teach isn't tactical. The tactical has its place: what marketing channel, how do I build this spreadsheet, what does my email copy look like, what does my PRD or product roadmap look like. But running a startup is an emotional rollercoaster, and I see a lot of burnout, exhaustion and genuinely hard emotional journeys in founders and early executives.

So the urgent, pressing calls are usually about reframing the overwhelm and getting someone back to a place of simplicity. I can often watch it happen in real time, a letting go, a settling down, the realisation that the mental chatter can actually be solved. And when we're in that position ourselves, we usually need someone external to help. I have my own coaches, business and life, who I talk to regularly for exactly this. We complicate things because part of us thinks complexity makes us look smarter. Clarity and simplicity are what actually help people most.

Don't apply if a stranger's problem doesn't genuinely interest you. The people who treat it as a credential or a side income don't last, and mentees can feel it.

Apply if you actually enjoy meeting a huge diversity of people and helping them avoid pain you already went through. The traits I see lead to success, in mentees and in anyone running a business, are humility and consistency. Humility doesn't mean trusting everyone's opinion. There's a saying I love: there are no statues built for committees. With this surplus of information we don't know who to trust, so we take input from everyone and end up building a flat, boring business with no soul. Be the key decision maker, take inputs, then decide. Pair that with the consistency to do something you love for a very long time, and you'll eventually figure it out. That's as true for mentoring as it is for building.