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$1M+ in sales with AppSumo 🎉 AMA.

Heeeey amazing people 👋

Hope you're all keeping well and keeping at it!

My name is Leo and I'm the founder of Plutio.

We've just completed our 4th and final launch on AppSumo and surpassed $1 million in sales overall!

Now we have enough "funding" to grow the team, scale the business and book our very first team retreat! (we're 6 completely remote and most of us have not met in person yet!) 🚀

If you're looking to launch on AppSumo but have questions, I'm more than happy to help! Ask me anything.

  1. 6

    Are you allowed to tell us, how much from that $1M you took home after AppSumo charges?
    The reason I am asking is because usually you hear of people making $10k on AppSumo but $1M is a huge milestone!
    Thanks

    1. 2

      I don't mind sharing, no!

      We made 30% of the first 3 launches, but took a significantly higher share on our 4th and biggest launch, as we've launched with them a few times and been with them since 2017.

      1. 1

        30% for you? Their site says 70% for partners. Is that a custom launch?

        1. 2

          So the share cut difference depending on the partnership, is a Select, A marketplace, a newsletter one etc... it is not fixed in stones and changes per deal. The best thing is to actually discuss it with the AppSumo team and negotiate a good share.

  2. 5

    This is UNBELIEVABLE. I had the chance to meet Leo in person a month ago. Truly a great person, extremely happy for his success and this is what AppSumo.com was started for.

    Helping promote awesome tools to people starting & growing businesses.

    Noah (Chief Sumo & CEO at AppSumo)

    1. 2

      The entire Plutio team is ever so grateful for the support and warm welcome we've received from the AppSumo team.

      Now we have all the financial resources we need to take our small business into the next level, without giving away our business.

      What you guys do at AppSumo is incredibly thoughtful and empowering.

  3. 3

    Appsumo takes 70% of sales revenue. It is worse than Apple App Store.

    1. 3

      It depends on how you're looking at it and what you're trying to achieve.

      To us; AppSumo wasn't a "business partner", where a 70/30 share cut makes 0 sense.

      We looked at AppSumo as a "booster" to help us achieve a particular goal.

      We wanted to grow our team and scale our business, to do that we need it cash and there are a few reasonable ways to do that:

      1. Raise money and give away equity.
      2. Take a bank loan.
      3. Crowd funding.

      Doing any of those three would take around 2-6 months at-least, and TONS of time to prep, pitch, network, push... It is draining.

      AppSumo on the other hand is where you can offer your platform for a life-time deal in exchange for cash and tons of new customers and fans, pretty much over a week's time. Without giving away months of your time and any equity.

      Their share is high because of the resources they have to spend on the campaign. Just like any other campaign... think about how much you would lose on Facebook or Google ads campaigns for example just to gain a few more customers?

      Now, don't get me wrong - I think there is an opportunity for AppSumo to re-structure and look at how they are spending their resources differently in an attempt to make the share more lucrative. Especially at how big they are now.

      1. 1

        Yes, I agree it does help bring some revenue which help the company to grow and don't have to give up on equity.

        Does they tell what percentage of sales revenue they spend on Ad campaign specially targetted to your or XYZ product?

        1. 1

          I never asked to be honest, but that is something I'm sure you can discuss with them when running the listing.

  4. 2

    Congratulations Leo @leobassam Was curious how you got started with building a community?

    1. 2

      First; you need to find the best place to host that community.

      For us Facebook was the easiest way, especially as most of our customers were there.

      Then make the community part of our on-boarding, i.e - funnel people over to it when they signup and try to engage with them on daily basis or as often as you see fit.

      Make them feel like it is the place for them to be heard. Feedback post? you are on it, feature request? you heard it. Issues? you got it!

      Show them and everyone else that you are listing and you are acting on it.

      Bit by bit, it will become a nice little community.

  5. 2

    Hey Leo, congrats on the huge success! I have a few questions:

    1. What percentage of users that buy the LTD stick around and continuously use your site for more than 3 months (or more than a month if that's uncommon)?

    2. How did you choose the pricing of your LTD compared to your standard pricing? I guess my worry here is if say ~50% of users stick around for 6+ months, does the hosting costs, etc start to cost more than the LTD cost (is this something that was needed to be considered)?

    3. Would you advise a small company with a very small amount of MRR/users to launch on AppSumo (or alternatives)?

    Again congrats and good luck moving forward growing and scaling!

