Steven Kovar

Tinkerer, designer, space cadet.

Current Projects

Firstplace

Sports Scheduling
firstplace.app Check out Firstplace
Roundtable

Micro Networks
tryroundtable.com Check out Roundtable
Vika

Card Game
TBD Check out Vika
Threes

Card Game
TBD Check out Threes
Today, Do This

Daily Joy Newsletter
dothis.live Check out Today, Do This
Mobility Fitness

Personal Fitness
mobiliy.fitness Check out mobility.fitness
Mentality Fitness

Personal Psychology
mentality.fitness Check out mentality.fitness

Essays

Be QuirkyRead 'Be Quirky' Essay
Producer vs. ConsumerRead 'Producer vs. Consumer' Essay
Social VanityRead 'Social Vanity' Essay
Fail ForwardRead 'Fail Forward' Essay
Destined to FailRead 'Destined to Fail' Essay
Failure to CommunicateRead 'Failure to Communicate' Essay

Career

AppHub
November 2021 — Present
Principle Engineer

Joined 8+ other software companies to help e-commerce brands accelerate growth.

Visit AppHub →
ViralSweep
2012 — November 2021
Co-Founder

Built giveaway, contest, and waitlist tools to help brands to launch, grow revenue, and build email lists. Acquired November 2021.

Visit ViralSweep →
AppSumo
2011 — July 2013
Brand Sumo

Developed the brand of AppSumo. Designed several iterations of the website, giveaways, and core products.

Visit AppSumo →
AnyLuckyDay
2007 — 2012
Design

The predecessor to ViralSweep. Daily sponsored giveaways. Grew email list to 25,000+.
University of Texas
2005 — 2011
Corporate Communication

Economics → Gap Year → Corproate Communication. Started several side projects and ultimately left early to work at AppSumo full-time.
NASA
Summer 2005
Habitability Design Center Internship

Interned during NASA's return to shuttle missions. HDC's work informed what became NASA's Artemis program.

Early Projects

PriceKnock

Online Deals
2011 Learn about PriceKnock Close
Tseretni

Interest Graph
2009 Learn about Tseretni Close
Football Bio

Social Network
2009 Learn about Football Bio Close
Woot Agent

Flash Sale Tracker
2008 Learn about Woot Agent Close
Bulletin Boost

Myspace Tool
2007 Learn about Bulletin Boost Close
Friend Fleet

Myspace Tool
2007 Learn about Friend Fleet Close
The Car Showcase

Social Network
2006 Learn about The Car Showcase Close

PriceKnock Close

Description

As AnyLuckyDay grew past 25,000 email subscribers, we noticed an increasing number of daily sponsors were digitally native brands.

Groupon and LivingSocial were just finding traction with brick-and-mortar coupons. We felt we could do the same for DTC brands.

How It Worked
1. We convinced a few AnyLuckyDay sponsors to offer generous coupons or offers for our audience to purchase.
2. Subscribers would select which categories of products they preferred to receive offers for.
3. Customers would buy coupons from us, and we would take a small cut.
4. We invested every dollar of revenue into growth via ads and social engagement.
Post-Mortem

Our business was growing and profitable, but Groupon and LivingSocial became entangled in a war for each marginal user—shelling out $50+ per email (10x more than we could afford).

Ultimately, those two companies both lost their war of attrition, suffering devaluations. Projects like PriceKnock were collateral damage.

Customers lost interest in deal-seeking as the post-2008 economy rebounded, while Facebook and Instagram ads became more performant for companies who could now generate sales directly themselves.
Tseretni Close

Description

Facebook at the time was still a relatively closed network. You could find friends from your direct network, but you couldn't make new friends from Facebook at large.

A friend and I noticed each user's data could be scraped if they used the Facebook login API, so we built a site around that.

How It Worked
1. Someone would log in to Tseretni using the Facebook Login button.
2. We then categorized their profile's data ("Favorite Book", "Favorite Band", etc.) and made it searchable and discoverable on our site.
3. If you searched for your favorite things, we would show you other people who have logged in to Tseretni with that same interest.
4. You could then view their profile on Facebook and add them as a friend.
Post-Mortem

Within a week of launching Tseretni, Facebook launched this function inside of Facebook itself. I suppose we had the right intuition.
_{* We couldn't come up with a good name, so we settled on spelling "interest" backwards. Please don't judge us too harshly.}
Football Bio Close

Description

I had hoped to play competitive soccer in college, but recruitment opportunities for soccer players in small-town Texas were scarce.

