$1,500 from 2 weeks on AppSumo (Learnings)
$1,500 from 2 weeks on AppSumo (Learnings)
Looking for more traction for your startup? Considering AppSumo? This post is a must read. I launched my product on AppSumo two weeks ago and had $1,500 in sales.
This post contains tips, pros and cons.
Let’s start
What’s AppSumo
For starters here, AppSumo is a software marketplace featuring software to their >1.25M users. Their main audience are freelancers, entrepreneurs and small businesses. Software is offered as a lifetime deal at a discounted price. To get on AppSumo you need to go through a rigorous evaluation process (e.g. they test your product, look for user fit, etc.)
This wasn’t my first ride on AppSumo and one of the main reasons I am writing this post is because things are now different. Back in the day, AppSumo had thousands of products listed while now there are only a few hundred (less than 500). Their standards went up and you need to hit a minimum # of sales per month to stay on the platform.
When I launched my first product 4 years ago, almost anything would have been accepted.
Take-away: it’s harder to get listed, but you will get more sales and visibility
Pros
When I launched SlideFill on AppSumo I got instant sales - 52 to be exact in a two week period. The average selling price is $30 of which I receive a 50% cut (more on this later). Sales came in faster than in the previous years and there are a couple of pros:
• You get exposure to 1.25M people
• You get instant sales (albeit discounted)
• You get extremely valuable product feedback
• You get new product ideas for upcoming features
I launched on AppSumo mainly for the last two reasons and I have now an excel sheet with maybe over 50 requested features with priority and I fixed over 20 bugs I didn’t know existed on my website. AppSumo is a killer platform to get early product feedback from an audience that forgives your beginner's mistakes.
It helps you to make your product better and find a better product-market fit for the future. This is a huge pro.
On top of that, you get an estimate of willingness to pay. The sales I had in the past 2 weeks accumulated to $1.5K and I didn’t do any additional promotion. While I only got paid half of it, it still shows me the potential of the product and potential revenue $$ for the future.
Cons:
That said, there are a couple of cons. Setting up your page takes a while, the platform has some bugs itself which makes you dependent on their support team (which is all in all super responsive) and of course you are not taking home all the hard earned cash:
• You get only 90% of the sales price when you refer someone - most sales are 50% revenue for you, 50% revenue for them
• Setting up your page does take time and manual revisions from their team doesn’t make it easy to do some last minute update
• Refund rates are relatively high due to the audience’ willingness to test but also their later discovery they don’t need your product.
From the 52 sales I had, I received 9 refunds (the avg. on AppSumo is around 18% - so I am below that). Bringing my total sales to 43 at $1,290 of which I got half or $580.
Tips:
If you’re thinking about launching on AppSumo, use the following tips to maximize your ROI:
• Spend time on investigating other landing pages, especially AppSumo Plus offers that are made by AppSumo themselves to give your page the same look and feel
• Create a public roadmap on your website (like this one) to help potential customers understand what’s coming in the future
• Try to take questions offline as soon as possible, it’s way easier to help people over email than through the AppSumo comment section
• Focus on reviews. I only learned now that reviews have an impact on you getting features in their newsletters which will drive more sales.
That’s it! Feel free to ask me any questions!
Are you listing on AppSumo Marketplace?
I've listed twice on Marketplace, once years ago when the terms were more favorable to vendors (70% cut for us, we can increase pricing anytime, etc.), and once again recently.
There definitely have been a lot of changes since then.
You'd think they would treat their vendors better for those who make the cut, but no... they're still trying to squeeze every bit out of us.
50% cut is fine (whoever controls distribution is king), but the fact that trying to increase your pricing is like pulling teeth really limits the usefulness of AppSumo as a long-term distribution channel.
Price is literally one of the most important levers you can pull to increase revenue and drive growth, and yet AppSumo decides to sabotage us there just so they can advertise a low sticker price.
I guess if you're starting out, and you have no other choice, AppSumo Marketplace is great.
Otherwise you'll be stuck dealing with low margins, forced low pricing, and -- worst of all -- shameless cheap-ass customers who pressure you to give away the store and even haggle the price in the Q&A section, despite your product already being so cheap and underpriced.
Also I'm not sure this is wise.
The moment I see a company try to take it to emails/DMs, I immediately assume they have something to hide.
Address the issues head-on in the Q&A section.
Customers know you're in the spotlight there and will attempt to use that fact to call you out or embarrass you publicly, or even use that public Q&A section to pressure you to do something you don't want to.
Don't shy away from it, stand your ground, and address the issue maturely.