    1. 2
      1. So our launch is still fresh and we don't have that data yet, but I will try and make it all public soon!

      2. Servers and running costs us around $1500 a month. We honesty didn't notice a huge and dramatic increase in costs as we grow. The cost increase is very subtle - so far.

      3. It depends on what you want to achieve. What you could do is launch on AppSumo get some new customers and some cash to help you scale and invest in acquiring more MRR customers.

  6. 2

    Plutio is an amazing tool!

    1. 2

      You made my day, thank you so much!!!

  7. 1

    Does having LTD users become a liability and lowers the valuation of your company and causes hesitation with investors?

    Btw I bought a LTD in the first round, thanks!

  8. 1

    Congratulations Leo.

    I made my first sale of my uptime and traffic analytics tool (weblister.co) from appsumo.com
    Though at times I have felt like their cut is too much, Is there a way to negotiate that?

    Kind regards.

  9. 1

    Super interesting to learn about how app sumo works and the cut they take. Thank you for your transparency 🙏💙

  10. 1

    Hi Leo, is there anything you would have changed with your growth over the past 5 years? Do you feel like finding PMF was holding you back from scaling sooner ??

  11. 1

    That’s awesome! Well done guys

  12. 1

    Congrats @leobassam 1 mil is a crazy number! I launched my time-tracking app Increaser on AppSumo two weeks ago. I didn't have much of an audience, and I only relied on AppSumo to promote the app. After a few days, traffic went down significantly. Do you have any advice on how to promote the listing, when you don't have an audience? It would be amazing if you can critique my listing  https://appsumo.com/products/increaser-personal-time-tracker-with-powerful-reports/

  13. 1

    Congratulations Leo! I've been considering trying AppSumo for one of the products I run as well, outside of some of the concerns other folks here mentioned like revenue share, deep discounts - I worry about retention / churn from AppSumo specific users. I know its probably too early, but have you seen any difference in churn between AppSumo vs non-AppSumo users?

    1. 2

      AppSumo users tend to stick around if you offer them value, at-least the value they've paid for at the start.

      We did notice a huge number of churn when we first launched in 2017 but that was because we were super buggy!

      However, that didn't stop SO many of our AppSumo customers to stick around for years and help us polish the platform.

      You will get some amazing people from there that will stick around, and root for you!

  14. 1

    Congratulations on your success Leo.

    When you first launched Plutio, what were some of the strategies that you adopted in order to acquire customers?

    Thank You

    1. 1

      Build a community!

      AppSumo pushed SO many new customers our way and we focused on bringing them all under one roof, we did that using a Facebook group.

      This way we didn't only build a strong communication channel between us and our customers but they were so amazing that new leads used to signup just because how active the community is.

  15. 1

    Congrats! This is a really extensive and amazing platform!
    A couple of quick questions:
    How long to build?
    Who is your target audience?
    Did you build it alone, if not who did?

    1. 1

      It took us 6 years to build, and we're still planning so many amazing stuff!

      Freelancers, SME's, Indihackers, startups.

      I started alone, and now we grown to 6 people :)

      Here is the full story: https://www.plutio.com/blog/plutio-backstory

      1. 1

        What is this an alternative to or who did you want to compete with?
        Project managers like Trello? or Accounting tools like HelloBonsai?

        1. 1

          So Trell is more of a PM, HelloBonsai is more on our list of competitors yes.

    2. 1

      I am extremely impressed, I haven't seen something this scaled from any Indie Hacker alone!

      1. 1

        Thank you! It was a really really crazy journey. Cant' believe it has been 6 years already haha.

  16. 1

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

  17. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      LTD customers have full access to our features set and we will not ask them to buy a subscription, but we will definitely release paid add-ons that they will be able to buy later down the line.

  18. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      AppSumo customers have certain exceptions on what a "good deal" is, and thus the AppSumo team works hard to continue offering on those exceptions with no exception. It is one of the reasons AppSumo is such as a great platform with millions of customers.

      So when they try and push you to lower your pricing exclusively for the deal they do it to ensure your launch will reach its potentials on the platform, i.e make tons of $$.

      In our case, we solved the price issue by making our deal stackable.

      But it all depends on what you're looking for.

      AppSumo is a great place to get some cash and new customers, but may requires a little compromise.

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