$93,884 & 3,500 customers in 3 weeks: Our AppSumo experience
$93,884 in revenue & 3,500 new customers signed up in just 3 weeks!! This is what we achieved with our AppSumo campaign.
We launched our software Project.co with AppSumo a few months ago.
It was a crazy few weeks where we had over 1,700 conversations through Intercom chat, signed up over 3,500 new accounts and sold $93,884 worth of deal codes.
What did we learn?
Would we do it again?
Was it worth it?
We have written a detailed article that explains all from our point of view.
Check it out here: https://www.project.co/appsumo-experience/
And please let me know what you think by up voting and commenting on this post.
Sounds awesome! Really interested to find out more about your journey!
Thank you @SamanthaFerguson123 - Please subscribe to our journey on the blog article page :)
Great write-up Matt, thanks for sharing this with the community! Your experience does tend to be the general consensus with SaaS companies that landed on AppSumo recently. Anyway, best of luck with Project.co... 🙌
Thank you @alexjpanagis
Seems like project.co is feature rich. How long did it take for it to get from idea to MVP?
Haha, depends how you look at it!! If you take a look here we've published our story: https://www.project.co/our-story/ - We first built the system around 8 years ago but rebuilt it from scratch in it's current form a couple of years ago. So although we had a lot of experience I'd say it took a year and a bit to get to MVP. A long time, although this was with a very small part time team.
To what extent do you think you have anchored prospective customers to the price of $49 for lifetime access? I notice it ranks just below your site on Google with the price visible.
Thanks for the question @td_evans - We thought about that a lot! We do not plan to run any future deep discount promos. And since this time we have developed the system a lot! We have a big set of new features coming tomorrow for example. So our current pricing of £5 per user per month should be more than acceptable for most. We've done just about everything we can to show our value as a product.
Wow! Congrats! Those are some great numbers.
Thank you @shanefromfargo :)
Hi Matt , these were really valuable insights on your article , loved it! .
Would you be interested in a convenient interview to share to an audience that could hugely benefit from project.co journey?
Thanks @BrandonDGS - Yes, happy to do that. let me know the details.
Awesome! I wish there was a DM function here but you could send an email to brandon@dgsmedia.co.za and i could definitely brief you.
Done! :)
Hi Matt - great article! I'm curious what type of uptick in organic traffic you've had since the AppSumo launch? Have you received any additional blog or press coverage as a result?
Hey @JamesB - I'd say AppSumo is responsible for 50+ visits per day even now. So that's a fairly decent uptick in traffic since the promo finished back in August :)
Matt, amazing article! This was a great read as we are currently in talks with AS. You have no idea how valuable this post was.
Amazing. Glad you enjoyed it @Butvidas - If you have any other questions let me know. Happy to help :)
Interesting read!
Thanks @eastlin glad you enjoyed! :)
Thanks for sharing.
What's the average team size for people that signed up?
Are those 1400 people using the product regularly?
Hey @sobbuh interesting questions. The average internal users for our paid accounts is 3.17. This is pretty low at the moment. As it's an average this is skewed by a lot of 1's and 2's. We have 700+ monthly active accounts.
Thanks for sharing, highlighting the pros & cons. Looking forward to reading the whole post. 🙏
Thanks for commenting @NaoLimao - Let me know if you have any questions once you've read through the article :)
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Hey @pjrvs thanks for commenting. Nice to hear from you! Geek mode confession: I bought your "Creative Class" course many years ago! It was great and I'm a big fan of how you work.
To answer your question... If we look at this a different way... Would I be happy with $28k and 3,500 new users a few weeks after launching the software to the world? Yes! So ignoring the huge cut that AppSumo took (which I actually feel is justified for them building and maintaining their engaged audience) this is still a good deal for me.
In contrast if I had no customers, no feedback and no way to learn about how to develop the software shortly after launching I'd be in a much more difficult place. The AppSumo deal gave us traction, feedback, committed customers, evangelical customers and all the information we need to rapidly develop the software. Along with some cash to cover our costs on supporting these users.
However, this isn't really a profitable move for us. I wasn't expecting the AppSumo deal to make us profitable. It's really to generate traction, feedback & get some word of mouth. We also have a steady bump up in our daily website visitors as well. I was kind of looking at this promotion like a beta stage 2. Instead of having 100 users as we had in our beta phase we gained 3,500 users at this stage. This has helped us massively improve the system over the last few months and we're now at a stage where we have a product that's been developed in the direction the consensus asked for.
If anyone else was looking to do it then I'd only recommend it if these are also your goals. If you're looking for quick cash or a way to take your app into monthly profitability this isn't really the right partnership for you.
Thanks for asking!
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Hey Paul, just for clarity, we made $28k rather than paying $28k. Is this how you understand it?
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Ah yes totally, I understand what you're saying now. Absolutely!!
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You are right that a 70% commission is insane, even worse if you consider that the deal are 80-90% discounts on the normal price.
As far as I know, being featured on Appsumo significantly increases long-term traffic, so people are usualy doing it for the long-term benefit.
I bought several deals on appsumo. The main problem I see with Appsumo is their customer base. Their are entitled and toxic.
They have insane expectations for lifetime deals that often cost less than $50 for a product that usually costs the same for a month. They have no problem insulting and complaining in a very rude manner.
Yes, I too noticed the toxicity with my limited experience with the LTD crowd.
These are new folks just out of the college or just into running a business. They don't really know what the real world is all about. Without the real world experience of running a business one tends to have high expectations and a huge ego.
I think product people are the promoters of these groups need to do more, share learnings to lower down the toxicity. :)
Thanks for commenting @Luqa - Yeah discounting by so much is massive!! That's why we didn't really look at it from a revenue point of view. Although we were fully released we almost looked at it as an extended beta period. It was a fantastic way for us to engage with a passionate community of people who have bought into the product and provide feedback based on their wants and needs from the system. It's invaluable to get this amount of feedback so soon after launch.
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Haha, thanks so much! We were going for the sexy look with our video ;)
We didn't negotiate all that much TBH. I obviously normally would, however having researched past companies that have run with AppSumo before it seems this is standard and there is no room for manoeuvre. However, if you think about it this way... They are bringing the whole audience, so without them we don't get exposure to these 800k people. We just had to work out if the result we got from the promotion would be worth the effort we had to make and we decided that it would be. Nice business model for AppSumo though for sure!!