I've dealt with these assholes for years now, and not once have I ever had someone turn the tables on me -- they always end up looking like the petty, unreasonable, and childish one.
Agreed on most in this post. I feel like they are canabilizing a lot of my sales, especially any 'organic' ones given they heavily target my (rather small) brand. Every person looking for my product - wether it's through AppSumo or search - will end up buying from them.
The reason I called out to take Q&A offline is not to hide things, it's just impossible to have a thread on AppSumo making things so ridiculously chaotic. It also helps to ask for reviews without begging in the comment section, as reviews are really king, but most people buy the product and don't really use it for a long time.
I sometimes feel it's a marketplace for software hoarders.
Yup, and this is what they want.
They want to bully you into offering way superior terms on AppSumo (and way inferior terms on your own site), so almost everyone ends up buying from them, even if they didn't drive that traffic in the first place.
That's why they always want your AppSumo tiers to be directly mapped to your monthly plans on your site, and they don't entertain any requests for price increases.
In short, they want you to be 100% dependent on them if they had it their way.
This is definitely true, my sales really picked up once I cracked the 10-review threshold.
I don't know how or why, but maybe they have some kind of algo that pushes your listing higher if you have recent good reviews.
This is for damn sure.
From what I see it'd be good to launch a cost-efficient Product for LTDs e.g. a web app that utilizes mostly frontend like my screenshot editor StartupUtils
Imagine getting hundreds of one-time payments and using external API for image generation - it'd make no sense, I'd be losing money if people used it often!
Curious if AppSumo accepts such simple Apps from Solo Founders.
You can limit each LTD tier to a fixed # of usage credits.
If they exceed that, you can charge them extra.
But be careful, AppSumo customers are cheap bastards and will cry that it's "tEcHnIcAlLy nOt aN lTd" so be warned!
Nowadays you can make way more specialized custom plans on AppSumo. I have seen some products (for example KWhero) using this to limit their API calls. We went with a different approach to launch specifically a standalone small product to gain traction and redirect that traction later to our main product based on usage.
Not sure if it will work, but it has significantly reduces our go to market time and it will allow us to prevent any 'obligations' to give access to more premium features in the main full product to one time buyers. They still get all what's promised in our description (obviously) and any updates we do to our 'MVP'.
Wonder if this idea was smart, but guess I will find out soon
That's one a case-by-case basis, not every vendor gets to do that.
Most of the time, AppSumo forces you to map your LTD tiers to the monthly plans on your site.
Once these "sUmO-LiNgS" complain to AppSumo, they'll threaten you with delisting if you don't extend all your premium features to AppSumo users.
Wait and see if you don't believe me.
Congratulations on your Appsumo launch Jay! I was involved in one a couple of years ago that was very successful, but it was a lot of work. You need be on top of those questions all the time! And yes, reviews are really important.
Thank you ! It's crazy how many questions we get. Analyzing these and changing copy over time really helps to drive more conversions.
I have an FAQ on the website with over 100 questions I THOUGHT people might have while in reality most questions people asked are very different.
Ran into the same situation! Also found that people would often ask questions without referring to the FAQ.
People may think it rude if you just respond with "check the FAQ". So I would answer it AND refer them to the FAQ as a gentle nudge.
There is this one dude who has asked literally >50 questions flooding the page with caps and emojis making the product seems rubbish. He bought over 500+ deals, almost seems like AppSumo browsing is his hobby.
The platform also has quite some bugs, editing is difficult (things switching around), 'pending reviews' that are not moderated (you can't see them) and the 'reply' system in questions is broken/not allowing threads, making it difficult to clarify things.
Anyhow, we will keep going :D
The biggest limitation of the AppSumo Q&A section is that you can't reply to replies.
Doesn't look like they've improved the platform any since my time! Keep up the good work.
This is a bad idea on a public forum.
Remember that other potential customers are also watching very closely to see what kind of customer support they can get if they decide to buy your product.
And from my experience, many customers will also take their grievances to the public Q&A area (instead of addressing it privately with you), because they know your hands are tied and so many eyes are watching, and they might be able to pressure you to give up something or embarrass you publicly so you concede, etc.
Be smart and know how to flip it back on them by making them look like the unreasonable one instead.
PR/Media is unfortunately a skillset we need to acquire as solo founders, like it or not.
100% the comment above. I have a guy who mails me every single day as he wants a white label product version of the software I launched. I have no intention to make a white label product for now and the turn around time would be way more than 24 hours to make that technically possible. My hands are completely tied in the Q&A making me look like 'underdelivering', while I find the request unreasonable.
