Pros
I wanted to take some time to leave a really honest review, mostly selfishly, since I want to us to keep hiring cool people to work with and some of these Glassdoor reviews are a bit intense.
I joined AppSumo pre-covid, and I know I've improved my resume and career prospects by working here (judging by what the previous people from AppSumo with my job title did after they left).
AppSumo is a totally remote workplace. Remote work has pros and cons, but I love it. I get to set my own hours, and there's no micromanagement or annoying monitoring. The team is really motivated and I'm generally impressed with the people I get to work with. I enjoy the work we do supporting new SaaS companies and solopreneurs — we have a really strong fanbase of passionate sumo-lings which isn't an easy thing to build.
What I have seen over the past few years is that Leadership, including our CEO, has done a lot to change things. The core group of "leads" has evolved. Less qualified leads who have been here a long time have moved into different roles that better fit their experience levels (several people come to mind here, cool that we didn't just burn bridges IMO). We hire consultants from some of the top tech companies in the world to help other leads who are learning.
Leadership worked really hard last year to develop a clear vision and mission, that was a huge relief. Our OKR-setting process has a solid group of cross-functional grassroots project managers that work overtime to make our goals and KPIs really clear. Noah and the entire team have really solved the issue of changing goals too impulsively, and in 2023 into 2024 — it shows. I like that it's a really transparent culture.
As mentioned previously here, the People team runs surveys and actually acts on our feedback (benefits changed, added One Medical membership recently which has been super nice). This has built my trust that team.
We're doing really well as a company as of the time of this review. In 2023, we exceeded our goals and were able to unlock revenue sharing, which resulted in a nice EOY bonus for me, on top of the already free Cancun trip.
Remote, yearly all-inclusive trip, bonus, good insurance, leadership that listens... this place isn't perfect (what company is) but there's a lot going for it, so much so that looking around, I struggle to find other opportunities that can match it.
Cons
I feel conflicted about compensation. It's not bad (the bonus helps), but I don't think salary bands are as high as they make them out to be.
I think Noah at times can miss opportunities to lead. Sometimes you just need that strong CEO presence, and Noah is more informal in his leadership style.
We don't get to meet in person very often. Sometimes remote teams can have needless misunderstandings, etc. that might be solved with more intentional in-person relationship building.
