Appsumo Pros and Cons after over $200.000 in sales

It's now been over a year since we launched our AppSumo Select deal, so I thought I'd share a little pros and cons list of partnering with AppSumo Select. I've also written a longer post on our blog that goes into more detail. Find the link at the bottom of the article. But for now, let's look at the results.

Results

• Total Sales: over $200,000
• Our Profit: $60,569.35
• Total Copies sold: 1470
• Refunds: 587
• Support requests first month: 223 (stopped tracking after that)
• Reviews: 73
• Questions: 144
• Tacos: 5/5

Pros and Cons

To me, there are many more pros than cons. It's all about perspective and how you look at things.

Pros

1. Their audience matches Baseline's target audience very well; there are a lot of marketers, agencies, and small businesses that have many brands.
2. AppSumo puts a lot of work into promoting your product, at no upfront cost to you.
3. AppSumo has testers that come and put your product to the test and give you actionable feedback.
4. AppSumo customers are generally not the same as other users. They wouldn't be buying your product if it wasn't on Appsumo. They thrive on AppSumo deals and try to make bargains. So you are getting customers you likely wouldn't get otherwise.
5. AppSumo customers are amazingly enthusiastic. They are eager to give feedback and help the product grow, which is incredibly invaluable.
6. AppSumo customers do expect some bugs and are very forgiving.
7. Many AppSumo customers are excited about growing with the product and, in a way, feel like they are a part of the team.
8. Their customers are super open to writing reviews
9. Their customers spread the word about the product
10. The conversion rate was excellent
11. Being on AppSumo Select is like a stamp of approval

Cons

1. They take a large percentage
2. The customers are lifetime.
3. The customers are unlikely to ever switch to a monthly subscription.
4. There will be a lot of support requests.
5. You don't have any control over how much or where AppSumo promotes your product. However, you can try to influence it.
6. There is quite a lot of work involved with getting the product listed, even though they take care of many things. You still have to write a lot of copy and finish many tasks they require.
7. There will be people reselling accounts, and AppSumo doesn't provide any tools to combat that.
8. Adding new features that are somehow limited tends to upset some Sumolings.

Read more

That's the gist of our experience. Let me know if you have any questions and I'd be happy to answer them. If you'd like to read the full post, which goes into more detail about each part and includes some tips on how to make your campaign succeed, read the full post here.