There are things you will never know if they are positive for your business until you try them. Of course, one can do forecasts of various metrics but reality is always a bit different and suprising.
That was our case with running a deal with AppSumo. A couple of months go we decided to setup one and looking back and analysing the numbers, it was a good decision for us.
In fact, at the end of the day, profits are nice to chase but reaching AppSummo’s huge audience and getting our product out there for a boost in notoriety was something we were after more.
Knowing this beforehand, I invite you to see how the numbers played for our business — ShortPixel — and our main product — an image optimisation and compression WordPress plugin.
# What’s our business model?
We offer a freemium business model, based on the number of images you need to optimise and compress. We give 100 free image credits monthly and offer upgrade options with monthly credit plans that renew each month or One Time bulk credits that never expire — have a quick peek at our pricing model bellow. All the images are processed on our servers farm without adding any additional load times on the clients server.
Our clients appreciate this model as being the most honest one on the market, in comparison to competing models that charge you for the size of the images you process. Considering that a big chunk of WordPress users tend to upload big-ass images directly from their smartphone/camera or downloaded from stock-photography platforms, the Gb threshold model runs out fast. We think our model is fair because it provides predictability and you really don’t need to worry about the size of the images you upload. Most of our customers purchase a One-Time credits package to process all the images they have and then add a monthly plan for new uploads. Our compression and optimisation algorithms are also cutting edge, but don’t trust me on that, test it out ;-)
So — now that you know a little bit about ShortPixel, here’s how the AppSumo deal played out for us.
We offered our ShortPixel Short Plan which normally costs $60/year with $25 lifetime.
The plan includes 5,000 image credits per month, no file size limit, one API key for multiple sites, lossy, glossy and lossless optimisation and automatic and bulk optimisation.
And the deal was stackable!
We initially offered 5k codes out that almost sold out organically before the AppSumo newsletter went out to 1M+ subscribers. We supplemented 2k codes more only for this and they sold out in 24h.
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# The juicy numbers of our AppSumo Deal:
- 3668 people became our clients
- that’s + new 2.6% clients
- they claimed 4862 lifetime plans
- 33% of them bought more than one plan
- 3 clients bought 20 lifetime plans
- record holder bought 30 lifetime plans
- 91% (3326) of them are new customers for us
- 9% were already our clients and upgraded
- out of this 9% (342) about half of them payed for our service for the first time with this deal bringing us $1,300.
- we estimate we “lost” cca 4.6% clients, meaning that the lifetime AppSumo plan satisfies all their current and future needs
- before AppSumo, our servers farm used to process 1M images per day from 14k unique domains. We spiked up to 1.5 Million images on 17,000 unique domains daily and it was a nice problem to have.
The surprise:
Up until now, 227 AppSumo clients bought also One-Time credits bringing us an additional $5,200. And they keep coming for more.
We also got a spike of 389% more support tickets but we were happy that when signing-up to have a deal on AppSumo we answered positively to: “Do you have at least 1 full time staff member for customer service?”
It’s true that our job is much easier by using Help Scout — a brilliantly simple but complex tool that helps us handle our team support inbox effortlessly. But, we take customer support very seriously! We always did and and it’s part of our core product. Customer Reviews confirm it — our WordPress review/1000 active installations rate which blows off our much bigger competitors.
Another valuable takeaway is the incredible feedback and support we received in the comments section of our deal and in the AppSumo FB Group. We took things further delivering an extra feature that was requested by people who bought the deal (the ability to create sub accounts for your clients, activated now for lifetime deals too — initially it was only for One-Time credits).
General feeling is that we got more than money or new clients but also a solid fan base made out of the same fabric as our core audience. And we are looking forward in going the extra mile for this incredible community, delivering new features, constantly improving our compression algorithms (major breakthrough for GIFs in our next update) and providing stelar (and free) customer support.
Would we do it again? Yes!
What would we do differently? Maybe provide more options for people to purchase also One-Time packages so that people with large media libraries can go ahead and optimise everything from the start. And make sure we don’t lose any valuable feedback and golden customer development opportunity by inviting all the sumo-lings be part of the community of short-pixelers we are starting to build.
In case I missed something, we are happy to answer any* questions about our experience with AppSumo.
*if it does not breach our confidentiality agreement.