If I buy a burger in McDonalds, it doesn't give me instantly the right to resell them under a different brand.
Don't give in to this kind of nonsense.
The product is the product. The terms are the terms. The price is the price.
There's a difference between genuine product feedback and haggling/pleading for you to give the store away.
A guy literally wrote in and said he wanted to resell my product as-is, and he told me, if he buys my AppSumo offer to resell (which has inferior terms to my own site), nobody will buy from him, instead they'll buy directly from me.
Like, uh yeah? That's the point?
I'm not in the business of supplying my customers so they can compete directly with me.
You'll find all kinds of craziness in the AppSumo Q&A section.
Don't worry, you're not going through this alone.
Congrats :)
Thank you so much!
Thank you for sharing your insights.
Personally, I didn't know about Appsumo but your article made me want to try it as a side project.
Definitely do. I know there is a lot of 'negative' in the comment section here, but it's honestly just founders being critical. It's definitely a good way to get early traction and more importantly product feedback. If you're not in for the short term revenue but want to build something sustainable, AppSumo can really help you to get feedback. 98% of buyers will never engage (or even use the software), but there are some B2B prospects that are genuinely interested in your software providing input for a potential product roadmap.
Thanks for sharing! I haven't used APPSUMO, but I want to try it. I registered on it and browsed some software information, I haven't published it yet, so I don't know how to publish it because it doesn't have a guide. I have a question: if there is a problem with their website, why is there constant support instead of fixing the bugs?
You cannot publish your product (as far as I know). They make it seem very self-serve, while in reality almost all goes through customer support or success manager. I have no idea if this is intended or just a faulty website.
Once you submit your product for review (it will not be public), you will enter as a lead in their system and they will reach out to you with next steps. You can also just email them, their support is fast!
It's definitely not.
Changing a basic term or just adding a feature takes weeks... if they even approve it.
Increasing price?
Good luck with that.
They'll ghost you or, if you're lucky, reject you.
We are currently working on setting up our startup in AppSumo, and this helps a LOT. Thank you so much. When you mention taking the conversation offline. Is there a way to share the email privately or you guide them to a support email?
No worries at all! Hope it helps some people as I have done so many iterations on AppSumo to see what works and what not.
I do redirect them to the support page and ask them to take the first step. I mostly answer their question directly in in the Q&A and give them the option to directly reach out via the support form.
AppSumo is also great for backlinks - so include a link in every reply to build some stronger UR / DR :)
These are actually good points and learnings. I received the opportunity to promote the lifetime deal of my first Saas on AppSumo. I made a little over $500 and then it stopped.
The point about gaining reviews and taking questions offline is the real one because the comment section's public commentary has a lot of impact on buyers.
What happened?
Probably shouldn't do that.
Take it as an opportunity to learn how to effectively handle people who are trying to call you out or embarrass you publicly.
Not every potential customer is on another customer's side.
It's your job to win the media/PR war.
I believe it stopped because the exposure from the platform started declining? Not exactly sure of the root issue there.
In the initial stages of the discussion, sure it is a helpful to answer the questions asked by potential users or customers, but if it is turning into a debate, then I believe it should be avoided and then taken off-line.
AppSumo sales shouldn't just abruptly stop, they run ads for you all the time, regardless of whether you're Select or Marketplace.
As long as you keep adding features and accumulating good reviews, your visibility should increase.
They do stop running ads for underperforming products, depending on when you launched - they did a complete overhaul of all the product on the platform and removed some. I launched https//slidefill.com about 2 months ago and I am still getting sales at the same speed (not like the initial week) which is about 2-5 a day.
I didn't know about that.
I just thought they keep running ads, because they've always run ads for my products.
Whenever I'm browsing the internet randomly, sometimes even incognito, and I see my own product in the ads, I know at least AppSumo is doing something.
In my opinion, AppSumo is a crutch, it's training wheels for founders who aren't good at marketing (I include myself in this category), and the sooner we "graduate" from it, the better.
They don't include us Marketplace listings in their emails, so it's mostly just ads that are driving the sales (though I've been included once in their emails before, and I got a healthy bump in sales from that).
We can definitely learn to do run/optimize our own ads.
It's just that AppSumo is so convenient.
You focus on the product, the sales comes automatically.
Hard to say no to that.
Hey! Thanks for your great post, I'm about to setup my first AppSumo launch and indeed this post was right on time!
Great to hear! Feel free to provide feedback on SlideFill if you would be in-market!