Football Bio was meant to be a tool for players to find friends and showcase their abilities; a new incarnation of The Car Showcase for an audience that I actually genuinely cared for.

Unfinished Plans
1. Each player would have a profile where they could upload clips from their games or practice.
2. Coaches and recruiters could browse videos of athletes looking to play in college. The idea was to extend this into professional recruiting as well.
3. Eventually, enable recreational teams and leagues to organize through the site.
Post-Mortem

The site was never finished because studies took precedent. The costs of hosting a video site at the time were also prohibitive without raising venture capital.
Woot Agent Close

Description

The "one deal a day" store woot.com periodically held an all-day sale called a "Woot-off."

They would sell one product at a time until it sold out, or—as a special treat—would sell 'Bags of Crap' for $5 which was, in their own words:

…a random collection of stuff that we shove into a box and sell to you. Wooters have received brand-new laptops, a single shoe, expired batteries, and more. You'll never know when they'll appear, or what you'll get!

These were a hot commodity and sold out very quickly.

How It Worked
1. Download and install Woot Agent to your desktop.
2. Any time a Woot-off began, Woot Agent would sound an alarm and pop up a notification on your desktop.
3. Each new product featured would sound the alarm again.
4. If the Bag of Crap was being sold, a special sound effect would go off.
Post-Mortem

By the end of our first Woot-off, the app had over 25,000 downloads. Considering we made it just for fun, we were ecstatic.

It sounds bizarre in hindsight, but a partner from Polaris Venture Partners asked to meet in person shortly after.

He wouldn't say how he found me, but I'm sure it must have been Woot Agent.
Bulletin Boost Close

Description

Myspace allowed users to post bulletins which behaved like a feed of friends' activity.

We created Bulletin Boost as a straightforward ad network, posting bulletins using the Myspace profiles we had grown using Friend Fleet.

How It Worked

For a flat CPM rate, we posted content to our 1,000,000+ friends on behalf of customers. We also joined affiliate networks and promoted products—to immediate success.

Post-Mortem

Myspace introduced CAPTCHA challenges to outbound links just a few days after we started posting our own affiliate links, effectively ending Bulletin Boost's business.

Affiliate marketing felt icky, so I'm glad our foray was cut short. There are more fulfilling ways to make money.
Friend Fleet Close

Description

As Myspace grew in popularity, so too did did peoples' desire to have many friends on the platform.

To prevent spam, Myspace limited users to 500 friends added per day. This created a demand from power users who wanted to be among peoples' 500 frends added each day. Friend Fleet filled this demand.

How It Worked
1. Each day, a person could log in with their Myspace account ID.
2. We presented them with 5 other Friend Fleet members to add at a time, earning 1 point per friend added.
3. They could also refer a friend to Friend Fleet and earn extra points—ranging from 5 to 20, depending on demand.
4. Members who earned the most points per day would be at the front of the line to be added.
5. You could pay $20 to skip the line for one day, or $100 for the whole week.
6. We also used the service ourselves and created many accounts with 10,000+ friends.
Post-Mortem

We launched on a midnight and woke up to $860 in revenue the first day—not bad!

Inevitably, we ran into a "big fish in a small pond" problem, so the most simple solution was to create more ponds. We duplicated the app under different names, but usage fizzled out once everyone had their fill.
The Car Showcase Close

Description

The Car Showcase started as a community for car enthusiasts and grew to a few thousand members in the 18 months we operated the site. A simple take would be to describe it as "Myspace for cars."

The site was growing at a pretty impressive rate for something a couple 18 year olds cobbled together. It had profiles for users and their cars, along with a gallery feature that rivaled Facebook's at the time.

Unfinished Plans
1. Allow anyone to upload and share their car's "dyno" readouts and challenge friends to see how their cars stack up. The community could vote on their favorite cars based on power and aesthetics—a fun growth flywheel.
2. Track the most popular makes and models of cars on the site, then sell parts through an online shop. At the time, "tuner culture" was very popular and online sales for aftermarket upgrades was relatively un-touched.
3. Allow members to verify their identity and rent or sell their cars on the site, much like Cars & Bids created by Doug DeMuro.
Post-mortem

Ultimately, we shut the project down because our community cared a lot more about cars than we did. It felt disingenuous to portray ourselves as gear heads.

We just wanted to look at cool cars on the internet.