After asking someone inside Appsumo, here is my checklist and resources for lifetime deals (LTD)

I believe many SaaS startup founders have heard about lifetime deals, and it sounds really attractive in terms of getting cash flow and user feedback quickly.

To be honest, I got a whole new understanding of it after I interviewed one of my users, which inspired me to release LTD sooner than I planned before.

My team and I are actually preparing for this recently. I did some research on it and connected with marketplaces like Appsumo, StackSocial, also a few Facebook LTDs group owners, and got something useful that I’d like to share with you, and I’ll try to keep this post short and to the point.

Something You Should Know Before Running LTDs

First things first, if you are thinking of running LTDs, you’d better know what it could mean to your product. There’re some pros and cons that should be fully considered before you decide to do it.

Pros 😄

It’s a great way to test the product-market fit and get user feedback.
You will get instant cash flow.
It helps reduce churn because customers are locked in.
Opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, as users prefer to buy products from brands they already have exposure to.

Cons 🙁

It hurts your MRR or ARR as it’s a one-time payment. In the long run, if there are too many LTDs users, it may not be particularly good for the long-term sustainable development of your product.
The cost of providing long-term service for LTD users may eventually be higher than their lifetime value, you will have users to take care of for the rest of your life. Have you ever considered future costs like customer service and your server?
Monthly/annual payment users may value the products more than LTDs users. As they understand that they are paying for product improvement and maintenance.
High commissions will be charged if you launch on marketplaces like AppSumo. If do LTDs for cash flow, then this will be a big damage to your revenue.

If you can fully take the possible risks, then it’s time to make your plan for LTDs.

I Did Some Research And Made My Plan On LTDs

Every plan starts with a goal, you have to decide what your goal is, making more revenue or making more people aware of your product, then give you feedback at every step. For me, is the latter. LTDs could be a trap if you fall into articles like “how I get $400k within 2 weeks with LTDs”. You’d better consciously focus on monthly customers and how you ganna sustains your business, instead of money from lifetime deals.

After the goal was set, I was thinking about how to distribute my deals to make more people aware of Gemoo. Soon I figured out my way: launch on marketplaces, then promote on Facebook groups.

Apart from marketplaces, there are many Facebook groups you can use to distribute and promote your lifetime deals. Please connect with group owners before you do it, and most of them would much like to help with your launch. Here are some groups I found valuable: 🕵️

The next step was to learn and compare those marketplaces from different perspectives. I aim to get users’ feedback and test product-market fit from LTDs, cash flow is a plus instead of a must. So the factors I value more are the quality of their users and the traffic & influence of the marketplace when comparing platforms. I looked at Appsumo, Pitchground, SocialStack, and Dealify. Appsumo is undoubtful the most competitive on both counts. The users on it are active and willing to give feedback, and the traffic is huge.

Therefore, I’m going to make it my primary distribution channel for running LTDs. I’ve heard about how strict and complicated Appsumo is for the application process. Instead of learning the tips from Google, it is faster and more effective to directly ask an internal staff directly what and how to prepare. So I connected with someone inside Appsumo and a Facebook LTDs group owner, trying to figure out what and how should I prepare.

Luckily, they were so nice and generous to share what they know to help me out, and I appreciated it very much. The responses I got from Appsumo are as below:

My Checklist For LTDs

According to what I’ve been told from Appsumo and owners of Facebook groups, I summarized my own checklist for LTDs: 📝

Add a chatbot to my website
Support team setup
Redeem code preparation
SOP for refunds
The pricing model for LTDs: The campaign price of LTD is based on your product’s pricing, so they cannot assist you in the next step before your pricing plan is released in public.
Bug fixes: In general, a team from the marketplace will test the usability and stability of the product, to see if it fits their requirements. So if there is a small problem and you’ve known it, fix it in advance.
Build clearly explained license rules: Make sure to write if future updates and features are included or not.

Everything is under preparation now, and I will keep you in the loop when it’s prepared. I’m so excited about it, and hope Gemoo will be selected by Appsumo. I will keep sharing my journey on Appsumo no matter what the result is. If you're interested, just stay tuned in my blog: https://gemoo.com/author/morgan/. And leave your comment below if you’d like to discuss more.

The complete story is originally posted here: https://gemoo.com/blog/how-to-prepare-lifetime-deals.htm